Report: Rural schools have great potential to become community centres

Eneli Kindsiko, expert of the Foresight Centre, said that housing several services together with a school or kindergarten is a growing trend around the world and moving from the “one-house-one-service” mindset to the model of community houses would be beneficial in rural Estonia as well.

“Community houses are built around kindergartens or elementary schools, bringing together various services needed by local people, such as remote work offices, day centres for the elderly, hobby groups, a family doctor or nursing homes, which are common in other countries,” Kindsiko said.

The Foresight Centre reveals in its short report that 26% of Estonian schools and 68% of kindergartens are currently monofunctional. When looking at the local governments, small islands, peripheral areas and Raasiku municipality near Tallinn stand out the most in terms of schools and kindergartens with three or more services. However, every third school in Tallinn is monofunctional.

Due to the shortage of pupils, a third of Estonian school buildings are half-empty, they were built several decades ago, are often run-down and they serve children from the same sparsely populated areas. For example, nearly 100 school buildings across Estonia need capital investments and every fourth elementary school or secondary school building is in a merely satisfactory condition and functionally outdated. Also, every third cultural centre and every second day centre for the elderly is barely in a satisfactory condition. “Jointly, they would achieve economies of scale by savings from the administrative costs of using different houses and premises and, ideally, the capability to renovate the buildings to become more multifunctional and energy-efficient would increase as well,” said Eneli Kindsiko.

The short report ‘Community Schools in Estonia’ (in Estonian) is part of the Foresight Centre’s research stream ‘The Future of Spatio-Temporal Accessibility of Public Services’. The purpose of the research stream is to map the availability of public services now and in the future and find which models of service provision could be the most beneficial in the future.

The model of a unified common house could benefit the rural areas the most, but currently, the municipalities of Harju County (outside of Tallinn) are rather better at creating multifunctional houses. For example, across Estonia, there are approximately 45 cultural centres located on the same property with a school or a kindergarten – as many as six of them are in Harju County. One of the reasons for this may be Tallinn’s neighbouring municipalities’ higher capability to invest in new educational buildings, which are designed as multifunctional from the start. Rural areas, however, are often left with run-down buildings and their old layout makes it more difficult to add new services.

Studies show that there is a high demand for community houses in rural areas of Estonia. “For example, many people living in rural areas and working remotely want their community houses to include shared office spaces with high-speed internet and other infrastructure necessary for remote work,” said the expert of the Foresight Centre. “Creating them next to schools or kindergartens would also be logistically convenient for parents.”

The Foresight Centre points out that currently, schools and kindergartens include mostly services for children, such as libraries or hobby groups, but especially in rural areas, community houses could also improve the availability of a wider range of public services and even prevent some services from disappearing. “The future of rural schools, as well as other public services in rural areas, depends on whether and how we think of public services as a whole,” said Kindsiko. “Does each service have to fight for itself alone, or does their strength lie in cooperation, which should be the advantage of rural areas? They should be small and agile,” Kindsiko summed up.