Balance quality pre-schooling with education and support for parents

Pre-school education is important and deserves more investment. But tirelessly debating quality standards, crèche inspections, and the capabilities of early childhood staff and inspectors distracts from the obvious — reducing socially generated gaps in child outcomes cannot be the sole responsibility of Ireland’s pre-school education system, and the debate is a smokescreen.

By focusing on quality improvements alone, we have separated the child from the family and the family from the child to generate leverage in public policy. By failing to look at the child in the wider context, we are feeding a disconnect between policies that serve children and policies that serve their parents.

The relationship between the social mobility of parents, adult mental health and child outcomes is impossible to disentangle. There is a disconnect between policy interventions for vulnerable children and interventions for their parents. A child’s development unfolds in, and responds to, their home environment. This is a time of tremendous opportunity, but also of tremendous risk. When a child grows up in the adverse circumstances associated with poor life outcomes — economic hardship, limited parent education or ethnic minority status — the burden can be insurmountable.