Ms Ciairín de Buis:

On behalf of Start Strong, I thank the joint committee for inviting me to address it and its decision to examine ways of ensuring high quality and affordable early years care for children. There was an extensive discussion in the media recently about a crisis in child care.

That media commentary has often focused on the crisis of affordability. We have heard this morning about how Irish parents pay some of the highest costs in the world. I think it is important to emphasise that it is not that we have the highest costs in the world, it is that parents pay the highest costs in the world. Overall, we pay more than twice the EU average, and between three and four times the EU average if we happen to be lone parents. But the cost of child care is not the only child care crisis. There is also a crisis of quality, and any of us who watched that RTE "Prime Time" investigation will remember how important quality is and how very clear it was that there is not high quality, necessarily, across all services. That programme brought the quality crisis to public attention, but since then that quality crisis has been pushed back from the headlines, yet those issues have not gone away. We are not suggesting, by any means, that all services are like those that featured in that "Prime Time" programme. Some services are undoubtedly high quality, but, overall, we believe that the quality is variable and parents have no assurance that the service to which they are entrusting their child is one of high quality. As Ms Corbett mentioned, at a national level, we do not know enough about the quality of our services. We do not conduct an audit or a survey of quality, and we only require services to meet the most basic of standards and, yet, we have services that are also of high quality.

At the root of both the affordability crisis and the quality crisis is a third child care crisis - low investment and low public investment. Public spending on Ireland’s preschool services, including all spending by the Department of Children and Youth Affairs, as well as some additional spending by the Department of Education and Skills, amounts to less than €270 million per year. That is less than 0.2% of GDP. Some of the figures range higher than that but they actually include the infant classes in schools. If one looks at early years services, it is less than 0.2% of GDP, which is a fraction of the OECD average of 0.8% and far below the 1% recommendation of UNICEF. Many countries already exceed that 1% investment level. They include, of course, all the Nordic countries, but they also include the likes of New Zealand, France, and the UK.

As I said, some services in Ireland do offer high quality care, but they do so almost in spite of a lack of funding and support. They do so in a situation where staff usually earn just above the minimum wage and have poor working conditions. We have already heard this morning about staff being laid off during the summer months and many managers who just do not draw a salary or, for those who do, draw a residual salary. It is whatever is left over after everything else has been accounted for.

That some children benefit from high-quality early care and education is a reflection on the dedication and the commitment of those services, but for those services to continue to provide high-quality care and education, we need a new model, one that is sustainable and that focuses on children and quality as well as affordability, because we all know that where it is of high quality, early care and education brings benefits all round - to children, to parents, and to our economy. Where it is of low quality, many of those benefits disappear and children can suffer long-term harm. This harm that can be suffered through poor quality has been recognised in a growing body of research, most particularly by the OECD.

Coming back to Ireland, the recent report from the European Commission, namely, its 2015 report published just a couple of months ago in February 2015, highlighted concerns about the quality of child care in Ireland and pointed to that lack of an overall monitoring system, of a varying compliance with minimum standards and regulations, and the qualifications levels of staff. A lot of that comes back to the fact that our model of child care provision or of early years provision within Ireland is very much based on a market model. We have low public investment and quality and affordability are largely left to the market. We commissioned research from Professors Penn and Lloyd in 2014 which we published in November 2014. It showed that variable quality and inequitable access are typical of countries, such as ourselves, where we rely on a market model within our child care system. We need a new model of early years. We need a model that builds on our legacy of private, community provision and of childminding, but it significantly enhances public investment and public involvement to ensure quality and affordability.

Child care should be regarded as a public service. It is not suited to market provision, no more than our school education system is. When we talk about staff being laid off for the summer months, of managers drawing no salary, of high turnover within services, we would not accept that within our schools education system and, yet, we seem to think that is acceptable within our early years system, and it is our early years system that is the very foundation of our learning and education. I think we need to recognise and say much more clearly that that is no longer acceptable, because it is children who do not benefit or who, at worse, are harmed by that.

Recent public debate has often focused on the notion of child care tax credits and, as our colleagues here this morning have said, they do not work. They will not do anything to improve quality. They cannot incentivise high quality; they cannot be made conditional on quality. In systems funded through tax credits, the quality of services depends on the impact of an inspection system, but the regulations that our early years inspectorate uses are based on minimum standards and are focused on health and safety, rather than children’s learning and development. Both the "Prime Time" investigation and the Irish evidence and research that is available demonstrate that our inspection system is failing to ensure high quality provision. Tax credits also have limited and sometimes no impact on affordability and can, at times, drive prices upward, so they achieve the opposite of what they set out to achieve. That is the experience of other countries that have shifted from supply-side funding to tax-based funding. It happened in both the Netherlands and Australia when they moved to child care tax credits in the early 2000s. Both subsequently saw the rise in child care costs outstripping inflation and negating the financial benefit of the tax credits to parents. More details around that are included in our longer submission, which has been circulated to the committee.

Given that I have just said what does not work, I want to turn now to what does work. The alternative is public investment in services, subsidising the cost of places for parents and linking that public investment to quality - public investment that will allow us to achieve the double dividend of high quality and affordability. That is the approach that was recommended by the OECD, after they reviewed what happen in 20 different countries within early care and education.

Our current child care funding schemes already take that form of direct investment in services and they subsidise the cost to parents, both through the free preschool year, which is available universally, and then through the more limited schemes, such as the child care subvention scheme. Those schemes, however, are limited, particularly the subvention scheme. They are limited in their availability, who they subsidise places for, and the quality conditions attached to them, but they provide a framework that can be built on. We need to ensure, at the very least, that all children who should be entitled to a place through the subvention scheme can access a place through the subvention scheme. We need, then, to make sure that it is not based on geography, that it is not down to luck, as to whether one's parents live in an area in which there is a community child care setting. It also means that it needs to be widened across to all services, so those both privately and community can provide the child care subvention schemes. It also needs to be widened to regulated childminders who meet quality standards, but that, of course, means we need to regulate childminders. Start Strong, along with others, has long campaigned for childminders to be brought within the regulatory framework, for the benefit of children, and also for childminders. Incidentally, Childminding Ireland, which represents childminders, is very much in favour of regulation of childminders.

We also need to move towards a second free preschool year. We need to address the funding model but we also need a very clear commitment that we will introduce a second free preschool year, and within a relatively short time framework. We need to then link any public money that is invested in early years to the quality of those early years services in the provision and those quality conditions need to increase incrementally over time. We need to look at capping fees that parents have to pay, to ensure that the costs of improving quality are not just passed on to parents, so that children can benefit from them as well.

I touched briefly on the issue of childminders. We commissioned Goodbody to research this and it estimates there are approximately 50,000 young children being cared for by professional childminders. Those children do not benefit from a regulatory framework. We need to ensure they do. We need something as basic as ensuring Garda vetting is in place for those childminders, and to examine the risks for children, anxiety for many parents, and the lack of recognition and support for the childminders.

We have set out proposals for how that can be achieved that cover the regulation and developing supports to help childminders achieve quality standards and to open up public funding schemes to those childminders, provided quality standards are met. Children and parents should be assured that services they access, whether centre-based or childminders, are of high quality.

Child care is only part of the answer. We also need to consider paid parental leave for the first year because that is in children's interests. We need to ensure there is paid parental leave in addition to the existing maternity leave provision in order that both parents can share those early months of a child's life. We also need to ensure both parents can be at home at the very least for the first two weeks of a child's life and that either parent can be at home over the next year.

The interdepartmental group will shortly report to the Minister for Children and Youth Affairs on options for future investment in child care. We have made a submission with several detailed recommendations. I will not go through their detail but our proposals boil down to this: children’s interests must come first in designing child care policy. Child care has several effects. There are issues such as labour market support and ensuring our recovering economy continues to recover, but children need to be at the centre of that, and in designing any policy, we need to ensure it focuses on children. The quality of child care is critical, therefore, as is ensuring affordable services. We need to increase our public investment significantly in early years' services, linking that public investment to higher quality. Children would benefit from higher-quality services and their parents from more affordable child care. It is possible to improve the quality and affordability of child care at the same time. It is important to do both at the same time. If we focus exclusively on one, the other will miss out. We need to make those subsidies conditional on raising quality standards. We need to remember that child care is part of the larger early care and education system and ensure paid parental leave is part of that jigsaw, as well as flexible working conditions in order that children can thrive in those early years.