Investing in pre-school education today will secure a better tomorrow

I STILL have the pen I got for speaking at a conference of managers in the public service back in 2009.

A very nice pen, that fits snugly in my inside pocket. But it’s not the main reason I remember that conference.

A lot of the talk that day was about value for money in the public service. Not the most gripping subject, you might think, but you’d be amazed what you’d discover. I was fulminating about one of my favourite topics at the time, Thornton Hall. Thornton Hall was going to be a super-duper prison back then. It was going to cost an arm and a leg to build, but more than that, it was going to cost hundreds of millions to run.

Built to house 1,200 prisoners, at a time when it cost around €80,000 a year to house each prisoner, the operating costs were likely to come in at around €100 million a year. Just imagine that — a prison that would cost a €1 billion to run in its first decade.

I had spend months trying to find a cost-benefit analysis for a proposition like that, and failed. So I suggested to the senior public servants at the conference that perhaps none existed. And when the conference was over, a senior civil servant from the Department of Finance confirmed to me that they had indeed asked for one to be commissioned, but it had never happened.

They were the good old days, when governments did things on the hoof, without ever worrying about either the costs or the return. A billion euro prison? No problem. Hundreds of millions on decentralisation? Of course. A couple of billion on SSIAs, to fuel an already burgeoning consumer economy? Ah sure why not.

Thankfully, someone (I think it was Alan Shatter) saw sense, and Thornton Hall never got built, although tens of million had been spent on site works. We’re still paying for the financial and economic consequences of the other stuff. But now the pendulum has gone entirely the other way. Now, it’s impossible to get an idea discussed unless you first establish how much it will cost and how it should be paid for.

That may be the reason why Ruairi Quinn felt it was necessary to link a suggestion about expanding pre-school education in Ireland to cuts in child benefit. Let’s cut one to pay for the other, was his basic proposal.

I sort of understand why he might have thought it was necessary to link the two, wrongheaded as it is. Everyone who works in the community and voluntary sector knows that if you go to a public servant with a good idea — an idea that might keep young people out of prison, for instance, or an idea that might help elderly people to live their declining years in dignity and peace — you’re only ever asked one question. How much will it cost?

Funny enough, if you’re in a position to discuss ideas like that with business people, they never ask that question. Instead they have a different one. What’s the rate of return likely to be on the investment?

It was a man called Steve Aos who had first introduced me and others, to that way of looking at public policy decisions. Steve Aos is the director of the Washington State Institute for Public Policy. He had spoken at a conference we had organised in Barnardos in 2008. Passionately, clearly, and humorously about a subject that is dry as dust — value for money.

A couple of years earlier, the Washington State legislature was proposing to build a new prison. Aos carried out a study at their request. Ultimately, they decided on the basis of his advice to close an existing prison and transfer the cost into a range of evidence-based prevention programmes. The purpose of doing this was not some liberal impulse. It was to see if would result in less crime and lower cost to the taxpayer.

According to the independent Institute for Economics and Peace, Washington is the 10th safest American state now, with an almost 11% increase in personal safety since the 1990s. Most of the states ranked higher than Washington are strongly rural states, like Utah, North Dakota and Maine.

But that’s not really the point. The point is that decisions made on a sound economic basis can have profound social consequences. And that’s the way we should be looking at pre-school education in Ireland.

When he spoke to our conference, Steve Aos made the point that “In most cases, there are significant benefits to early intervention programmes that work both for the individuals concerned and for the taxpayer and which most definitely result in financial savings for the State.”

He outlined his own review of early childhood education programmes for low income three and four year olds – and that review showed that such programmes had a long-term benefit for the children involved with increases in on-time graduation from high school, drops in the number of students accessing special needs services and drops in adulthood conviction rates.

Aos has published dozens of such studies — they’re all available on the wsipp.wa.gov website. Cool clear logic is applied. If it doesn’t work, he says it doesn’t work. If it does work, he says it should be invested in.

And if you read the work — not just his, but the work of many other experts in the field — you come to the conclusion that investment in early years education is probably the single best investment the Irish government could make in anything. If you invest in early years education, you increase school attendance and improve classroom behaviour throughout all the years in school.

You improve exam results. You reduce drop-out. You reduce gang membership, anti-social behaviour and crime. You increase the chances of people getting jobs and keeping them. You improve the chances of people sustaining good long-term relationships.

YOU invest a euro, in short, and get back at least €12 in return in hard economic benefits. That doesn’t count the social and personal impact on lives where the cycle of poverty and disadvantage has been broken.

If you’re going to get all this return, there’s one condition. The investment must be in good stuff. There is no point in pouring money into a system of pre-school education and expecting a return from it if the quality isn’t good enough. It is utterly worthwhile, in hard economic terms, to invest a bit more to get decent quality. Otherwise, we’re all going to wonder why we

What Ruairi Quinn did last week was to start a debate. That’s good. I happen to think he chose the wrong starting point by focusing first on how we might pay for a proper system. Child benefit cannot, and must not, be cut again until we are putting services — free healthcare for instance — in place for all children.

It’s just possible though that the single most important debate we could possibly have right now is about pre-school education. Getting this right now could have an effect that would improve generations of lives and the future of our country. It’s well worth arguing about.