The decision to change the system of funding community creches threatens to ghettoise the service and is symptomatic of a childcare policy which is failing Irish children and their parents, writes Kathy Sheridan
When a Roscommon councillor complained a few months ago that he was getting childcare on the cheap, by being allowed to benefit from a scheme for disadvantaged children, there was an outcry. Who was monitoring this? Was there no means testing? Shouldn't middle-class people availing of "cheap" childcare at the expense of the poor be ashamed of themselves?
The Government swung into action. Brendan Smith, the Minister for Children, announced that the old system of subsidising staff salaries in community creches was to be replaced with direct, targeted funding for parents on welfare.
It was touted as even cheaper childcare for families on welfare, even though it was evident that the size of the pot for current services had not increased. The original scheme had been funded by the EU (under the equality agenda) plus a Government anxious to harry women out to work for the boom. Now, with the ending of the EU programme, the government was merely being asked to meet its own responsibilities.
Its response? In a sector where staff costs amount to 80 per cent of a creche's outgoings (scandalously minimal though those wages are), the wage subsidies that kept them in business and enabled them to plan ahead were to be withdrawn. Furthermore, targeting parents on welfare made no sense from the most important viewpoint: the child's. "Targeting does not work. This is widely known and accepted. Irish policy-makers know that it doesn't work," says Dr Nóirín Hayes, an expert in childcare.
It confirmed some people's suspicions that the Value-for-Money Review of the Equal Opportunities Childcare Programme (EOCP), undertaken by Fitzpatrick Associates (available in December 2006, but not released until after the election), was nothing more than a look at how to give the sector less money - or even, it was muttered, to cover the costs of the pre-election €1,000 Early Childcare Supplement, with savings squeezed from the community creche sector.
But of course, this was not just about money. The old scheme made sense on another level. As these creches are generally located in areas where more highly remunerated folk - such as cabinet ministers or semi-state CEOs - tend not to live or school their offspring, the EU requirement to provide a healthy social mix of 60 per cent disadvantaged children (many with enormous issues) and 40 per cent from non-welfare families, was a genuine bid for social inclusion.
The general idea was to taper fees according to families' incomes (which creche managers readily admit was not always adhered to, mainly because it required almost impossibly intimate levels of policing, in settings where no funds were allocated for administration). But in working to stabilise the lives of children of chaotic, dysfunctional families, community creches perform a vital role. Those creches that achieved the 60/40 social mix did so by proving their calibre to non-welfare parents, who still pay comparatively hefty fees.
Now creches may be forced to compromise on staff quality by recruiting from an unqualified pool, for example from Community Employment (CE) participants, instead of highly qualified, skilled and knowledgable candidates.
A Government policy document contains a commitment eventually to phase CE out of childcare within five years. But the CE scheme has already been deemed unsuitable for schools. Why is it considered acceptable for the most formative years of a child's life? The potential fall-out for the neediest children is evident.
And what will be the incentive for non-welfare families to enrol their children in community creches? The net result may be that a model facility such as the Mellow Spring Childcare Development Centre in Finglas, Dublin, could be reduced to a "ghetto situation", in the words of its director, Breda Kenny, a passionate campaigner for the sector for over 30 years. "It will mean relinquishing the vision of providing a high-quality service for the most disadvantaged families, or close down . . . What the Government is doing looks very good, but in fact, they are creating two tiers; they are also labelling children; and they are taking away parents' choice." She points to a similar scheme in Australia, which "ended up almost squeezing out the community sector and resulted in a poorer service".
The mantra that no childcare is better than bad childcare is echoed in countless studies. It underpins the thinking of international childcare and education experts and, for sound reasons, discerned by the Jesuits long ago. "Fifty per cent of a child's development takes place before the age of five or six," says Denise McCormilla, manager of the highly-regarded Border Counties Childcare Network.
Yet, the official obsession in Ireland continues to be on buildings and place numbers rather than on the quality of the service. Of the half a billion euro in EU funding for the EOCP programme, 53 per cent went on capital investment, 33 per cent on the three-year staffing grants, says Dr Nóirín Hayes. "Over time it may well be that the construction sector, rather than children, families, or the early childhood care and education sector itself, will be seen as the real beneficiary," she adds, still appalled at a newspaper headline about creche places, "Slots for Tots", which for her summed up the national mindset. The official pre-school inspections that regularly make the headlines and further unsettle agitated parents are centred on health and safety. Remarkably, they have no remit regarding training or qualifications, still less regarding the much admired national quality framework document, Síolta, a project funded by the Department of Education. No one has.
"No one is monitoring the quality of the settings in which children are spending almost every day of their lives. We don't know what the children are experiencing. We are supposed to be working towards a knowledge-based economy. All the research shows how those skills are established in the first four or five years of life," says Dr Hayes. "It's like building a hospital and saying the women locally can come in and do the nursing."
THIS IS BORNE out by the experience of one rural community creche that had surplus funding from its capital budget. Although the board decided that the surplus should be used to offset the abolished staffing grants, this was not allowed. "Spend it or lose it," they were told. So the money went to making a very good playground even better.
The obsession with slots for tots and buildings is an indicator of a society-wide gap in understanding. Up to 10-15 years ago, there were two institutions that supported early child development and learning. "Until the mid-1990s Irish children were largely cared for at home until they entered school at age four," says Dr Hayes. "In recognition of the importance of these two institutions, the State supported parents directly with a universal child benefit and supported a national school system of free primary education." In contemporary Ireland, it is widely acknowledged that the landscape has radically changed.
"A majority of children now spend time in various 'bridging settings' between the home and school . . . These various early childhood settings provide an important service to families and society and it is time that Irish policy-makers recognised this and supported them directly in a manner comparable to that for similar services."
While the funding row about community creches may seem fairly irrelevant to parents paying through the nose for private childcare, it underlines eternal issues. If this is officialdom's attitude to community childcare, the bedrock of early care and education for the neediest and families most in need, what on earth is its attitude towards the private sector? What, in Ireland, constitutes childcare policy? Who should be entitled to subsidised childcare in a child-centred democracy? What constitutes enlightened thinking in this area? And what, in truth, is Irish society's attitude to childcare? Why, for example, did the notion of a few relatively well-off parents availing of cheaper childcare in poorer areas trigger such a public and political backlash, in a country where nearly three-quarters of the workforce earns less than the Taoiseach's proposed pay rise? After all, Early Start, the Government's early childhood intervention scheme in disadvantaged areas (for which the evaluation has never been released) is not means-tested, although it is undoubtedly of value to non-disadvantaged children in these areas. Nor are medical cards for the over-70s. Nor is third-level education.
Is it because this is a sector run exclusively by women for women (for which the anecdotal evidence, sadly, is overwhelming), or because many of the senior policy-makers have a full-time spouse in the home, and - as one Cabinet Minister said to a senior childcare worker - "Sure anyone can look after children"? Does it lurk somewhere in that old row about where precisely women's role lies? As Dr Nóirín Hayes notes, "the debate here keeps slipping into where women should be." She points to the continuing tension between Ireland's traditional ideology, "which places a strong value on the place of women in the home, and the policy driver that encourages increased female labour-market participation. The State treads carefully to favour neither group of women over the other. The focus in respect of early childhood education and care is therefore primarily on women and not on children, resulting in investment policy that creates childcare spaces for children, gives cash payments to parents and facilitates market growth."
It doesn't appear to be working, even at that crude level. The OECD shows that Ireland has a particularly high female drop-out rate from the workforce after the birth of a first and second child. "Typically, a second earner in a couple family, with two young children in ECEC [early childhood education and care], with earnings at two-thirds of average salary has no net return after ECEC costs," says Dr Hayes.
It is widely accepted that families on welfare are often better off financially than a working couple existing on low pay. Remarkably, despite the well-known fact that all children have two parents, the new childcare subvention application form for parents has room for only one name and PPS number.
At a west Dublin community creche, 29-year-old Marguerite, a lone parent on full allowances, whose two children are cared for at the minimum welfare rate (a total of €114 a week, part-time), is here to pick up her two children. She works part-time, for local government. "I work part-time because, if I worked full-time, I'd be no better off. I'd have to pay the full creche rate and I couldn't afford that," she says. Although the children's father is deeply engaged with them, often drops them to school and wants to marry Marguerite, she will accept no maintenance from him, she says: "I'd lose some of my allowances and he could walk out on me tomorrow and where would that leave me? Get married? If I married him I'd lose everything."
Marguerite will benefit from the new subvention.
MEANWHILE, IN A five-year-old private housing estate in sprawling Tyrrelstown, in north Dublin, about 15 miles from the city, Brenda and Darren Casey, both 37, live in a small, immaculate house with their two children, Niamh (two) and Caolan (eight months).
They both work, in Brenda's case in a Government department, have a new mortgage, one car (by necessity) and a joint gross income of about €75,000. Their childcare crisis came with the arrival of Caolan, when they discovered that to send both to their existing creche would cost over €2,000 a month. They moved the children to Mellow Spring, where the figure came down to €1,300. The worry now is that, under the new subvention arrangement, Mellow Spring will have to increase its fees. "If it's a substantial increase, I'll have to give up work. Even €50 extra a month would put a strain on us. The way I see it," says Brenda, "is that the department wants the likes of Darren and myself to replace the staff funding that the Minister was giving. We don't have an extravagant lifestyle by any means but I enjoy working. It gives me an outlet. You could be here all day," she says, looking out on an empty estate, "and you'd see no one."
She is clear on what she wants in a childcare facility. "To me, proper childcare is a safe environment for the kids; it will develop your child and challenge them mentally; and you have to feel comfortable with the people minding them. In Mellow Spring, every child is the same to them. I wouldn't be looking for childcare for nothing. I'd gladly pay a percentage, but I do feel that the Government should definitely be doing more. Mellow Spring is trying to integrate children from different backgrounds and trying not to stigmatise itself as a facility for the underprivileged by having people like Darren and me having our kids in there mixing with others from different backgrounds. I do feel with the Minister not giving appropriate funding that it's pushing me and Darren back out to the private sector. I can't understand why the Government can't see the Scandinavian countries as a template. We always seem to be playing catch-up regarding policies. Why can't we just do things properly in ways proven by other countries instead of paying thousands and thousands for reports that nobody reads?"
Meanwhile, in Scotland, the new government seems wedded to the concept of universal entitlement for all children to properly funded services from the age of one. Their minister for children and early years, Adam Ingram, talks about how all ministers want all departments - from health to justice - to be informed by the early years. They already provide early education and care for 90 per cent of their children aged three and over. In Glasgow, policy regarding having a nursery within "pram-pushing" distance of every pre-school child is well in train.
"The critical issue is access to the same community services across the board, regardless of income," says Bronwen Cohen, chief executive of Children in Scotland, the agency for national and voluntary agencies. She believes that, by 2020, "it will be recognised that these children's services should be treated in the same way as schools". But it is her passion for the way this should be done - "by recognising the needs of the whole child" - that is compelling. This assuredly is not about slots for tots. "It is about healthy lifestyles, healthy relationships, citizenship, the ability to give their views . . . For example, we've been thinking about 'nature kindergartens' [ predominantly outdoors daycare], to help children understand nature, food and cooking it." As for cost, there is "always a contribution from parents, according to ability to pay".
The obvious truth is, however, that parents will never be able to fully fund the delivery of quality childcare services, advises Prof Peter Moss, of the Thomas Coram Institute in the UK. "Most services will need to be subsidised by the state to reach and maintain quality standards."
Cohen notes that in Nordic countries, fees are not more than a third of the full cost of a placement. "In Sweden, the parents' contribution is diminishing all the time." As for the UK, Scotland has been well ahead of the rest in its integrated childcare strategy. So confident are they about the long-term benefits accruing from their huge investment in this area, that they will be arguing to have those savings factored in to any future devolution settlement.
When will we finally see a grown-up debate in Ireland?