Ms Maria Corbett:

I thank the joint committee for inviting me to participate in this discussion. I concur with the comments made by previous speakers. The Children's Rights Alliance unites more than 100 member organisations which are working together to make Ireland one of the best places in the world in which to be a child. We seek to make changes to the lives of children by ensuring their rights are respected and protected in our laws, policies and services. I will provide the committee with a children's rights lens through which to consider the issues arising. I will focus my remarks on the issue of children with special needs and the importance of quality and affordability.

Every year the Children's Rights Alliance produces a report card to grade the Government's progress on its commitments to children, including the commitments in the programme for Government. Members will have received copies of an extract from the report card dealing with early childhood care and education. There has been huge progress in recognising the importance of this area, but the experience of the child and parents cannot be overestimated in terms of the impact on families and children. This year the Government is examining ways of embedding its national policy on children and young people, Better Outcomes, Brighter Future. I will relate that policy to the issues we are discussing.

A number of articles in the UN Convention on the Rights of the Child are relevant to the issues of affordability and quality. Ireland ratified the convention in 1992, thereby pledging to the international community that we would uphold these rights. Article 18 of the convention obliges states to give appropriate assistance to parents in the performance of their child rearing responsibilities and ensure the development of institutions, facilities and services for the care of children. States are also obliged to take appropriate measures to ensure the children of working parents have the right to benefit from child care services and facilities. The free preschool year, subsidised child care and child benefit are the key mechanisms through which Ireland meets its obligation under the article, but it needs to do much more in this regard.

Article 28 provides that all children have the right to an education. The UN committee has interpreted this right as beginning at birth. One of the more positive developments in recent years is the recognition that child care is not simply a matter of putting children somewhere while their parents work. It is important for the educational development of the child. The right to education is closely linked with the child's right under Article 6 of the convention to development.

Article 27 obliges states to recognise the right of every child to a standard of living adequate for his or her physical, mental, spiritual, moral and social development. The issue of child poverty has to be addressed head-on in Ireland. The statistics indicate that the number of children affected by poverty has climbed throughout the recession, with the figure jumping from 6.3% in 2008 to 11.7% in 2013. These are damning statistics. Affordable child care is part of the solution to the problem of child poverty. The European Commission has stated Ireland needs to do more to reduce the barriers faced by parents in finding employment and avoiding the risk of poverty.

The State’s schemes for subsidising child care do not provide parents with an automatic entitlement to subsidies. Access to the community child care subvention programme, for example, depends on where one is living and the time of year in which one is seeking a place. Compared to elsewhere in Europe and other developed countries, this is a significant gap in public services.

On the issue of children with special needs, my colleague, Ms Heeney, is representing Early Childhood Ireland which undertook a survey of practitioners that found that 11% of early years services had to refuse a child with additional needs because they were unable to meet his or her needs. It is disheartening to hear parents tried to include their child in a child care setting but were unable to do so. Every year approximately 200 children with special needs avail of a mechanism whereby their attendance in a free preschool year is split over two years to allow them to start later. This is a positive measure, but we need to understand why services are unable to meet the needs of children with disabilities. I urge the committee to investigate ways of upskilling services in their totality to cater for children with special needs by improving child-staff ratios, training and upskilling. This is critical for any integrated service catering for a childhood disability, whether social, developmental or educational.

Uptake of the free preschool year is 95%, which is fantastic. However, we must identify the remaining 5%. Do they include children with disabilities and special needs? Are some of them Traveller or Roma children whose parents are hesitant about accessing public services? We need to focus on those 5% if we are to ensure the service is available to all children. The key component of any rights based approach is providing access for all children under Article 2 of the convention which deals with non-discrimination. Decisions should be made in the best interests of the child.

Within the early years settings, whether it be a crèche or a childminder, we do not have a national picture of the quality of the services provided. How can we improve services if we do not understand the problems arising? We need to continue the work begun as part of the early years quality agenda, but we should also carry out quality audits across the board to understand children's experiences. Early childhood education and care are only beneficial to children if the quality is high. Previous speakers have noted that childminders fall outside the national regulations. We are concerned about that gap from the perspective of quality and child protection.