Ms Denise McCormilla:

I will deal with just a couple of things because so many matters were raised that I may not be able to pick up on the remaining ones. It strikes me that so much has been written and said, and there are many people with different opinions. Some of them agree, while others are totally opposed, so we need to keep things as simple as possible. That is why I went back to the IFI project, which was funded in the late 1990s. It gave an example of services in Northern Ireland and the southern Border counties. They were poor services, but were given the opportunity with three years' funding for measurable improvement to take place. At the time, they were committee-managed services but governance was poor. There were no proper governance structures in place, so the first thing was to establish such a structure.

Management of responsibilities for pay and HR were carried out by national organisations, rather than local parents having to do so. Parents did a certain amount, however, and the parents' committee was re-established. Staff were given a contract, proper job descriptions according to their roles, and were paid for a three-year period. If they were delivering a service for three hours a day, 15 hours, they were paid for 25 hours. That might be a jump too far at this point in time, but if it was even a case of one hour a day extra it would allow them to do the additional work that is absolutely necessary. Either it does not get done or it is done in people's own time. As the burden increases, it is impossible for people to do all that work in their own time, especially with education-focused inspections and all the requirements involved.

Considerable work remains to be done to meet the 16 Síolta standards. We have to meet all of them, starting with standard No. 15 on legislation and regulations because a significant number of services are not in full compliance with the regulations. The services with which I was involved had to meet the standards and regulations. Síolta and Aistear were not in place at that stage, but they had to meet the standards of the high scope curriculum training programme, which supports children's learning and development in partnership with parents. Staff had to participate in continuing professional development on a monthly basis for their first year, attend cluster group training with an appropriately inspirational trained instructor and show measurable practice. A service evaluation system was devised to show them how they had progressed and could improve. They also had external support. Now we have inspections, the better start mentoring system and support staff employed through voluntary and community organisations and county child care committees. The county child care committees can also help on governance issues. An external evaluation was conducted at the end of the three year programme. As adviser to the service during this period, I saw demonstrable progress from an originally poor quality of service, albeit delivered with great heart, once the necessary conditions and ingredients were in place.

On the complexity of funding schemes and the question of subventing independent and private providers, there is, for example, only one committee managed service in Letterkenny. Parents in one of the fastest growing towns in the country need access to affordable child care. I would be inclined to suggest we should get rid of the separation between private, community and independent services. They are governed by the same legislation and the same standards and have to pay their staff. There should not be a divide between private and community child care services. Community and independent providers should not have to pay rates if they are working within the system. We know how much money is required to pay staff and meet the additional costs involved. A capitation system might be an alternative way of funding services. I do not know the level of capitation paid to schools, but that system appears to work. The capitation system revolutionised secondary education in the 1960s.

It is time for radical change in the child care sector. Those of us who have been involved in it for many years believe we are chasing our tails in trying to make the best of bad policies, inadequate training, poor pay and limited understanding. We get tired of all the external reports on the poor quality of child care services in Ireland. We can do better, but we must start small and make it simple by identifying where the money should be spent and how much in total is available through the various schemes. We know from the Pobal reports how many work in the sector, their qualifications and the positions in which they work. We should begin by considering what salaries ought to be paid based on a national salary scale which we have prepared. That would allow us to estimate the cost of paying staff who work in the sector and decide how we could make better use of existing funding. I would investigate how we could make better use of what we have before looking for additional funding. We could make better use of what we have by working in a more integrated way. We are all inclined to work in silos. How could we take a nationally co-ordinated, integrated and strategic approach involving all of the various players involved? When I started 30 years, nothing was in place.