Mr. Toby Wolfe:

Start Strong very much welcomes the opportunity to speak to members on child poverty. Start Strong is a coalition of organisations and individuals seeking to advance children's early care and education in Ireland. It is a member of the End Child Poverty Coalition and of the Prevention & Early Intervention Network. My remarks will fall into two parts. First, I will make a few points on the role of early care and education in combating child poverty. Second, I will say a little specifically on area-based approaches to child poverty, particularly in regard to early childhood services.

On early care and education in combating child poverty, the negative impact of poverty on child outcomes is well known. It is particularly notable in early childhood. Research in the United Kingdom has found that, by the age of five, children from the poorest fifth of homes are already nearly a year behind children from middle-income households in terms of developmental outcomes. Early childhood care and education can play an important role in combating child poverty, in two ways. First, when of sufficient quality, early care and education has a long-term beneficial effect on children's development and on outcomes in adulthood, especially for children from disadvantaged backgrounds. This helps to break the intergenerational cycle of child poverty.

When early care and education is affordable and accessible, it enables parents to access employment, education and training, thus reducing child poverty in the short term. It is very significant that countries with the lowest child poverty rates, particularly the Scandinavian countries, have early care and education systems that are regularly rated the best in the world.

To realise the benefits of early care and education, the following elements must feature: high quality services, affordable services, accessible services which ensure children from minority groups such as Travellers are fully included in daily practice, and joined-up services, with early care and education services connected with local health services, early intervention services, primary schools and so on.

While early care and education are necessary if one is to combat child poverty, I must stress they are not a silver bullet. The End Child Poverty Coalition has rightly argued that eliminating child poverty needs multifaceted, joined-up solutions that include both income supports and high quality public services, including health care services, education services, housing policy, parenting and family supports, labour market activation policies and so on. Given the interconnection between these different policy areas that impact on young children, it is essential to co-ordinate policymaking at a national level and to co-ordinate the delivery of services and supports at local level.

At national level the co-ordination of services requires the development of national strategies on early childhood and child poverty that draw together different policy objectives and planning across different policy areas and different Departments. Joined-up national policymaking is critical as without the co-ordination of policies at national level, integration of services at a local level can only take us so far. The forthcoming national early years strategy will be a crucial opportunity. It offers real potential for enhancing joined-up policymaking, provided it is able to bring together a wide range of policy areas and has robust implementation and monitoring mechanisms. In terms of local level joining up of services and supports, in our Children 2020 report a couple of years ago, Start Strong proposed the development of early childhood hubs that would link together supports for children's early care, learning, health and development and would link together services outside the home with supports for families in the home.

There are many different models of hubs or integrated services at local level that are possible and I am not going to advocate any one model. I will make a number of general remarks. One type of model of integrated local service is at a very local level, the type of community centre with early care and education services at its core and other services radiating out from it, rather like the Sure Start model in the UK in which they talk about services being at pram pushing distance to facilitate access. Another model of integrated services at a planning level, at county or sub-county level, involves co-ordinating referral pathways and information on services and so on. Different types of model may be appropriate in different areas and perhaps simultaneously. In a rural area, the pram pushing distance will be hard to achieve and one will be talking about a different type of integration of services. I have listed in my submission a range of services that members might be interested in bringing together in terms of early childhood, which include public health nurses, early care and education services, primary schools, after-school services as well as specialist supports such as speech and language therapists and so on.

At county level, the children services committees have been established on a pilot basis as a mechanism to promote the local co-ordination of services and supports for children and families, and it is Government policy to roll them out more widely. At a local service level, there are a number of examples we can learn from in Ireland today. The three sites that form part of the prevention and early intervention programme, Young Ballymun, Tallaght West and Preparing for Life in Dublin 17, all involve a range of linked services and supports for children and families, all three have been rigorously evaluated and lots of learning will come from them in the next year or two.

There are other examples from which we can learn. There are a range of joined-up initiatives being funded through the national early years access initiative, all of which involve multi-agency collaboration. There are also family resource centres operating in disadvantaged communities that provide a range of connected services and supports. There is valuable learning to be had from all of those that can inform the area-based approach initiative to tackling child poverty for which the Government announced funding in the last budget.

It is essential not only the Government develops the county level planning structures further, such as we see in the children's services committees, but also that this area-based approach to child poverty initiative is used at local level to enhance the local integration of services for all children everywhere in the country. There is learning that can come out of this initiative that could inform mainstream services. We must ensure it does so. Most disadvantaged children do not live in disadvantaged areas, so the area-based approach initiative to child poverty, if it is to have a major impact on child poverty, must be treated as a pilot with the aim of drawing out learning to inform mainstream service delivery.