Robert Troy (Longford-Westmeath, Fianna Fail)
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I thank the Minister for attending. The topic of child care costs and, more specifically, the provision of the second preschool year has garnered a lot of coverage in recent weeks. The Minister, Deputy Quinn, suggested a second preschool year could be provided through a reduction in the funding of child benefit, a view which seems to be supported by the Ministers, Deputies Fitzgerald and Burton, but not supported by the Tánaiste, who seemed to shut down the whole debate.

The provision of affordable child care is an extremely important issue which warrants further consideration, although a second preschool year alone will not deal with the high costs of child care. I believe debating the second preschool year is premature until weaknesses within the existing preschool year are addressed. I was disappointed that a recent evaluation report compiled by an inspector from the Department of Education and Skills and a member of the HSE, in regard to a small sample of State-supported early child care settings, was leaked to the media instead of being properly published and debated in the House. The evaluation process concentrated on five key areas, which I will not outline here as the Minister knows them well. I acknowledge there were positive results in some areas, including in regard to quality of personal care and the extent to which relationships with children and the environment supported children's development. However, there were areas of concern, in particular that the extent to which the programme of activities and its implementation supports children's development was effective in less than half of the settings evaluated, demonstrating significant weaknesses or more weaknesses than strengths. Inspectors expressed concern that there was a lack of planning in some settings for a curriculum which is based on children's abilities, interests and needs.

That is worrying considering the early years are the most formative in a child's development. Much of the policy development for early childhood care and education has been completed, namely, Síolta, the national quality framework for early childhood education, Aistear, the early childhood curriculum framework and a workforce development plan. However, there is a complete failure to progress any of these initiatives to an extent that will actually result in change. Some 134 out of approximately 4,000 services are currently implementing the Síolta quality assurance programme, and with regard to Aistear, which was commissioned by the Department of Education and Skills, to date, neither the NCCA nor the Department of Education and Skills or the early years policy unit has taken responsibility for the implementation of the framework. The workforce development plan was expected to focus on developing the workforce through commitments and resources to upskill staff but, instead, focused on standardising qualification and training levels. National and international research established that the skills and qualifications of adults working with young children are a critical factor in determining the quality of children's early childhood care and education experience.

None of these failures is attributable to the early childhood services, rather, it is the Government's failure to provide the necessary resources and supports and to ensure the policies it champions are implemented. That said, I acknowledge the evaluation process sample was extremely small. Will this evaluation process be expanded given we now know there are areas of significant weakness? Will the Minister ensure the model of evaluation and inspection is based on best outcomes for the children rather than being compliance based? We would like to see a second preschool year introduced but it is critical that we look at the weaknesses that exist in the current preschool year before we seek to introduce a second.

Frances Fitzgerald (Dublin Mid West, Fine Gael)
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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?

Olivia Mitchell (Dublin South, Fine Gael)
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Can I come back to the Minister on that because she is on the seventh minute?

Frances Fitzgerald (Dublin Mid West, Fine Gael)
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I pay tribute to the staff who have engaged in further education and training in the sector. This is an area to which we need to give further support.

Robert Troy (Longford-Westmeath, Fianna Fail)
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I hope the Acting Chairman is as lenient. I will not delay matters. We all acknowledge that the participation rate in the free preschool year is very good at almost 100%. However, participation alone is not a measure of success. I am glad the Minister concurs with my point that we need a broader evaluation focused more on the children's outcomes rather than on compliance with regulations. Will the Minister ensure that we expand the evaluation process across a wider range of our early childhood settings as opposed to only 15 out of over 3,000? I accept that it is not reflective of the entire image but it does highlight areas of concern. I acknowledged the areas of positives it highlighted but we need to focus on the area of concerns, which relate to the quality of the provision of our education. That is why I am asking the Minister when she will ensure that the policy frameworks of Síolta, Aistear and the workforce development plan will be rolled out continuously over the early childhood providers because that is what we need to see. She also made reference to the issue of national literacy and numeracy. I believe the Minister for Education and Skills has allowed €6.5 million in 2013 in respect of this area. What percentage of this budget will be ring fenced for children in the preschool year?

Frances Fitzgerald (Dublin Mid West, Fine Gael)
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The reason we had this pilot inspection carried out was to inform the development of an ongoing quality regime within early childhood settings. We are absolutely committed to that. It is extremely important. Developing that is an important part of the process of moving towards a second year as well. We should still have the vision for a second year but we need continually to build in quality for children's experiences, whether it is in early years setting or the early years of primary school. There is a number of actions being actively examined and worked on by both Departments. One is enhancing the supports that are available to individual settings to develop the Aistear and Síolta services. Second, we must adapt the existing preschool inspection system to provide an early education inspection and assessment system. Both Departments are actively working on that. It will be similar to what is in place for primary schools. Third, we will review the professional training system for early education practitioners to make sure that we deliver the kind of accessible and affordable training and the appropriate quality for the staff in these services. That can be done by working with the VECs and other providers funded by the Department of Education and Skills. That is the programme of action that is needed in this area. We will be rolling out various implementation actions in respect of each of those in the coming months and years.