Investing in children - Oversight essential on €600m plan

It is almost beyond comprehension that any entity should pay €600m to 4,300 businesses — an average of €140,000 — and not thoroughly access the effectiveness of that investment.

That the multimillion-euro investment was made by the State in pre-school education at private childcare centres points to a bizarre and dysfunctional absence of public accountability. That only 15 of the 4,300 businesses to benefit from that funding were inspected to assess its effectiveness, confirms we have not learned, despite the multibillion-euro lessons forced on this society, that light-touch regulation is a poor substitute for formal, mandatory systems of assessment. That kind of free-range regime also facilitates the grant-friendly manipulation of creche records like that exposed by the impressive and shocking RTÉ documentary last week.

This systems failure was acknowledged by senior Department of Education officials when one wrote: “There has not as yet been a focus on accountability for educational outcomes in ECCE [early childhood care and education] commensurate with the level of investment in early years’ education by the State.” In plainer terms, that means we’ve spent €600m but have no idea if anything has been improved or achieved by that investment.