Rethinking the hidden curriculum: daily routine in Slovene preschools

In Slovenia there is a unitary system of early education for all preschool-aged children. Since the vast majority of children attend full-day programmes, the daily routine represents a significant part of life for children in kindergarten. When systemic and curricular reform of preschools was introduced at the end of the twentieth century, lot of attention was paid to changing the previously rigid and non-individualised daily routine. This article presents some of the findings of a research project that introduced principles of Reggio Emilia preschools in Italy to preschool teachers in Slovenia and concerned indirectly the daily routine. The focus was on whether and in what manner the daily routine changed in the decade after the introduction of the new national curriculum, and whether the mentioned training influenced these changes. The results show increased flexibility of the daily routine in teachers' practices but the picture is not uniformly positive.