On Thursday, 4 January, in Vilnius, the Lithuanian Education Trade Union (LETU) convened a multiplier SEQUENCES project event and organised a national conference on Early childhood education. The event was attended by 130 participants, mainly education personnel from all regions of the country.

During the conference, a lot of attention was paid to the problems of early childhood education: pre-school and pre-primary. Laima Jankauskienė, the representative of the Ministry of Education and Science, presented the proposal for early education. It is proposed that the first class would be from six years old since 2020, and the pre-primary education for the five-year-olds would be mandatory as early as 2019. At present, pre-primary education is mandatory for children aged six.

Egidijus Milešinas, the vice president of LETU, spoke about the SEQUENCES project opportunities. Project could facilitate the improvement of working conditions of pre-school and pre-primary education personnel, improve their training opportunities and serve as internal quality assurance measure to help teachers to improve.

Tatiana Babrauskienė and Inga Puiša, the LETU representatives, presented SEQUENCES toolkit, which is based on collected a set of indicators to assess 5 quality domains (availability of services, personnel, training program, assessment / monitoring, management / funding) aimed to develop a culture of quality assurance at the level of pre-school and early education providers. Information about future trainings was also provided.

The Ministry of Education and Science informed that in the near future a pilot project for the external evaluation of the quality of pre-school education institutions is planned. It was agreed that the Lithuanian Education Trade Union, which puts a lot of emphasis on the internal quality assurance, will share its experience and outcomes of the SEQUENCES project and cooperate with the project promoters.