The Norwegian Education Mirror 2022
Minority-language children
Kindergarten children are defined as minority language speakers if both the child and the child’s parents speak a language other than Norwegian, Sami, Danish, Swedish or English as their first language. There were 52,300 minority-language children in kindergarten in 2021.
Twice as many minority-language children in kindergarten compared with ten years ago
Over the past ten years, the number of minority-language children in kindergarten has nearly doubled. In total, 19 per cent of children in kindergarten are minority-speakers. In most of the ten biggest municipalities, the proportion is over the national average. Lillestrøm and Drammen have the highest proportion of minority-language children in kindergarten, with 35 per cent and 34 per cent respectively.
In private kindergarten, 16 per cent of children are minority language speakers, while that percentage in municipal kindergartens is 23 per cent. In total, 58 per cent of minority language speaking children go to municipal kindergartens.
The increase in the number of minority-language children in kindergarten is linked, first and foremost, to the fact that there are more immigrants in the population, but also that more children with migrant backgrounds go to kindergarten. 87 per cent of children aged 1-5 years with a migrant background went to kindergarten in 2021, which is an increase of 6.6 percentage points since 2017 (Statistics Norway 2022b).
Minority-language children and children with migrant backgrounds
In BASIL, kindergarten children are defined as minority-language speakers if both the child and the child's parents speak a language other than Norwegian, Sami, Swedish, Danish or English as their first language.
The level of coverage for children with migrant background is the number of minority-language children in kindergartens as a percentage of the total number of children with migrant background in the population.
Statistics Norway's figures define children with migrant backgrounds as children who have either immigrated to Norway, or were born in Norway to two parents who have immigrated. National backgrounds from Denmark, Sweden, Ireland, the UK, the USA, Australia and New Zealand are not included.
Kindergarten offers to newly arrived children from Ukraine
Since February 2022, nearly 2,600 newly arrived Ukrainian children aged between 0 and 5 years have sought asylum (UDI 03.10.2022). Ukrainian children who have been granted a residence permit and live in a municipality are entitled to a kindergarten place.
A survey by the County Governor's Joint Services indicates that must of the Ukrainian children entitled to a kindergarten place have been offered one (the Norwegian Directorate for Education and Training 2022a). Furthermore, a number of children who are not entitled to a place have also been offered one. Having received an offer of a place from the municipality, 7 out of 10 children accept that offer.
A large majority of municipalities state that kindergarten provision for Ukrainian children in their municipality is satisfactory. The municipalities who say that it is challenging to make a satisfactory number of offers say that the two biggest challenges are a lack of personnel with relevant multicultural or linguistic expertise, and a lack of personnel in general.