Zappone’s after-school master plan ignores children’s voices

Kids want to play, they don’t want to obey rules — they have enough of that in school, writes Victoria White

THEY want to go home. That’s what Children’s Minster Katherine Zappone’s UCC-based research group on after-school childcare found when they talked to children.

Some 59% of 8 to 12-year-olds want to go home after school, while only 1% wants to go to a crèche. Other options occupy the middle ground: friends’ houses, 17%; relatives’ houses , 13%; an afterschool club, 6%; and childminder, 4%.

Kids want to go home after school. They want to take off their uniforms and relax in familiar surroundings with their families and their pets. They want to eat food cooked by Mammy or Granny or Auntie or their minders and they want to help prepare it.

They want to play, inside and outside. They don’t want to obey rules. They don’t want to be restricted. They have enough of that in school.

So what does the minister’s department do? Makes an “action plan on school age childcare”, launched silently this month, to carry out the commitment in the Programme for a Partnership Government to provide after-school care in school buildings and “provide more options and flexibility to parents”. This is precisely what the children don’t want. They had to be consulted because of the Children’s Act. In fairness to the Department of Youth Affairs, they were consulted and though I have not as yet seen the transcripts of the consultation, the finding that they want to go home after school is spelled out clearly in the action plan.

But the finding is ignored. There is no measure in the plan to facilitate the children’s preference. While it is noted that the kids would prefer to go home it is simply stated that this is “not possible” for all children and so after-school childcare should “simulate” the home environment.

There will never be a society in which every child can go home after school. But why is there not one single measure in the plan to help more kids live their dream? No call for the mandatory provision of part-time work for parents, as exists in many countries, including the UK, the Netherlands and Sweden. No investigation of a Guaranteed Basic Income or an allowance for parents staying home to mirror the proposed subvention of after-school care which will run to many millions. It is galling that the action plan notes the cost of childcare can “impact” on a family’s quality of life but there is no recognition that keeping a parent at home does the same.

Not at all. What we are really talking about — the pesky children’s voices notwithstanding — is “supporting the economic engagement of all women”. If you are caring for your own children in their preferred environment, their home, you are not “economically engaged”. You are stuck in what our friends in the European Commission call an “inactivity trap”.

Your children are not having what the Action Plan calls a “modern childhood”. Though truth to tell, in Ireland 22% of 10-year-olds are reported to be in out-of-home care — a figure which has been static since 2003 — and more than half of those are with relations. Only 7.4% of 10-year-olds are in after-school childcare for more than 15 hours a week.

As far as the minister’s department is concerned, that has to change. The action plan says it will benefit “all families” to have their primary carers in the workforce. Although Irish research is cited which shows no difference in academic achievement between children who go home after school and those who go to a formal after-school, the action plan still blasts off about “promoting positive child outcomes” and “narrowing the gap in attainment between more and less advantaged children by enabling all children to access high quality, affordable childcare”. And although the research behind the action plan specifically shows that kids don’t want after-school provision in the schools where they have already spent the whole day — and Early Childhood Ireland cautions against “schoolification” — this type of provision is central to the action plan. The Department of Education will engage with school owners and produce guidelines for the use of the buildings for after school care within the next three months. Education Minister Richard Bruton is quoted stating he “fully supports” this approach.

Education Minister Richard Bruton

I’m not against homework clubs, currently catering for 8% of nine-year-olds. My own kids availed of one for a while to solve the homework crisis at home and I can see kids from educationally disadvantaged homes and homes in which there is little English or Irish gaining from them.

Certainly, an hour or 90 minutes extra at school is unlikely to do most kids any harm. The problems begin when homework is over and kids want refuge from being supervised with their peers.

I can still recall the relief of escaping from my crowded primary school. My 16-year-old volunteered recently that his favourite memory of childhood was being driven home from school in the rain via his disabled twin brother’s school and the two of them sitting down to tomato soup and fresh white bread for lunch.

For me, it was just a rainy day and a lunch of sugary soup and processed bread. But I’m so grateful I could give him that memory of refuge, security and intimacy.

Failing being able to keep a parent at home in the afternoons, there are many options to be explored before descending to the solution, first mooted by the PDs in 2005, of locking kids up in school till after tea. Childminding has been run down under this Government and the last though this research shows it is more popular with schoolkids than creches and tells us why: kids value the personal relationship with their minders. The action plan does commit to evolving for the registration of these after-school childminders and that’s welcome.

But we could be much more creative than that. The parents at my kids’ school ran an informal childcare bartering system by which kids were minded in their friends’ houses. It worked as long as you could repay the favour but some parents were rarely in a position to repay and while stay-home mothers gladly helped them out on a regular basis, others didn’t.

Why not formalise the bartering arrangement? Produce a register in schools of Garda-vetted parents willing to take another child home with theirs? With a small subvention or a tax shelter, a stay-home parent could be adding €100 a week to their family budgets, €200 if they took two kids. That’s riches if you have no income and want your own kids home after school.

Unlike the minister’s action plan, such an initiative would show it is not enough to consult children when it comes to their care. You have to act on what they say.