There are several hobby and sports schools in Tallinn where the language of instruction is Russian, but the city sees this as an obstacle to the transition to Estonian-language education.

The city government believes school lessons in Estonian alone are not enough for children if social interaction during free time continues in Russian.

"We have sports clubs where only Russian children participate. Naturally, if all the children there are Russian and everything is conducted in Russian, no Estonian-speaking child will join those trainings. And we definitely want to change that. We want to encourage sports clubs to involve children of different native languages in their training in order to improve the language environment," said Mayor of Tallinn Jevgeni Ossinovski (SDE).

The city is now planning to allocate additional funding to institutions that make efforts to create mixed-language groups and transition to Estonian. Sports clubs will be addressed first.

"We are facing a reform. From September 1, we will increase the sports funding per child by 75 percent, which is a very significant increase, but along with that, we will also review the conditions under which we fund sports clubs. In addition to ensuring that children engage in training, we also want to introduce certain quality measures, one of which is having diverse team compositions so that there is more Estonian-language instruction as a result," Ossinovski explained.

The mayor said the plan is still in its early stages, and discussions with clubs on this topic are yet to begin.

Additionally, in a few years, a C1-level Estonian language requirement is planned to be introduced for hobby school teachers.

At Kanutiaia Hobby School in Tallinn, approximately half of the children speak Estonian at home, while the other half speak Russian.

"The best way to learn a language is through play, activities, and hobby education. This helps children acquire the language in practice, through concrete experiences, games, and activities. Such language acquisition happens in the most natural way," said the school's development manager Andres Kask.

Minister of Education Kristina Kallas (Eesti 200) believes the idea has potential to be expanded across the country. However, municipalities have limited financial resources and there are not enough Estonian-speaking hobby teachers.

"If you consider, for example, municipal music schools, just to give an example, many of these schools currently operate largely in Russian. If we now impose language requirements and say that instruction can only be conducted in Estonian and that teachers must have a C1-level proficiency in Estonian to teach in music schools, then I believe, for example, that Narva's music school would have to close," Kallas said.

For this reason, she believes the reform would require several years of transition time.

--

Follow ERR News on Facebook and Twitter and never miss an update!