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Roma in Croatia are spatially, economically and politically marginalised. There is a social gap between Roma minority and the majority of population. Prejudice and stereotypes against the Roma community are deeply rooted in the mind of the local community due to their insufficient knowledge of the Roma culture. The women of the Roma ethnicity are doubly marginalised, because of their Roma ethnicity and their gender. Roma women, more than Roma men, lack the basic elements necessary for self-realisation: education, healthcare, cultural and political participation. Roma generally have poor access to healthcare, and most of them do not have medical records. The Roma in Croatia most often speak Boyash (bajaški) or Romani chib. They speak both their mother tongue (Romani) and the language of the country they live in – standard Croatian. Students can study the Romani language and culture in higher education, at the Faculty of Humanities and Social Sciences and the Faculty of Teacher Education at the University of Zagreb. Kali Sara, the Roma Association for the promotion of the education of Roma in the Republic of Croatia, organises courses for Roma children and young people on the Romani language, culture and life in general. As for the educational attainment of Roma, data show that Roma children are still rarely included in the preschool education system. A large number of Roma children do not complete compulsory education. They rarely attend secondary school. Very small number of Roma students graduate at the Faculty level.

The purpose of this paper is to analyse the resilience of preschool teachers, aspects of teachers’ readiness to develop children's resilience and the relationship between the two constructs of resilience and readiness.

Two instruments (the “Resilience Scale For Adults” and the “Questionnaire on the Readiness of Preschool Teachers for Developing Children's Resilience”) were used to collect data on resilience and readiness for developing children's resilience from 191 female preschool teachers enrolled in a graduate education programme in the Faculty of Teacher Education, University of Zagreb, Croatia. Data were analysed by factor analyses and a two-way analyses of variance.

Results indicate that preschool teachers achieve high results on resilience measures, and that they have supportive attitudes towards programmes for building children's resilience and are willing to implement such programmes in their everyday practice. Those preschool teachers who perceived themselves as more resilient also considered that they were more competent in developing resilience in children. Additionally, preschool teachers who perceived their kindergarten's institutional climate as supportive, felt that they are more competent for fostering resilience in children, and were at the same time more willing to implement programmes for building children's resilience.

The findings suggest that the level of institutional supportiveness is related to preschool teachers’ competence and willingness to foster resilience in children. Those preschool teachers who perceive their institutional climate as supportive feel more willing and competent to implement programmes for developing children's resilience. Additionally, teachers’ competence for developing resilience in children is related to their own resilience: more resilient preschool teachers feel more competent to foster children's resilience. These results suggest that general institutional climate and resilience of those adults who work with preschool children are important aspects of early educational environment, and should be taken into consideration when planning the implementation of programmes for building children's resilience.

This research is the first Croatian research on resilience in the context of early childhood education. It also represents a contribution to a relatively small number of studies that link preschool teachers’ resilience with their readiness to foster resilience in children.

In this chapter, Andrea Óhidy provides an overview of some central issues of the book. First, she shows the similarities in the challenges to increase the participation and success of Roma people in education and lifelong learning in the selected European countries; then, she discusses their policies and support programmes, which, on the one hand, try to improve the social situation of the Roma while promoting minority language and culture, on the other hand. She finds the reason for their similarities regarding the wording, defining and communicating and also concerning the main ideas and concrete projects for possible solutions, in the Roma inclusion policy of the European Union in the frame of the Open Method of Coordination, which has been introduced within the Lisbon Strategy, linked to the idea of lifelong learning. She considers the realisation of these policy measures at national, regional and local levels to have shown only unsatisfactory results until now.