State must uphold strict standards in preschool sector

Standards have been set, they just have to be enforced, writes Claire O’Sullivan

Nine years ago, the Organisation for Economic Cooperation and Development (OECD) raised issues about how preschool and creches were being run in this country.

“The regulatory framework in place in Ireland seems weak in comparison to other countries. It is basically a licence to practice, but does not include sufficient incentives to train, employ qualified staff or continually improve expertise. Other countries regulate more stringently or, like Australia, introduce voluntary quality improvement and accreditation schemes,” it wrote.

Two years later, revised regulations were introduced by the Department of Health with greater emphasis on the “learning, wellbeing and development” of the child, but the regulations, in terms of ensuring child development, were still not of the stringency that the OECD might expect and were variously described as “timid” by childcare experts.

And so the Government asked the Centre for Early Childhood Development and Education (CECDE) to develop a national quality framework for early childhood care and education. Called Síolta, it was published in 2006, but has only been implemented in little over 100 of the country’s 5,000 preschools.

In recent years, an early years curriculum aimed at “planning for and providing enriching, challenging and enjoyable learning opportunities for children” has also been drawn up by the National Council for Curriculum and Assessment (NCCA). This curriculum, called Aistear, is about far more than education during the ‘free preschool year’. It provides a blueprint for how children should be cared for in creches and preschools from age zero to six years old so that they meet all their development potential. However, Aistear isn’t compulsory in creches or preschools. Instead, preschools are asked to “engage” with Aistear but they are under no compulsion to adopt its principles.

Therefore, we have a quality framework for early childhood care and a national curriculum for children aged zero upwards, but they may as well not exist as none of the ministers in the departments of health, children or education has seen fit to make their adoption compulsory.

Heino Schonfeld is a childcare consultant, running his own company, Leitmotiv. As the former director of the Centre for Early Childhood Development and Education, he helped draw up Síolta.

“We are very good in this country at drafting reports, but like poetry, they sit there on a shelf without being implemented. Implementation is just as important as drawing up a blueprint, but you cannot implement a quality service unless the creches and preschools are supported so that the childcare workers have the capacity and support to put these programmes into place. Implementation of Síolta and [the] curriculum has been very slow as the creches and preschools don’t have sufficient resources, such as sufficiently trained staff, to do it,” he says.

If childcare services of the quality that Síolta and Aistear aspire to are to exist, there will need to be a huge investment in childcare by the State, according to Heino.

The State does fund community creches for disadvantaged children but the vast majority of Irish creches are for-profit companies, run by individuals. At the core of the HSE’s existing regulatory structure are carer-child ratios.

These stipulate, for instance, that for every five children under two and a half, you must have one childcare worker. Such ratios mean that wages are the biggest cost for most childcare providers but with large numbers of creche owners burdened with Celtic Tiger mortgages on their premises, and many hard-pressed parents opting for the cheaper childminder option, few creche owners are making any kind of substantial profit and so few can afford to invest heavily in widespread training of staff .

This means the impetus to engage in further training must come from the individual childcare worker.

“Central to a creche is the child and carer relationship. Childcare and child development is about how the child is treated by the carer and there should be very clear standards around that. With the free preschool year, there was a new demand from the Government to train up staff teaching the course, but when pay rates are very low in a sector, there isn’t much of an incentive for a staff member to fund themselves to educate themselves further. There is minimal motivation,” he says.

To teach the Early Childhood Care and Education (ECCE) programme, a team leader only needs a FETAC level five certificate. But, preschools where a team leader has a childcare degree are given higher capitation funding by the Government and this had led to a fifth of preschools hiring staff with a degree.

Because of this, Heino has come to believe that if Irish parents are really to receive best quality childcare, the State will have to become serious players in the childcare sector.

“The private childcare model is a higgledy piggledy poor business model. There is a very strong argument that the State should come into this sector as just like primary schools, they can drive quality and standards as they have the resources to do so. The motivation of those in the private sector is to make a profit and in the case of larger creche chains, satisfy investors. However, if the State are to invest hugely in childcare training and preschool education, the benefits for the country in the long term are enormous. All the evidence points to it,” he says.