Strengthening Early Childhood Education and Care in Ireland

In Ireland, nearly all children aged 3 to 5 (who were not enrolled in primary education) were enrolled in ECEC in 2019, which is above the OECD average; and 25% of children under age 3 were enrolled, which is close to the OECD average.

Despite an increase in public investment over the past decade, average expenditure per child aged 3 to 5 is below the OECD average. Moreover, among OECD countries, Ireland has one of the highest levels of childcare costs for parents. However, if recent trends in public investment and commitments announced in the budget for 2022 were maintained over the longer term, Ireland would be making progress in catching up with OECD averages in future years. Given the market-driven nature of the ECEC sector, increased funding should be accompanied by mechanisms to ensure that it translates into higher quality.

The creation of the Early Childhood Care and Education (ECCE) programme – not to be confused with the term ECEC – and the National Childcare Scheme (NCS) have signalled further public engagement for the sector. The ECCE programme provides public funding for pre-primary education and has contributed to high enrolment rates for the concerned age group. However, public funding through the ECCE programme has created an incentive for providers to focus on the age group served by this programme and has attracted the most qualified staff to the programme, leading to a fragmentation of provision at the detriment of ECEC for the youngest children. It will therefore be important to overcome the duality between provision for the ECCE programme and non-ECCE provision by increasing funding for younger children, aligning incentives to attract qualified staff and extending education-focused inspections to non-ECCE programmes, as committed to in the First 5 strategy.

Raising the levels of qualifications of staff working in the sector and the quality of their preparation has been a core element of Ireland’s recent policies to improve the quality of provision for children. As a result of these efforts, the qualifications of staff in ECEC centres have indeed risen, with the percentages of both staff holding the minimum qualification to work with children (ISCED 4 or NFQ level 5) and staff with an ISCED Level 6 qualification (bachelor’s degree) increasing over recent years. The government has made efforts to raise the quality of initial education programmes for ECEC staff, for instance, by setting standards and requiring the inclusion of a practical component.

The relatively strong focus on formal types of education to raise the qualification of the workforce would nevertheless benefit from being embedded in a more comprehensive approach that reflects the different needs of different staff. This requires a clear strategy involving employers, training providers and workforce representatives to facilitate access to training and also support more informal and centre-embedded learning, which can be demanding in terms of commitment, cost and time. The government has recently taken a more direct involvement in steering professional development, notably with the creation of a dedicated agency, Better Start, and the National Síolta Aistear Initiative. The recognition of prior learning is another important component that needs to be further developed.

The market-driven nature of the sector and the low level of public funding have resulted in low wages and precarious working conditions for staff (with part of them working part-time and on temporary contracts), causing a high turnover in the sector. The establishment in 2021 of a Joint Labour Committee (JLC) tasked to develop and propose requirements for pay and working conditions in ECEC is an important step towards the development of wage standards. It will be important that the JLC covers several aspects of terms and conditions of employment, including fixed-term contracts and working time.

Developing leadership will be an important condition for the success of ongoing policy initiatives to improve quality in ECEC in Ireland, be it through further staff development, through greater consistency in the implementation of the curriculum and quality frameworks, or through a greater focus on self‑evaluation.

In recent years, the Irish government has established a range of quality assurance arrangements for the ECEC sector. In addition to monitoring of compliance with the regulatory standards that cover both structural and process quality, education-focused inspections were introduced for the publicly funded ECCE programme to reinforce the focus put on process quality. Ireland plans to extend education-focused inspections to non-ECCE provision and to bring a larger percentage of home-based settings within the scope of regulation and inspection.

Responsibilities and functions are allocated across different institutions, which has translated into an increased burden for providers, taking too much time away from staff focusing on children’s experiences. Streamlining the activities of the range of bodies engaged in inspection and regulation, and developing a single integrated framework to be used as the common reference point for all inspection activities and for self-evaluation should be a priority going forward.

Complementing the role of the inspectorates, a number of organisations provide ongoing support and guidance to providers on quality and improvement to respond to issues identified in inspections and to develop improvement strategies independently of inspections. However, access for providers to external guidance and support for improvement is limited and patchy. While potentially challenging, the objective should be to establish a more easily accessible ‘one-stop-shop’ approach to directing providers to all relevant guidance and sources of support.

Several national bodies gather and analyse data and evidence to monitor the quality of the ECEC sector. Strengthening arrangements for appropriate data sharing between the national bodies with an interest in quality monitoring and improvement would allow for a more holistic view of performance in the sector.