Averil Power (Fianna Fail) | Oireachtas source

I welcome the Minister to the House. I also welcome the establishment of the early years education advisory group. As the Minister has said, the membership of the group includes organisations like Start Strong, Early Childhood Ireland, Barnardos and the Irish National Teachers Organisation and representatives of child care professionals. It is positive to see a Minister for Education and Skills prioritising this area. I am sure her decision to do so reflects her own background and experience and her commitment to early years education. I would like her to clarify in her closing remarks how this fits in with the early years strategy that has been promised by the Department of Children and Youth Affairs. The Government originally gave a commitment that the strategy would be published in 2012, but it has yet to be published. Maybe the Minister has some intelligence to give us on the reasoning behind that. What has caused this delay? More importantly, I would like to know how the strategy fits in with the Minister's approach. It is important that we avoid duplication. I would love to see the Department of Education and Skills taking the lead on this. For too long, early years provision has been treated in Ireland as childminding rather than as education. What is the current fit between the Department of Children and Youth Affairs and the Department of Education and Skills? Is the strategy that has been announced in line with the Minister's own plans?
Traditionally, we have not had a great record of prioritising investment in early years education. In the past, we were behind many other European countries in getting started with child care and early education. We are still behind now. Fianna Fáil prioritised this issue when it was in government. It started to make a major investment through the equal opportunities child care programme, which ran between 2000 and 2007 and created 40,000 extra places. Its successor, the national child care investment programme, created a further 25,000 places between 2006 and 2011 by providing capital grants to child care providers in the private and community sectors. Those programmes dramatically increased the availability of child care places across the country. The introduction of the free preschool year was also a major step forward. Indeed, significant advances were also made in developing important quality and curriculum frameworks for the sector and putting in place a development plan to ensure the professionalisation of the service. Unfortunately, in respect of the latter I do not think the resources have really been provided to this day to roll out the curriculum framework. While it is being very well implemented within the primary curriculum in schools, child care providers would say they have not been given the resources they need to actually implement it. It is important that the curriculum is not just inspected - it also needs to be supported. We should not just be coming in to pick up where we think people are going wrong. The supports should be in place to help them to upskill their staff and deliver a high-quality curriculum.
One of the big issues for us as a country is that early years work is traditionally poorly paid. It is still poorly paid in this country. This sector is very professionalised in countries that have grasped and prioritised early education. Such countries tend to allow people who are starting teacher training to opt to be a primary school teacher or an early years teacher. They are paid at the same levels. In some countries, one is actually paid more for working with children in the early years than for working in education in the later years. We have the opposite here. People are working on the minimum wage. Services are under pressure. They cannot afford to buy in the expertise and skills they would like to have. I think that is a huge challenge for us. Regardless of what else we do, we must provide for serious State investment to help improve quality without worsening affordability for parents. We already have an expensive service. I am not proposing the introduction of qualification criteria that would increase the price paid by parents even further. As the Minister's colleague, the Minister for Public Expenditure and Reform, acknowledged earlier this week, we already have one of the most expensive child care systems in the world. There is a need for State investment to fill that gap and for us to take investment in early education seriously.
All the research shows that investing in early education is right from a social and an equality point of view and makes economic sense. Even at a time of limited resources, it makes sense purely from an economic perspective to prioritise early education. Research shows that the skills children develop in their younger years in areas like self-control, curiosity, perseverance and teamwork are not just important in themselves, but are also important in helping children to avail of later educational opportunities. The earlier they can develop those skills, the better. The 2010 OECD report, Doing Better for Children, argued that public spending on services for children should be frontloaded onto the early years because the economic research is so strong. The PISA study found that children in certain countries who "attended some pre-primary school [who had early education] outperformed students who had not". It found that "the difference between students who had attended [early years education] for more than one year and those who had not attended at all averaged 54 score points in the PISA reading assessment" and that this amounts to "more than one year of formal schooling". That is really significant. Similarly, US research shows that those who avail of early education are more likely to do well, not just in education but also in employment. They are also more likely to find themselves in high-skilled jobs.

Research shows that early education reduces child poverty. There is a lot of compelling research that tells us this is where we should spend money and it is what we should prioritise, yet we do the opposite in Ireland. We spend more per capitaon education in the later years, on post-primary and tertiary education, than on education in the early years, and by some margin. We need to address the issue and take it seriously. I welcome the fact that the Minister for Education and Skills is personally committed to education in the early years. However, the Government must give her the resources required to make an impact, and we support her in that regard. It is crucial that proper resources are invested.
Gaps exist in a number of areas. The free preschool year was a good initiative for working parents because it allowed them to have some child care supported by the State rather than paying for expensive care themselves. The initiative also means every child has some level of early education. The groups we wished to benefit the most were children from disadvantaged areas and children with special needs. Last May the Government published a report which showed that the initiative did not give these children any advantage. It lifted all children equally, so everybody benefitted a bit, but the gap between children from disadvantaged areas and those from better-off backgrounds stayed exactly the same. Things improved a little for all children but the gap stayed exactly the same. That situation is a real challenge for us. Research shows that to tackle disadvantage among children, one must intervene at the youngest possible age.
Let us look at best practice. My area of Darndale, Dublin 17, has the early childhood initiative and a Preparing for Life initiative. All of those initiatives show that the Government needs to work with parents almost immediately after a child is born. If we did this it would help parents to become their child's first educator and thus ensure that children do not fall behind by the time they start school. We need a proper full-time year-long service, particularly in disadvantaged areas.
The Minister mentioned the early start scheme, which is still a pilot scheme. Schools have asked me why the early start scheme is still a pilot one, what is going on, whether the Department is committed to the project and whether it will be extended. I ask the Minister to give us her views on the matter.
Regrettably, cuts have been made to community child care provision. Over the past few years I have fought in this House on behalf of the Jigsaw project in Darndale, the biggest child care centre in the country, which was threatened with closure last year as a result of cuts. The commitment of the Minister, and that of the Government, will be judged on whether resources are put in place to provide a service.
There is another big gap in the area of special needs education. A lot of parents with children who have special needs have found it impossible to secure a place.Providers say there is no place for them due to a lack of support and because providers do not receive extra capitation or payments from the State. They feel that in order to support a child with special needs they would need smaller ratios and a special needs assistant or something like that, but I remain unconvinced. The system of providing an assistant in schools has had some drawbacks that we did not anticipate. Some form of extra support must be provided, particularly if children have high care needs, in order to ensure these children can be integrated properly. There is no point in enrolling a child in preschool if he or she is left sitting in a corner and is not integrated - a situation which is not fair on anybody. These are a couple of the issues that I would like the Minister to elaborate on in her closing address.