Pre-school funding must be increased, warns report

IRELAND'S pre-school education and childcare is seriously under-funded, an OECD report warns.

Around 4% of three-year-olds in Ireland receive publicly funded pre-primary education compared to over 90% in Italy, Belgium and France.

The Thematic Review on Early Childhood Education and Care Policy urges increased spending on all services for young people from four months to six years of age.

In particular, it recommends that all children should have access to publicly funded education from the age of three.

Extending paid parental leave to one year after the birth of a child is also urged, as is increasing the number of childcare places, capping parental fees for low and modest income families and subsidising accredited providers.

The report also points to research that suggests the development of quality childcare is self-financing through increased tax returns from women's work and less dependency on social security.

It wants all infant classes to be provided with trained child assistants and the child/staff radio be reduced to 15-to-one.

It also says that the staff/class radio in schools - where one in four infant classes has more than 30 children - would be unacceptable in most European countries.

It is difficult to see how quality and fair access to childcare can be effectively addressed without direct funding, the report argues, particularly when Ireland compares badly with the rest of Europe as well as with most OECD countries.

OECD project manager Dr John Bennett said Ireland's investment in pre-school children, at 0.4% of Gross Domestic Product (GDP) was well behind Britain's spend at 0.8%.

But the Irish National Teachers Organisation said the OECD proposals would do nothing to reduce class size in primary schools.

"The Government must keep its promise to reduce class sizes to less than 20 pupils," said INTO general secretary John Carr.

While every infant class should have a classroom assistant, appointing such assistants cannot be used as a cover for failing to reduce class sizes, he argued.

For far too long, he said, childhood education had been a privilege, not a right.

Labour's spokeswoman on Education, Jan O'Sullivan, said the report highlighted the Government's appalling record on pre-school education. She added that a pre-school place should be provided for all children a year before they begin primary school.