Teachers Turn to Each Other to Reach Children Facing Social Exclusion

When a five-year-old throws himself on the playground floor in the middle of a tantrum, a kindergarten teacher must calm that child while simultaneously supervising fifteen others. It is precisely these moments of professional crisis that a new study from Croatia has placed under the microscope, and the findings reveal a striking gap between what early childhood educators urgently need and what formal training systems actually deliver. The research, published in Discover Education, interviewed forty-two early childhood education and care teachers from fifteen Croatian institutions to understand how they experience their work with children at risk of social exclusion, what support they currently receive, and what kind of professional development they believe would genuinely help them. The results paint a picture of a workforce improvising under pressure, leaning heavily on informal collegial networks because the official channels of continuing professional development rarely reach them in a useful form.

The concept of risk of social exclusion sits at the heart of the study. The researchers define it as a multidimensional construct encompassing economic, social, cultural, health and other aspects of disadvantage and deprivation that can affect a child’s present life and development as well as future life opportunities in adulthood. Crucially, the framework rejects the idea that any single characteristic of a child or their environment determines an unfavorable outcome on its own. Instead, disadvantage emerges from the interaction of multiple risk factors and protective factors present in the child’s individual characteristics and surroundings. This analytical lens differs from, and complements, the broader principle of inclusion: while inclusion is a normative orientation toward equitable participation for all children, the risk-of-social-exclusion perspective identifies specific, potentially cumulative configurations of disadvantage that inclusive practices must be equipped to address. For professional development, this distinction matters because recognizing intersecting risks allows a more differentiated understanding of the knowledge and support teachers actually require.

The scale of the problem is considerable. International research cited in the study suggests that roughly twelve percent of children are exposed to at least two different risks by the time they start school, while a representative Croatian study of children aged five to seven found that twenty percent were at risk of social exclusion. Estimates vary depending on whether teachers or parents make the assessment, with parents reporting somewhat greater exposure. Against this backdrop, the stakes of early childhood education are high: the European Council has emphasized that high-quality early childhood education and care is an essential tool for fighting inequality and educational poverty, capable of preventing early skills gaps and breaking intergenerational cycles of disadvantage. Yet paradoxically, children at risk of social exclusion are more often enrolled in less effective programs than their peers, and the professional needs of the practitioners who teach them remain insufficiently documented.

To fill this gap, the research team, working within the Croatian Science Foundation project MORENEC, conducted semi-structured interviews averaging forty-five minutes with teachers working with children aged five to six. The institutions were purposively selected to capture variation across geography, community size, founder type and institutional scale, spanning nine of Croatia’s twenty-one counties, six boroughs and nine cities, nine public and six private settings, and sizes ranging from two to forty-five educational groups. All participants were female and gave written informed consent. The analysis followed the inductive thematic analysis procedure developed by Braun and Clarke, with three researchers independently familiarizing themselves with the data, generating initial codes and searching for themes before jointly reviewing, defining and naming them. Coding was performed in NVIVO12, and harmonization on a sample of five interviews achieved at least ninety-five percent agreement between the authors.

The first major finding concerns the sheer breadth of risks teachers encounter daily. Among risks arising from children’s own characteristics, developmental difficulties dominated, with speech and language difficulties the most frequently mentioned, followed by behavioral issues ranging from aggression and vulgarity to profound social withdrawal. Risks stemming from family circumstances included divorce, poverty, adoption, neglect and abuse, and these often co-occurred in layered combinations. One teacher described a girl whose parents went through a bitter divorce, who then moved to a new kindergarten and lost her familiar environment, whose father was subsequently killed, and who was only now beginning to show the emotional fallout in the form of sadness, confusion and emerging aggression. A third cluster of risks related to cultural minority identities, including children of Ukrainian refugees, children of Filipino or Albanian parents who did not speak Croatian, Roma children, and children from religious minorities. The diversity and co-occurrence of these risks, the authors note, point to the complexity of the situations teachers are expected to navigate in everyday practice.

When it came to the support available for professional development, a clear pattern emerged: teachers rely overwhelmingly on resources within their own institutions. The most valued forms of support were shared reflection between the two teachers who work with the same group of children, peer learning in communities of practice, and coaching and consultation provided by the pedagogues, psychologists and educational rehabilitation specialists employed in kindergartens. Teachers described daily exchanges of experience in small kindergartens, joint problem-solving with colleagues, and experts who observe a child interacting with the group and then discuss strategies with the teaching team. Yet this picture was far from universal. Several teachers reported a lack of collaboration, colleagues withholding information, expert help that arrives too late or goes no further than a formal meeting with minutes, and institutions missing specialists such as speech therapists or special needs experts entirely. The variation suggests that different organizational cultures prevail across Croatian kindergartens, some functioning as loosely coupled institutions where professional exchange is sporadic rather than systematic.

Support from outside the institution exists but is unevenly distributed. External experts such as speech therapists, psychologists, social workers and social pedagogues occasionally visit, and the national Education and Teacher Training Agency organizes workshops, seminars and trainings, as do universities, non-governmental organizations and bodies like UNICEF. Some teachers described constructive sessions on sensorimotor disorders or modules completed at a faculty of education and rehabilitation sciences. Others reported collaborating with social welfare centers or faculties of education. But a substantial number reported no collaboration at all with the local community or external services, and even enthusiastic participants noted that the volume of support falls short of growing demand. The content of external provision also skews heavily toward children with developmental difficulties, leaving teachers of children facing poverty, family breakdown or minority-related risks largely without targeted training.

The third research question, concerning teachers’ own definitions of their professional development needs, produced perhaps the most actionable findings. On the content side, teachers wanted help understanding concepts of inclusion and social exclusion, practical skills for timely recognition of risk and for supporting children’s socio-emotional development, strategies for handling aggression, tantrums and grief, knowledge about autism spectrum disorders, giftedness and speech and language difficulties, culturally informed approaches to working with Roma and migrant families, and, significantly, communication skills for engaging the parents of vulnerable children, whom several teachers identified as the weakest link in their practice. On the form side, the preferences were unambiguous: small-group workshops, interactive sessions combining a theoretical basis with the sharing of concrete experiences, mentoring and coaching in which experts model their work with real children, and self-directed learning through professional literature. Large-group lectures were explicitly rejected as a waste of time, with one teacher noting she could read the content of an hour-long lecture herself and decide what to apply.

This rejection of lectures carries particular irony, because lectures are the dominant format offered by the national agency responsible for in-service professional development, and most Croatian teachers participate in formal programs only one day a year or less. The study’s discussion situates this mismatch within international evidence: meta-analytic findings indicate that effective professional development programs rely on workplace coaching, combine workshops and lectures, and last forty-five to sixty hours, whereas Croatian provision is characterized by short one-day sessions focused on general pedagogical competences. The authors frame the results through the Who, What and How components of professional development models, and through the tension between outside-in learning, in which expertise is delivered by external authorities, and inside-out learning, in which professionals take responsibility for their own growth. Notably, the teachers expressed both: they craved specialist knowledge and modelling when facing situations that exceeded their competence, while simultaneously embracing peer reflection, learning communities and personal investment in professional literature.

The implications extend well beyond Croatia. The study argues that effective continuing professional development for work with children at risk of social exclusion must be practice-oriented, embedded in professional collaboration, and responsive to context-specific challenges, combining external expertise with the professional learning that happens inside institutions. Responsibility cannot rest with individual teachers alone; institutions must build organizational cultures that support shared reflection, learning communities and access to multidisciplinary expertise, while providers should shape external programs around the needs teachers actually encounter. The authors acknowledge limitations, including the absence of quality indicators in the interview protocol, potential interviewer effects from the nine-person research team, purposive rather than representative sampling, and reliance on self-reported experience rather than observed practice. Still, in a field where twenty percent of children carry risks that their teachers feel unequipped to meet, the message resonates far beyond the kindergarten walls: the professionals closest to vulnerable children are not asking for more lectures, but for the time, trust and collegial structures to learn from each other in the middle of real, messy, everyday practice.

Subject of Research: Continuing professional development of early childhood education and care teachers working with children at risk of social exclusion in Croatia

Article Title: In-service ECEC teachers’ professional development aimed at educating children at risk of social exclusion

Article References: In-service ECEC teachers’ professional development aimed at educating children at risk of social exclusion. (n.d.). https://doi.org/10.1007/s44217-026-02205-2

Image Credits: AI Generated

DOI: 10.1007/s44217-026-02205-2

Keywords: early childhood education and care, continuing professional development, social exclusion, in-service teacher training, Croatia, inclusive education, peer learning, coaching, thematic analysis, educational inequality, teacher collaboration, at-risk children