Social pedagogy has long been a distinctive, important scientific discipline that is increasingly important in all spheres of society and educational impact on the most diverse groups. In many countries, social pedagogues are also key experts who work in the school environment and participate in supporting the education of all students and thus their successful education. In the Czech Republic, the situation is more complicated, because the development of social pedagogy was artificially suppressed during the time of totalitarianism and so far, not even more than three decades since the establishment of democracy, it has not been possible to legislatively anchor social pedagogues in the catalog of pedagogical professions despite hundreds of graduates in the field every year throughout the country. And we perceive the difficult promotion of a social pedagogue as an expert in school as a significant deficit, because this position is still not covered by law.

The fact that this is an important step in strengthening the emancipation of the profession is inspired by, for example, the educational system of Poland, where already at the beginning of the millennium M. Słoma (2001) mentioned that the position of a social educator in Poland is stable, constantly developing and strengthening new competencies with regard to the needs of society. It responds to the needs of the school, pupils and the local environment as a standard and focuses on supporting children from uninspiring environments and families with lower social status, coordinating cooperation between various institutions and experts supporting the development of pupils, developing an "open" school as part of the local environment, coordinating cooperation on targeted intervention for pupils, groups or families and implementing and coordinating preventive programmes and activities. The system of school social and pedagogical work is also developed in an inspiring way in Germany, where, for example, The authors Rossemeissl and Przybilla (2006) mention the importance of the social pedagogue in terms of the integration of children with various differences, emphasize the key role in individual work with a child with specific needs, and further mention the preventive work of the social pedagogue as an important guide to social learning and other aspects of educational and intervention work in school. We also record rich and stimulating experiences for the Czech environment, e.g. in England and Norway (Kyriacou et al., 2008).

The first thoughts about introducing the profession of social educator into the Czech school environment appeared at least twenty years ago in the publication of the authors Lorencová and Poláčková (2001), then by the authors Čech (2007), Kraus (2008), Soják, Čech (2010) and others. In recent years, the Association of Social Educators has significantly contributed to the discussion about the legislative anchoring of the profession, which is already intensively negotiating with the Ministry of Education, Youth and Sports of the Czech Republic in this spirit. They are supported in their negotiations by, for example, the publication of the authors of this article (Šmída, Čech, Hormandlová, Jůvová, 2024), which confronted the position of social educator with the needs of schools from the perspective of principals. However, the profession has not yet been legislated.

In this article, the authors attempted to follow up on research carried out among primary school principals from the perspective of school needs and the application of the profession of social educator. The aim of the research was to verify how a social educator can help make a school function more effectively as an educational institution, from the perspective of primary school teachers, for whom the social educator is supposed to provide support in their teaching activities, especially towards socially disadvantaged pupils.

A quantitative research strategy was chosen for the research, and a self-constructed questionnaire was chosen as the research tool. The quality of the questionnaire was verified based on preliminary research, expert triangulation, and statistical verification of the consistency of the questions in an effort to ensure the highest possible reliability of the tool and validity of the data. The verified online questionnaire was subsequently sent to teachers of randomly selected primary schools in the Czech Republic. 1,610 teachers participated in the research, the research group consisted of 86.6% female teachers and only 13.4% male teachers. This reflects the typically low representation of men in Czech primary education.

The results clearly show that the majority of respondents are interested in establishing the position of social educator in the school where they work. A total of 1356 teachers (84.20%) responded that they would appreciate the establishment of this position. Only 254 respondents (15.80%) stated that they did not feel the need to establish this position in their school. More specifically, the results show that teachers face complex problems that often require a multidisciplinary approach and welcome the support of experts, which in schools, in addition to school psychologists and school special educators, should also be provided by social educators. This is primarily in supporting socially disadvantaged students, in communicating with the families of these students and professional institutions, but also, for example, in terms of supporting the formation of the school and classroom climate, preventing school failure or risky forms of behavior. Teachers consider the improvement of support systems and targeted interventions to be important, which could significantly reduce the burden that teachers face every day.

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