In accordance with the Employment Relationships Act, parents of first-graders today have the right to paid absence from work due to accompanying the child. The employer is obliged to allow the employee who is the parent of the first-grader to be absent from work, and the employee must provide the employer with prior evidence of his absence, which shows that his child will attend the first grade in the following school year.
The right to parental absence from work due to accompanying a first-grader on his or her first day of school described above applies to both parents and to all employees, regardless of the type of activity or sector in which they work. It was included in the Employment Relationships Act with an amendment adopted on 18 December 2019.
More current changes are brought about by the amendment to the Kindergartens Act, which today introduces a free kindergarten for another child from the same family who is at the same time in kindergarten with an older child. In addition, parents will now be exempt from paying for kindergarten for the third and each subsequent child from the same family, regardless of whether he or she will be enrolled in kindergarten at the same time as his or her sibling.
Furthermore, the amendment to the Kindergartens Act also brings more powers to the school inspection, tightens the conditions for the protection of pre-school children and provides for stricter sanctions for misdemeanors. Thus, natural and legal persons who are not entered in the register of providers of publicly valid programs or in the register of guardians of pre-school children are immediately banned from carrying out pre-school education and childcare activities and fined in the range of EUR 5,000 to 10,000.
