Ms Mary Lacey-Crowe:

The purpose of my being here today is to highlight the importance of children with disabilities being specifically included in future child care policy development in relation to the development of quality and affordable child care, and I am speaking from my own personal perspective. While we at the Sacred Heart Centre are mostly considered a centre of excellence, we need to be continually mindful of our limitations and be ever cognisant of the child. A child is first and foremost a child, not a disability and for this reason I prefer to use the phrase "child with additional needs". With continued advances in research, training and education and policy development it is widely accepted that the child with additional needs is best facilitated in an inclusive setting. Segregation or isolation of children with additional needs is restrictive, discriminatory and is a barrier to social inclusion. The United Nations Convention on the Rights of the Child clearly assigns responsibility to Government for "render appropriate assistance to parents" and ensuring that "children of working parents have the right to benefit from child-care services and facilities".

While the United Nations Convention on the Rights of the Child was the first international human rights treaty to clearly include disability, the 2006 UN Convention on Persons with Disabilities has given us a new understanding of disability and what is needed to ensure the rights of the child with a disability are being realised in progressive ways. We can deduce from this that a child with additional needs has the same right as all children to be included in the same early childhood education setting and should not be deprived of this opportunity.

However, this is not the reality of the situation or my experience to date. The permanent exclusion of children from their local mainstream early childhood setting is extremely difficult and heart breaking for families. It should not be happening in 2015. Quality childhood care and education provides a vital opportunity for children with additional needs to be integrated into their local communities with their peer groups and avoids alienation of the child and family. On reviewing past referrals to our service, particularly toddler-playgroup services, we frequently see that children with additional needs cannot be catered for in a mainstream setting for several reasons. These include resource challenges, non-engagement of parents, the need for further training engagement between the Health Service Executive and service providers, challenging and disruptive behaviours, continence issues, health and safety concerns, reputation, fear, and tolerance.

When it comes to future planning for the individual child, we have had to be creative to ensure the child is afforded the opportunity of inclusion. While individual child care providers have excelled at inclusion, the whole system needs to be standardised nationally.

From a local perspective, I want to acknowledge the investment by the speech and language therapy department in Waterford in providing continuous training to child care providers to assist with the inclusion process and to the various early intervention teams for other initiatives. However, there is a long way to go and it is difficult when there are so many stakeholders involved, all with a different focus. It is vital we retain a child-centred approach and that all changes that challenge us will be in the best interest of the child. The lack of a co-ordinated structure that plans, funds and provides regulated child care and education makes full inclusion difficult and even sometimes impossible. Going forward, it is vital that early childhood educators are trained in a framework that assumes that children with additional needs will be in their early years services and will not need to be isolated from their peers in formative years.