Some of the workplace skills that we value most, whether it is curiosity and creativity, or an ability to think independently while still working collaboratively, start to be developed in the earliest years of life. Early childhood education and care (ECEC), as children’s first experience outside the home environment, holds immense promise for guiding children towards a positive and rich life-long learning and development path. However, this role of ECEC is coupled with great responsibility in not only ensuring access to but also quality of services.
Historically, policies on ECEC have focused on setting norms to ensure the safety of young children, such as the formulation of standards on buildings, materials or staff-to-child group ratios. However, it is the quality of interactions that children experience, known as process quality, which matters most for their development, learning and well-being. Fostering process quality involves designing policies in a way that best facilitates meaningful interactions in ECEC settings, going beyond simply a regulatory nature. This was the focus of the Quality beyond Regulations policy review, which the OECD developed to help countries and jurisdictions better support the different dimensions of quality in ECEC.
As part of its participation in this project, Ireland asked the OECD to conduct an in-depth review of the Irish ECEC system (also referred to as Early Learning and Care or ELC in Ireland). Ireland is currently pursuing a strong policy agenda for ECEC and has committed itself to improving access to, as well as affordability and quality of ECEC provision. These ongoing reforms are centred around the ECEC workforce, the funding system, home-based ECEC provision and governance of the sector. The overarching objective of the present review is to provide policy recommendations to strengthen the performance of the ECEC system in Ireland, in line with national policy goals. The realisation of this report was possible due to the strong engagement of a large range of stakeholders in Ireland, as well as the support of the European Commission.
The review focuses on policies in the area of workforce development, and quality assurance and improvement. The ECEC workforce, which encompasses professionals who interact with children and families in ECEC settings, is at the core of the quality of children’s experiences within these settings. Raising the professionalisation of the ECEC workforce and retaining high-quality staff is a challenge for many countries including Ireland. ECEC staff’s initial education, professional development and working conditions all matter for the quality of provision and workforce satisfaction, thus making them priorities for reform in Ireland. Furthermore, ECEC in Ireland is almost fully offered by private providers, including chains, large structures and small structures. In this context, the quality assurance system (e.g. monitoring and inspection) provides important feedback on strengths and weaknesses in the system to inform further actions for improvement and provide valuable information for parents to help them evaluate the quality of services when making decisions about their children’s early education.
The report discusses how carefully designed policies can support meaningful interactions for all children as part of their ECEC experience - this is where focus should be placed.