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

As I said in the Dáil yesterday, I found the scenes broadcast on Tuesday night's programme on RTE distressing, shocking and absolutely unacceptable. What we saw was poor practice and a dereliction of duty and care, resulting in the mistreatment of young children. It was abusive, distressing and inappropriate and showed a poor understanding of children's developmental needs, as all of those Members who watched it will agree.

It was truly unacceptable and inappropriate and was harrowing to watch.

Since coming into office I have initiated, prioritised and placed a much overdue focus on early years services. Two months ago I came to this Chamber to address the imperative that is early intervention at the request of Senators who realised how important early intervention services are. We talked about the benefits that can accrue in terms of both better outcomes for children and economic return to the State, but primarily in terms of returns to the individual child. I also used that opportunity to speak of Ireland's legacy - as I said when I addressed Senators here earlier in the year at their request - of providing direct cash payments instead of investing in services. That is the reality of the legacy. We need to discuss the implications of that and where we go from there. I highlighted a legacy that has allowed us to lag behind many other developed countries when it comes to our early years sector. It is clear that we lag behind our European counterparts when it comes to the early years sector. We have much ground to make up. I further spoke of the need to improve quality standards and workforce capacity in all sectors of child care and early years services. That is the challenge and it is one I am determined to meet.

Up to the last decade, Ireland's preschool sector was almost non-existent. We all knew the small playgroups that existed in local community halls. It is out of that sector that our current child care services have grown. Everyone knows that. During the late 1990s we still had one of the lowest female workforce participation rates in the developed world and one of the highest unemployment rates. The years of the Celtic tiger saw a scramble to put services in place in response to demand but a wholly inadequate approach to quality and sustainability. On Tuesday night we saw elements of that legacy starkly exposed. We saw the challenges at first hand. We saw what happens when we do not invest in building an effective system and culture of quality-focused, child-centred service provision and when we do not invest in robust oversight and inspection. We all saw that. As I said, the scenes were shocking and distressing and what they showed was absolutely unacceptable. There was poor practice resulting in the mistreatment of young children. The practices witnessed are currently and rightly the subject of a thorough and comprehensive investigation by, I stress, both the HSE and the Garda. All such incidents of mistreatment of children in child care settings should and must be reported to authorities. The matters addressed in the "Prime Time" programme deserve and demand a comprehensive response.

As I said when I addressed the Senators here earlier in the year, I have already highlighted these issues. I have already acted and will continue to act on many of them. We are aware of the challenge and the work that needs to be done. Work is under way in my Department, by Gordon Jeyes and by the inspectorate to address the range of issues that were highlighted in that programme.

The "Prime Time" recordings highlighted practices on the part of individual staff members which were of very serious concern. The responsibility of management must also be the subject of questioning. Management is responsible for the selection and training of staff, the development of operational policies and practices and the management of day-to-day service delivery. Most of all, management - I am sure all Members will agree with me on this - is responsible for the ethos and culture of the preschool. Its members set the tone through their example, their interaction with children and parents and their guidance of staff. A caring ethos is the very foundation of any preschool service. It is management's responsibility to ensure this ethos pervades all interactions with a child. This is local commitment on the basis of which good standards are achieved and timely action is taken to address areas that require improvement.

Providers must all be subject to a robust system of regulation and oversight. Parents need that reassurance; of that there is no question. It is clear that significant work is needed in this area. It is already in train and will be developed further. I want to see a strong partnership between providers, parents and the State. We do not have robust registration and have not had it in this sector for ten years but we will have it now. We will have registration rather than notification. It is not enough for people to notify the Department that they want to open a child care service; they must register and meet various criteria, and work is under way to have a registration system in place. We need the kind of regulation and inspection that will underpin standards. We are a small country and we can achieve asystem of regulation that is strong and consistent across the country. As I said, in many aspects of child protection and improving children's services, what we have not had is national implementation, national measurement or a national approach. We cannot get the standards we are talking about and the kind of regulation that is required if it is left to local initiative; there must be a national approach. I want to inform the House that we have not had a national approach to inspection, but we will have it now. It will mean that inspectors can be redeployed to areas of need and can do the work that is necessary. Such a system of regulation must approve the commencement of a service - we are working to achieve this - only after it has been established that it is in a position to meet standards. Where the HSE has been concerned about crèches, somehave been closed if there is a question of their being a danger to children. They must be closed in such cases, and that has happened.

We must ensure also through regulation that we will be in a position to respond to parents who have concerns that have not been properly addressed. As I have said a number of times, we need that partnership with parents, but parents can empower themselves in this situation to ask questions about the care of their children and demand to see inspection reports. Parents throughout the country do that every day. Parents make decisions about the care of their children and if they are not satisfied, they raise concerns. I must inform the House that the level of complaints from parents is low, at 0.3% of all services. Perhaps parents do not know precisely what is happening every hour of every day and, as we saw in the video, I am sure many parents whose children were attending those services were shocked. I make the point that that is the percentage of complaints we get from parents regarding the services.

We need to be proactive in assessing compliance with standards, and we need to publicly report on the standards achieved in each of the 4,600 preschools in the country. I have said that in the coming weeks we will put online the new reports that have been done, and the previous reports should be available to parents if they request them. Providers should be providing them to parents now.

In advance of the establishment of the child and family support agency, work has been under way within the HSE to establish a single national management system for the preschool inspection service. This includes registration for all child care providers, and we are working towards this. I have stated what is involved in that; namely, inspection prior to opening, not afterwards. Registration will begin later this year. We will also outline the compliance requirements necessary to address all the issues that have been raised.

I have said that parents are entitled to ask their service providers to provide copies of the latest HSE inspection reports. They should be available as a matter of course. As stated by the new head of quality assurance at the HSE, Annie Callanan, it should be a mark of any good child care provider that the parent can go in and see its inspection reports, see the qualifications of the staff and see that all the staff are vetted. That is the situation we should be in. I emphasise again that this is not the situation we have been in; it is the situation we are now working towards and that we want to implement.

We are working on the development of new national preschool standardswhich are designed to support providers in delivering a high quality service and to support parents in choosing the child care best suited to their needs. These standards are well advanced and will be implemented later this year. The work has been under way on these new national standards for preschools.

Many of the tools for improving the services are already in place. Siolta and Aistear are developed but we need to accelerate their implementation. We are developing a more comprehensive and broader-based inspection regime for preschools, moving away from the narrow focus on compliance to a greater focus on outcomes for children, including educational development and child well-being. The programme extracts showed that relationships between adult and child were not being managed. The focus was not on child development. We must ensure that the quality of the relationships and the interaction with children are assessed in order to ensure good outcomes. That work will be informed by the findings of the first ever joint pilot inspection carried out in a small number of settings by inspectors from the HSE and the Department of Education and Skills. I will seek to amend the Child Care Act to ensure that the sanctions are stronger to deal with failure and where there have been prosecutions.

The HSE is addressing existing resource issues in the inspection services in particular parts of the country. The inspection rate in each of the past two years stands at 60% of all providers. I want to see the national average of service inspections carried out every 18 months as being the norm across the board. In England, inspections are carried out every two to three years. Of course, where problems are identified there has to be enforcement which is a key issue. It is no good having inspection without enforcement. Of the 2,500 reports in 2012, there were hundreds of follow-up visits to deal with compliance issues. Compliance varies from minor issues to what I would call red-line issues. We have to be absolutely clear about the unacceptability of any red-line issues. A good inspection system will inspect for and enforce compliance. That is what we intend to provide. The HSE will prioritise resources to achieve this outcome.

We are working to improve the support and mentoring services for individual preschool services to help them to implement Siolta and Aistear. Siolta is the curriculum standard which is designed for the preschool system. Aistear is the curriculum. We have done much work on the various tools which will provide good outcomes for children. We must now ensure that these are in place and that they are being implemented. In the past ten years there has been a focus on direct cash payments to parents and there has been far less investment in an affordable, accessible, high quality child care sector. This year we will invest €3 billion in direct cash payments. I understand more than anyone how much parents need those direct cash payments. I am simply making the policy point that the investment has been in these cash payments and not in the development of the sector that is the subject of today's debate in the House and which was the subject of the "Prime Time" programme. Everyone is concerned about standards and everyone wants to see quality but I repeat that the focus has been on bricks and mortar and on direct cash payments, rather than on building the system which I am outlining and which should have been coexisting with the development of the sector. I acknowledge there are many good providers providing high-quality services. I see them every week and I know that parents are very satisfied with the quality of care. However, there is no room for complacency. We must ensure a monitoring and inspection system is in place.

I wish to reassure Senators that all complaints in respect of preschool services are acted on by the HSE and where a complaint is made, the services are inspected on an urgent basis. In 2012, the 0.3% of complaints equalled 243 complaints received, all of which were investigated. These and other measures I have outlined will form part of a comprehensive programme of quality improvement and regulation for early years services which will be a key part of Ireland's first ever early years strategy. I have asked the early years strategy group, which is composed of experts from around the country, to examine the issues arising from the "Prime Time" programme. This is already on the agenda for the group. The work of the group is well advanced and I expect to publish its recommendations in September.

I want to be very clear about the change we will drive. We will sign up all the parties involved in the delivery of this change. This is not about any one of these factors such as the number of extra inspectors. I agree that inspection and enforcement is important but we must also deal with the other issues to which I have referred. Issues such as staff qualifications, the culture and management of the sector, must be dealt with. We cannot underestimate the scale of the challenge but we will deal with every one of these issues. There is not a simple, single solution. We should not distil our national response into a narrow overly-simplistic focus on any one factor. We will not achieve a quality service if we simply focus on one factor. We need to address the range of issues. Inspections alone, while essential, are not the answer. What is required is a multifaceted agenda, a partnership between the State and providers, a much broader focus on quality assurance and workforce development, as well as robust registration, regulation and inspection. I have asked Gordon Jeyes to examine the inspection reports on the for-profit sector. We need to analyse the pattern revealed in the inspections of the for-profit sector which is the focus of attention as a result of the "Prime Time" programme. I emphasise the need for a national analysis of the for-profit sector. Many parents have put their trust in these services. There needs to be an in-depth examination of the issues raised as between the for-profit sector and the not-for-profit voluntary sector. I am collating that information with the assistance of Gordon Jeyes.

This is the Government's and my Department's agenda. It is also the HSE's agenda. Just like the ambitious and comprehensive reform programme under way in child protection, work is already under way and a sustained effort is required for a significant period ahead. This will not be completed overnight. We have the tools and the knowledge but action is what is needed now. I will be to the fore in securing these resources. Parents and society rightly demand and expect the highest standards and this will be a key factor in driving change in the sector. I believe this week's controversy will have a lasting impact in building knowledge about the importance of quality in the preschool sector.

Eleven Deputies raised the issue yesterday in the other House. Today it is the turn of Senators. I have wanted a debate on early years care and on the care of the under-fives. We have not really had such a debate in this country. We have debated teaching standards, monitoring and curriculum in primary schools. We need to focus on the under-fives. Having prioritised this issue since coming to office, I will drive the programme of work required to bring about a quality preschool sector which gives parents a choice of quality services. I look forward to the debate.