Ruairi Quinn (Dublin South East, Labour) | Oireachtas source

I agree with the Deputy in that the Department of Children and Youth Affairs is less than two and a half years old. It grew out of the Department of Health. It was originally under the late Deputy Brian Lenihan and former Deputy Barry Andrews. It was a semi-autonomous unit that has become a full Department. The previous Administration introduced the ECCE programme, which every one of us supports.

The recent revelations on child care, as distinct from early childhood education, are disturbing. I will be meeting the Minister for Children and Youth Affairs and senior officials to talk about much closer co-operation in this area. We have a responsibility for the educational input in this area. That costs approximately €6.5 million currently. With the Minister for Children and Youth Affairs, Deputy Frances Fitzgerald, we are trying to improve the qualifications of child care workers. Currently, the recommended level is level V on the national qualifications framework, but this could be raised to level VI. We will be talking to the providers of the education. In many cases, the care workers in the sector pay for their own education. We are considering how this could be subsidised because, quite frankly, the workers are low paid.

We want to increase the quality and implement, in so far as it is possible, the two educational programmes, namely, Síolta, the quality control framework, and Aistear, the curriculum framework. I will revert to the committee and report on the outcome of the meeting with the Minister for Children and Youth Affairs to address the quality of the educational input. A child could be in a crèche for the full working day of its parents, but nobody would suggest a child of crèche-going age should have more than three or three and a half hours of education, as one would see with junior infants. Their capacity to absorb information is lower. The duration of being in care is not the same as the duration of being in early childhood education.