Frances Fitzgerald (Dublin Mid West, Fine Gael) | Oireachtas source

I believe the two are inextricably connected. I welcome the increased focus on the early years and I want to see more discussion about it, not less, given we need to focus far more on early intervention. That is the first point. Second, there is no question of the shutting down of the debate by the Tánaiste or anybody else. The Tánaiste has said he welcomes the increased focus on this area and that we need to examine the range of issues, some of which Deputy Troy has mentioned. Obviously, funding is challenging at present. While we must certainly look at weaknesses, I suggest to the Deputy that we need to look also at the strengths of the preschool year. What we need to do is examine the various building blocks that will lead to the successful establishment of a second year, having examined in good detail and assessed on an ongoing basis the first year. These are the general points I would make.

The free preschool year in early childhood care and education was introduced in January 2010. The objective is to provide every child, in the year before commencing primary school, with a well-developed programme of activities to support and promote all areas of their development. The ECCE programme was the first to implement Síolta and Aistear in order to ensure service providers work towards achieving the highest standards of curriculum planning and age-appropriate learning. I would make the point that we need to examine what is happening in the zero to six year old age group in terms of their experiences, whether in preschool or in the early years of primary school, and there needs to be more examination of the quality of the education children are getting in those years. As the Deputy knows, I have maintained the universality of the scheme and secured an extra €10 million to ensure we could deal with the increased demand for the programme.

I want to put some facts on the record because some of the recent reporting does not quite give the full picture. In 2011, some 2,789 child care providers were subject to inspections by the HSE, an inspection rate of over 61% in a single year. This compares very favourably with the UK, for example, where Ofsted operates a policy of inspecting child care providers on a three to four year cycle. However, I am very conscious of the continuing imperative to deliver improvements in quality in early years. Taking up the Deputy's well-made point, I have prioritised the need to introduce a more comprehensive and broader-based inspection regime than the one established by the previous Government, which was based more on compliance. We need to move away from that narrow focus on compliance to a greater focus on children's outcomes, including in regard to their educational development and child well-being.

As I said, the early years programme was set up with a compliance-focused inspectorate regime and we need to move to a more broadly-based regime focusing more on many of the quality and outcome issues. This links into the literacy and numeracy strategy which the Minister, Deputy Quinn, has initiated, and it obviously should be a part of that. In support of this, we last year initiated a joint pilot inspection of early years services. I emphasise that this was a joint inspection, carried out by the Health Service Executive and the Department of Education and Skills. We brought the two inspectorate regimes together in order to have a more effective examination of the services and bring the experience of both sets of inspectors to bear on the inspection.

It covered a very small number of services - 15. It is important to note the results of the inspections indicated that while services varied, in general, the care and well-being was found to be good, most of the services provided a very high standard of personal care and support for relationships around children and the support provided by the physical and material environment the children had was strong in the majority of services. Deficiencies were identified. It is extremely important that we now have that kind of inspection for the first time, even on a small scale, so that we can look at these quality issues. In the same way that HIQA is examining what is happening in departments of social work and front-line services, until we know precisely what is happening, we cannot make the changes that are necessary. It is the same in this area.

The inspectors advised that observation tools and assessment strategies be used in order to ensure that the needs of children are appropriately addressed. They highlight the need for quality practice within early childhood settings and the need to support the development of professional expertise among staff, including with respect to planning and implementing a clearly structured, well-referenced programme of activities, as outlined in the Síolta and Aistear frameworks. There is a number of elements to that which my Department is examining. Can I put on record that the Pobal annual survey of child care providers for 2011 found that in respect of staff qualifications, one third of staff had a qualification at degree level and 76% of staff had a qualification equal to or higher than FETAC level 5?

See this speech in context