3. Quality assurance and improvement in early childhood education and care in Ireland
This chapter discusses the main strengths and challenges faced by Ireland in developing a system for quality assurance and improvement that best support the Early Childhood Education and Care (ECEC) sector. It focusses on how the quality system is governed, how frameworks, tools and processes have been developed and deployed, and how the outcomes of inspections are used to promote improvement.
Governments across the world have increasingly recognised the benefits of investing in facilitating access to early childhood education and care (ECEC) and ensuring that the provision which they develop is of high quality, so they have taken steps to develop a variety of arrangements to assure and improve standards in the sector (OECD, 2021[1]). The OECD’s earlier review of policies and practices across member states, Starting Strong IV: Monitoring Quality in Early Childhood and Care, found that they are very diverse, but are generally designed to serve common purposes including satisfying the need for public accountability and providing feedback on strengths and weaknesses in the system to inform further actions for improvement (OECD, 2015[2]). It was also noted that quality systems can provide valuable information for parents to help them evaluate the quality of services when making choices, a particularly important role in systems such as Ireland’s, which have a heavy reliance on a market approach to delivery, with many private and for-profit providers as described in Chapter 1.
Two general trends in the development of ECEC quality arrangements internationally are highlighted in both the OECD review (OECD, 2015[2]) and in a survey of ECEC in 43 education systems undertaken by the European Commission (European Commission/EACEA/Eurydice, 2019[3]). One of these common trends is a tendency for more countries to move from a position where they focused quality arrangements solely on ‘structural quality’, to a position in which they give increasing attention to also monitoring ‘process quality’, developing arrangements which give balanced attention to both.
As part of the Quality beyond Regulations project, the OECD defines structural quality as aspects such as staff-child ratios, group sizes, the physical size of settings, curriculum frameworks and minimum staff qualifications. These are seen as aspects that (while not sufficient on their own) can create the conditions for delivering good process quality. The definition of process quality includes aspects such as “children’s daily interactions through their ECEC settings, including with other children, staff and teachers, space and materials, their families and the wider community” (OECD, 2021[1]).
With regard to ECEC inspection procedures, this has commonly meant that monitoring and inspection arrangements were established initially to focus primarily on structural quality, created by departments and inspectorates responsible for areas of policy such as health, family or social affairs. Subsequently, these arrangements were enhanced by additional ones designed to create a stronger focus on process quality, introduced by ministries and inspectorates with responsibilities for education, now extending their activities in the 0 to 5 years age range.
A second trend highlighted in both the OECD and Eurydice studies is towards extending quality arrangements from focusing solely on centre-based provision for older children in the ECEC age range (approximately 3 to 5-year-olds), which is usually where the greatest level of public funding is invested, to paying increased attention to promoting quality in services for younger children and in services, such as childminding, which are not centre-based. Putting these two trends together, the Eurydice report notes that the external evaluation of ECEC settings for older children often sought to address both structural and process quality. Much less attention was given to monitoring process quality in services for children in the 0 to 3 year age range where, if monitoring was in place, it was usually restricted to structural quality (European Commission/EACEA/Eurydice, 2019[3]).
Both of these trends have been evident in the recent development of ECEC quality assurance arrangements in Ireland. Strengths and challenges in current policy and practice will now be discussed in three main areas:
how the quality system is governed, including how responsibilities for undertaking quality assurance activities are distributed at national level and throughout the system
how frameworks, tools and processes have been developed and deployed in the quality system
how the outcomes of inspections and other sources of intelligence are used to promote improvement.
The chapter also makes recommendations for ongoing and future policy development, summarised at the beginning of the chapter in Box 3.1.
Governance and responsibilities for quality assurance
Take steps to streamline and integrate the processes of regulation and inspection experienced by ECEC providers as committed to in the First 5 strategy. In the short term, deepen collaborative working between Tusla’s Early Years Inspectorate (EYI) and the Department of Education’s (DE) Inspectorate. In the longer term, consider bringing their functions within a single body that provides integrated care and education inspections.
More broadly, keep all inspection, monitoring and auditing activities under continued review to seek opportunities to reduce burdens on providers.
Pursue plans to extend the scope of regulation and inspection to childminding and to extend the scope of education-focused inspections beyond ECCE centres. Tusla EYI and the DE Inspectorate should work together on developing suitable inspection arrangements.
Encourage settings to take responsibility for their own continuous improvement by further developing resources and programmes of support aimed at building capacity for self-evaluation and improvement planning in the sector as committed to in the First 5 strategy. Inspections of ECEC centres should include attention to how good settings are at reviewing their own provision and taking action to improve.
Inspection frameworks, tools and processes
Develop a single integrated quality framework to be used as the common reference point for all inspection activities and for self-evaluation by settings. This framework should integrate both structural and process quality aspects and encourage settings to aim for increasing levels of high performance beyond basic compliance, wherever appropriate. An inter-agency group including Tusla EYI, the DE Inspectorate and support bodies including Better Start should take the lead in developing this framework through a process of extensive consultation and practitioner involvement.
Take further steps to co-ordinate the planning of inspection programmes between Tusla EYI and the DE Inspectorate, including clearly articulating the principles determining how the inspectorates draw up the sample of settings to be inspected each year.
Continue to move further towards more risk-based, proportionate approaches to inspection programming, as improvements to information and data gathering allow.
Pursue as a priority the initiatives currently underway to increase the engagement of children and parents/carers in inspection processes.
Consider developing a more formal system for service users to have complaints reviewed by Tusla, as the body responsible for statutory registration, if they remain dissatisfied after exhausting the complaints procedures operated by providers.
Use of the outcomes of inspection and monitoring processes
Review the statutory steps available for Tusla EYI to deploy in cases of services that are falling persistently short of expected standards. Introduce options that strengthen Tusla’s ability to take robust action, which ensures that speedy and decisive remedial action is taken.
In pursuit of the commitment in the First 5 strategy, increase ease of access for parents/carers to user-friendly information about the quality of services, drawing on the results of both Tusla and DE inspections. The development of a web portal for parents/carers, which brings together inspection findings, information about financial support and other relevant information on ECEC providers in their area, could be an appropriate way forward.
Develop a stronger and more coherent infrastructure for providing quality development support for ECEC settings replacing the relatively patchy and fragmented provision currently in place. This should be a key concern in the review ‘of the operating model’ for ECEC currently underway and in consideration of the role of the proposals for the creation of a body provisionally referred to as ‘Childcare Ireland’.
Strengthen arrangements for enabling appropriate data sharing between the national bodies with an interest in quality monitoring and improvement including the inspectorates, government departments and other agencies, to support collaborative action, improve risk identification and to enable the integrated, holistic analysis of performance in the sector.
Context
In recent years, the Irish government has established a range of national quality assurance arrangements (regulation, inspection, quality assurance and improvement support) for the ECEC sector, with responsibilities and functions allocated across different bodies (Figure 3.1) (Frontier Economics, 2021[4]).
In 1996, systematic arrangements were established for the regulation and inspection of centre-based provision for children in ECEC. Statutory registration was established in 2014. The role of managing and maintaining the national register is allocated to Tusla, a dedicated state agency established in 2014 to deliver a wide range of services and functions relating to children and families and charged with improving the well-being and outcomes of children. Regulations, which were most recently updated in 2016, set out standards, which providers need to meet in order to achieve and maintain registration. The purpose of registration is described as being to ensure the health, safety and well-being of children and to ensure settings are promoting children’s development effectively, requiring both structural and process quality requirements to be met (Childcare Act 1991 [Early Years Services] Regulations 2016) (Government of Ireland, 2016[5]).
Compliance with the regulatory standards (defined in the areas of: governance; health welfare and development of the child; safety; and premises and facilities) is monitored nationally through a systematic inspection programme for all centre-based ECEC provision and a small percentage of childminders. This regulatory inspection programme is undertaken by Tusla’s Early Years Inspectorate (Tusla EYI), a discrete unit which was created within Tusla when it was established.
In 2010, the government introduced the Early Childhood Care and Education (ECCE) programme (not to be confused with ECEC) to provide an allocation of nationally funded pre-school provision freely available to all children in defined age ranges. The age range was extended twice (in 2016 and again in 2018) to include younger age groups and now includes children from age 2 years and 8 months until age 5 years and 6 months (see Chapter 1). As this programme was extended, a higher priority was placed on providing high-quality education and learning experiences within these nationally funded centres. Reflecting this priority, and a desire to accelerate the spread and impact of the curriculum and pedagogical practice guidance that had been developed with Aistear (2009) and Síolta (2006), the then Department of Children and Youth Affairs asked the Department of Education Inspectorate (DE Inspectorate) to extend its inspection operations to ECCE-funded provision. The DE Inspectorate established an early years team and began inspections in 2016 (Frontier Economics, 2021[4]).
This split pattern of having one inspectorate responsible for regulatory inspection with a larger focus on structural quality, with a second inspectorate primarily focused on process quality, can be seen in a number of other countries (European Commission/EACEA/Eurydice, 2019[3]). This is usually the case where education inspectorates have been asked to perform the latter role some time after the initial regulatory inspection regime was established. In some countries, like the Netherlands, the regulatory inspection role is devolved to local government (municipality) level, while the national education inspectorate undertakes a programme of inspections focused on process quality.
In others, both inspection functions are carried out at national level, as in Ireland, and by separate inspectorates. In Wales and in Scotland within the United Kingdom (UK), for example, social care inspectorates, which inspect the quality of care in all regulated adult and children’s services (from ECEC provision to adult care homes), serve the regulatory compliance role, while the education inspectorates in those jurisdictions undertake complementary inspections of centre-based provision focused on the quality of support for learning and development. In some other cases, a strong focus on process quality has also been introduced, but both functions have been combined within a single inspectorate, which has been designed to have the capacity to serve both functions. This is the case, for example, in England (UK) and in Malta (European Commission/EACEA/Eurydice, 2019[3]).
In addition to the inspection programmes undertaken by Tusla EYI and the DE Inspectorate, ECCE-funded centres are also subject to a third form of external review undertaken by Pobal, a public agency administering programmes on behalf of different departments of the Irish Government. Pobal has been commissioned by the Department of Children, Equality, Disability, Integration and Youth (DCEDIY), which leads on ECEC policy in Ireland to support the implementation of all DCEDIY-funded programmes for ECEC and school-age childcare, to undertake regular compliance visits and, where necessary more detailed audits, to ensure that funded centres comply with the conditions attached to the funding they are receiving (Frontier Economics, 2021[4]).
Looking forward, the Irish Government is clearly committed to ensuring that quality assurance arrangements in the ECEC sector continue to strengthen and improve. In October 2021, as part of the announcement of a wider package of increased investment in the sector, the Minister for Children, Equality, Disability, Integration and Youth announced additional investment for development of the support infrastructure, including funding for new childminding initiatives, for quality support and for development and reform of inspection systems.
Source: Authors’ own elaboration, based on First 5 support organisations (https://first5.gov.ie/supportorganisations).
Regulation, inspection and quality assurance requires better co-ordination in the short term and a potential reorganisation in the long term
The Tusla EYI inspection programme has played an important role in ensuring centre-based (and a small part of home-based) provision is designed and operated in a manner which meets the expectations of the revised 2016 regulations. During its series of policy missions, the review team received positive feedback on the way in which these inspections are conducted.
The DE inspections have also had a positive impact. They were broadly welcomed when introduced and, while still limited to ECCE rooms, they have provided impetus for a shift towards focusing more strongly on process quality, specifically the quality of support provided for children’s cognitive development, early learning and social skills. Stakeholders interviewed during the missions have strongly welcomed the introduction of these education-centred inspections with their focus on quality improvement and curriculum implementation. A review of the first tranche of inspection reports, undertaken by the DE Inspectorate concluded that they provide actionable advice in clearly defined quality dimensions and are having a positive impact in strengthening the focus on education and learning within the sector (DES Inspectorate, 2018[6]).
With regard to Pobal’s monitoring activities, funded centres experience these compliance visits as another form of external ‘inspection’, albeit they appreciate the specific focus they have on ensuring funding programme conditions are being met.
It is clear therefore, that as funding through the ECCE programme and other funding programmes has expanded, the range of bodies involved in a regulatory, monitoring or inspection role in the ECEC sector has increased. Tusla, the DE Inspectorate and Pobal all undertake different functions in this respect in relation to ECCE-funded centres, while Tusla and Pobal do so in other settings. In recognition of the risks accompanying the growing number of agencies involved, arrangements have been put in place to promote co-ordination between them. A number of interview partners noted steps being taken to improve co-ordination through a high-level Operations and Systems Alignment Group (OSAG) led by the DCEDIY. They also commented on other OSAG harmonisation practices, such as the co-ordination of schedules and calendars between inspectorates, shared meetings, joint professional development and planned improvements to data sharing.
Nonetheless, there was evidence that providers find current arrangements for external review to be somewhat confusing and burdensome. For instance, ECCE-funded centres may have to deal separately with three different bodies monitoring their ECEC provision (Tusla’s EYI, the DE Inspectorate and Pobal), while additionally being subject to more generic regulatory inspections on issues like environmental health.
The most obvious areas in which there is a risk of confusion are in aspects of process quality, particularly around support for learning and development and around the management and governance of provision. Tusla assesses compliance under four themes: governance; health, welfare and development of the child; safety; and premises and facilities. This includes both structural and process quality areas. DE Inspectors do not look at compliance with structural aspects but do focus their evaluations on key processes relating to children’s learning, development and well-being, and processes relating to leadership and management. This creates an inevitable overlap.
Overall, there appears to be a sense among stakeholders and practitioners in the system that while external reviews have an important role to play in ensuring consistent quality, there is a risk that their current nature and organisation, involving multiple organisations and frameworks, is taking too much time away from staff focusing on children’s experiences in services. While this may be more manageable for larger providers operating chains of centres with dedicated management and administrative staff capacity, it can be particularly challenging for providers which are small in size and operating in isolation. They often lack the capacity and resources to deal with multiple and growing external demands and requirements. In Ireland, providers are mainly private and can be classified as either for-profit or community-based as outlined in Chapter 1.
Streamlining and rationalising the activities of the range of bodies engaged in inspection and regulation should be a priority going forward. The growing challenge of designing effective governance arrangements for education systems in an increasingly complex environment, with increasing demands for accountability, has been highlighted and explored in a report from the OECD’s Centre for Educational Research and Innovation (Burns and Koester, 2016[7]). Arrangements can easily become more and more complex as their scope and sophistication broadens. In Ireland, developing streamlined arrangements will be important for all ECEC providers that are subject to regulation and inspection, including the much wider group that will come into scope as regulation and inspection of childminding is extended (more on this in the following section).
In the short term, actions to achieve streamlining and greater co-ordination should include taking steps to deepen the integration of frameworks and methodologies used for inspection and monitoring, and improving the flow of intelligence and data between bodies. Such actions should have a particular focus on deepening co-ordination of the work of Tusla EYI and the DE Inspectorate. The range of experience and professional backgrounds of the staff teams within these two inspectorates is different, but both bring valuable expertise that complement each other. Joint professional development opportunities for inspectors from the Tusla EYI and the DE Inspectorate have been held successfully. Joint inspections might also be a positive step. Proposals have been developed for the occasional involvement of inspectors from the Tusla EYI and the DE Inspectorate in each other’s inspection teams but to date these plans have not been implemented.
Attention should also be paid to streamlining the monitoring activities of Pobal while still ensuring that they fulfil their key purposes. This may include keeping under consideration the scope for placing reliance on work undertaken and data gathered by the inspection bodies, wherever that makes sense. It is clear however, that Pobal’s role will need to be reviewed if significant changes are made to the overall funding model (which was under review at the time of writing, see Chapter 1). If such changes are required it will be important to ensure that the burden on providers is kept to the minimum necessary level.
Over and above rationalising activities and improving co-ordination, the potential for re-shaping the ‘regulatory landscape’ more significantly should also be considered. For example, this could be done by bringing inspection and monitoring functions, which are currently dispersed across different bodies, within a single organisation that provides integrated care and education inspections.
One option, given the priority on ensuring high-quality learning and pedagogy within ECEC provision, would be to combine the functions and expertise of the Tusla EYI and DE Inspectorate, and place them within a newly created Education and Children’s Inspectorate to cover the years from ECEC to upper secondary education. Such an inspectorate would be well placed to reduce complexity and increase coherence through rationalising and integrating inspection activities, while also benefitting from integrating knowledge and intelligence currently held in separate places. This approach would retain the benefits of having a coherent overview of support for children’s learning and development throughout the age range from 0 to 18, while also encouraging a more integrated view across educational development and support for children’s health and well-being. This approach has been adopted in Malta and in England (UK), for example. There would also be challenges accompanying this option. Given that policy on care and education are split across two separate Ministerial portfolios in Ireland, this merged inspection body would need to be designed to have direct lines of responsibility and accountability to both departments of government. As with existing arrangements, care would also need to be taken to build strong links between this new Education and Children’s Inspectorate and the bodies providing improvement support for ECEC providers, including the provisionally named ‘Childcare Ireland’, assuming it has those functions in its remit. Care would also need to be taken to ensure that the new body had sufficient expertise in all aspects of ECEC provision and that the different nature and characteristics of provision in the ECEC sector were understood, valued and reflected at all levels of the new organisation.
Another option to streamline the current infrastructure might be to bring the inspection functions currently residing with Tusla EYI and the DE Inspectorate’s Early Years team together into a newly merged inspection body which could either be separate to, be located within Tusla, or be established as a part of the new provisionally named Childcare Ireland. As with a single education and children’s services inspectorate, this design of inspection body would have the potential benefit of reducing complexity and increasing coherence through rationalising and integrating inspection activities and combining knowledge and intelligence. If located within a broader agency which leads improvement support in the sector (such as the provisionally named Childcare Ireland), the merged inspection body would also benefit from smoother collaboration, communication and intelligence-sharing, further facilitating positive synergies between the evaluation and support parts of the national infrastructure. Care would nonetheless need to be taken to build in appropriate internal firewalls so that inspectors continue to evaluate and report ‘without fear or favour’. The primary line of Ministerial accountability would be simple and direct through DCEDIY. This option would also present challenges, however. There could be a risk that the increased focus on improving process quality (particularly around pedagogy and curriculum) in ECEC, which is evident in recent Irish developments, in EU policy and international developments more widely, could be diluted if significant education expertise was not built into this new body and sufficiently strong links to the education department were not maintained. Having ECEC and school inspections split across two separate inspection bodies would also inevitably mean losing the benefits of having a single source of evaluation evidence and professional advice which has a holistic view of provision across the whole age range. Care would have to be taken to ensure this arrangement did not have the unintended consequence of weakening efforts to create a smoother transition from ECEC into formal schooling, building higher quality educational pedagogy into ECEC and ensuring a strong focus on holistic child development and well-being in primary provision.
Regardless of the specific option chosen, the enhanced focus on process quality introduced by the development of the DE Inspectorate’s education-focused inspections should be preserved and spread more widely across the ECEC quality assurance system, with appropriate expertise and delivery capacity. Either of the options discussed above should have the benefit of ensuring that data, knowledge and intelligence on ECEC settings, which is currently gathered and held separately, is more easily shared and brought together to provide a fuller picture of the performance of individual providers and of the sector as whole.
In parallel with reviewing the arrangements for onsite inspection and monitoring activities by national bodies, consideration should be also given to the scope for integrating, streamlining and reducing duplication in the requirements for ECEC providers to provide information and data to central bodies.
Extending the scope of quality arrangements to other parts of the ECEC sector
The national quality assurance arrangements based on regulation and inspection by Tusla, and monitoring of funded provision by Pobal, in practice currently only cover centre-based provision and a relatively small number of registered childminders. Furthermore, the more extensive arrangements which also involve potential engagement with the DE Inspectorate only apply to ECCE-funded provision, that is centres, or specific rooms within centres, which are supported by ECCE funding. While home-based providers are required to register with Tusla if they serve a certain number of children, this covers only a small proportion of the overall provision in the sector. In practice, most childminders are not currently within the scope of quality assurance arrangements. Indeed, the full size and extent of the childminding sector is unknown (Frontier Economics, 2021[4]).
Increasing the scope and coherence of quality assurance arrangements across all the main areas of provision within the ECEC sector, while respecting the particularities of different types of provision, will be an important step in the national ambition to ensure high quality and drive improvement across all types of settings. Countries which have been working to develop quality assurance arrangements for their ECEC sectors have typically started by focusing on centre-based provision and many have not progressed to addressing home-based settings. A number of countries, however, such as all the jurisdictions within the UK, have established arrangements for the regulation and inspection of childminding, which are coherent with their overall approach but adapted to suit the particular circumstances of that type of setting (European Commission/EACEA/Eurydice, 2019[3]).
With regard to childminding, which clearly plays a substantial role in the overall pattern of Irish ECEC provision as discussed in Chapter 1, the review team noted that the government’s First 5 Whole--of-Government Strategy for Babies, Young Children and their Families seeks to extend regulations and support for childminders (as well as school-age childcare) (Government of Ireland, 2019[8]). Related goals and next steps have been formulated in a National Action Plan for Childminding launched in April 2021 (DCEDIY, 2021[9]). Appropriate ways of including childminding in the national quality arrangements should be developed as a priority within this plan. As a first stage, this will require building up a better understanding of the size and characteristics of the sector. In parallel with scoping out the sector, there will be a need for the development of registration requirements and quality standards. As the National Action Plan for Childminding states, these will need to be well aligned with those established for centre-based provision, but appropriate to the childminding context (also see Chapter 3 on qualification requirements and training for childminders as part of regulation).
As expectations and requirements are placed on a whole new group of service providers for the first time, it will be crucial to ensure that the arrangements developed are proportionate and deliverable in practice, and that sufficient support is available to help service providers engage positively with the new arrangements. Both Tusla and the DE Inspectorate should collaborate appropriately in taking forward this work with the DCEDIY.
The consistency and coherence of how quality assurance arrangements operate in different types of centre-based provision should also be reviewed. For example, as nationally funded and quality assured provision for three to six-year-olds has become established through the ECCE programme, now sitting alongside junior infant class provision which has historically existed within schools, it seems timely to review the way school-based junior and senior infant classes are inspected and quality assured to ensure consistency and coherence of the overall approach across ECEC provision, as proposed in the First 5 strategy. While practice in school-based classes is based on the Primary School Curriculum, in both school and non-school settings, all children from birth to age six are within the scope of Aistear, the Early Childhood Curriculum Framework, and Síolta, the National Quality Framework for Early Childhood Education. The principles and practices articulated in the Aistear and Síolta frameworks provide an appropriate foundation for coherence across ECEC provision (see next section). The ongoing review of both curriculum frameworks, for ECEC and primary school, also aims to enhance coherence.
The objective should be to bring all ECEC provision within a set of quality assurance arrangements which consistently operate in line with a core set of principles and quality expectations, while being adapted proportionately to different settings. For example, when extending education-focused inspections by the DE Inspectorate to earlier age groups, as is currently being piloted, inspections need to be adapted to the developmental needs of that particular age group.
Extending the scope of regulation and inspection to childminding will send a clear signal that these areas are also seen as important and worthy of attention in terms of quality development. This should help re-address an imbalance, which appears to be currently present in the system, whereby providers tend to focus their attention and resources on ensuring quality (as well as supply) in centre-based provision for older children (particularly in ECCE rooms) because these are the areas where the current monitoring and inspection arrangements (as well as funding schemes) place a stronger focus.
Self-evaluation in the sector is at an early stage and needs focused attention to build capacity
While external review or inspection has long been established as one of the main strands of quality assurance strategies in education systems, there has been a strong trend internationally towards developing complementary policies and practices for internal review, or self-evaluation. This is increasingly also seen as a key dimension of strategies aimed at ensuring that a quality culture is embedded across schools and other educational sectors (OECD, 2013[10]; European Commission, 2020[11]).
Ireland has recognised the value of promoting self-evaluation in the ECEC sector. However, compared to schools where this tool has been promoted and supported for some time, the development of ECEC providers’ necessary understanding and capacity for implementation is understandably at a much earlier stage. It should now be given clear priority and resourcing. Stronger impact needs to be achieved in enabling managers, leaders and practitioners within the ECEC sector to build their skills and capacity to undertake effective self-evaluation and improvement planning in their own settings.
Some valuable first steps have been taken towards building a quality culture in ECEC settings in Ireland. In recent years Aistear and Síolta have been more actively promoted alongside each, raising expectations around quality in the sector. Together they provide a strong basis for further action to embed a more comprehensive quality culture across the ECEC sector, one which addresses process aspects as well as structural aspects, and the quality of pedagogy and learning environments provided. Together with the introduction of DE inspections for ECCE settings in 2016 (which are planned to be extended to ECEC centres more globally), they signal the importance already being placed on ensuring ECEC providers deliver high-quality professional engagement and processes which promote children’s holistic learning, development and well-being, alongside ensuring more basic aspects of child safety.
To date, however, the impact of these initiatives, although broadly welcomed, appears to have been relatively limited across the sector as a whole. Existing measures to foster self-assessment and improvement planning through the Síolta Quality Assurance Programme (QAP) have largely relied on the motivation of providers and services to engage in the process and have been difficult to sustain once validation through the process has been achieved. As was reported to the review team, the current QAP process is planned to be phased out. The sustainable development of capacity for quality development has also been hampered by structural issues such as high staff turnover as discussed in Chapter 2 on workforce development. Existing initiatives and resources are sometimes difficult to navigate for practitioners.
Consideration should thus be given to how to spread awareness and accelerate implementation through actions including a re-fresh and re-launch of a more streamlined and integrated package of key quality documentation along with a well-resourced programme of advice, training and support. The current process of “Updating Aistear”, that is a review and updating of the existing curriculum framework, led by the National Council for Curriculum and Assessment (NCCA), also presents an opportunity to create new momentum for improving the ability of providers to self-evaluate and improve their curricular provision and pedagogical practices; and for creating further alignment with the primary school curriculum, also under review at the time of writing (more on this below).
Efforts to improve providers’ capacity for internal self-evaluation and improvement should be aligned closely with external inspection and monitoring processes. Advice, guidance and support provided for self-evaluation should draw directly on the expertise of the inspectorates and draw on the same standards and quality indicators, while being adapted for different types of provision and contexts. There is a valuable role for the inspectorates in providing guidance on effective self-evaluation and improvement arrangements, and highlighting good practice when they see it developing in practice.
Both Tusla EYI and the DE Inspectorate have taken steps to encourage the development of self-evaluation in ECEC centres in recent years.
Tusla has published the Early Years Quality and Regulatory Framework (QRF) and offered an e-learning programme to help settings use the QRF to promote improved compliance. Since it opened a year ago, 9 200 providers and their staff have participated in the QRF e-learning programme. Inspection tools and checklists are routinely shared with services so they can self-assess their service delivery against regulatory requirements in advance of inspection and use them on an ongoing basis for self-directed quality improvement. During COVID-19 Tusla developed a self-assessment checklist to facilitate compliance, with positive results. The self-assessment tool is integrated into the inspection process and reviewed by inspectors prior to onsite activity.
The DE Inspectorate has also published the quality framework which forms the basis of its inspection evaluations and encourages centres to use it for their own ongoing self-evaluation and development. It provides signposts for practice and encourages centres to assess their practice and provision on a quality scale which ranges from poor to excellent. It also published webinars to support self-evaluation using the quality framework, and webinars sharing the findings of inspection combined with research to support reflection and quality improvement in the ECCE programme and infant classes in primary schools.
As has being recognised in the development of inspection processes in Ireland, inspections of individual settings can also help build capacity for self-evaluation by ensuring that inspectors focus explicitly on self-evaluation arrangements and provide constructive dialogue and feedback on the processes that are in place. The DE Inspectorate has drawn directly on its school inspection practices to build a strong element of professional dialogue into the way their inspections are conducted.
Other systems are also pursuing the development of self-evaluation in ECEC settings, often led by their inspectorates (see Box 3.2 for an example from Scotland).
As in Ireland, Scotland has two inspectorates playing complementary roles in the ECEC sector. The Care Inspectorate undertakes a statutory programme of regulatory inspections covering all registered ECEC provision, while Education Scotland undertakes a programme of education-focused inspections. Both inspectorates have been taking co-ordinated action to promote self-evaluation and improvement planning in the sector.
Building on previous editions of self-evaluation guidance provided for ECEC settings, in 2017 Education Scotland published How Good is our Learning and Childcare?, a self-evaluation resource which sits within a well-established family of guides produced for schools and other sectors of education (Education Scotland, 2016[12]). Evaluating a setting’s arrangements for self-evaluation and improvement planning is a core part of the evaluation process promoted by this guide. It is also a core element in any inspection undertaken by Education Scotland inspectors. Education Scotland also has a range of more specific improvement resources and practice exemplars for ECEC settings on its website, for example the Early Learning Play Pedagogy Toolkit.
In 2019, the Care Inspectorate published Self-evaluation for Improvement - Your Guide, which provides guidance on how settings can develop systematic processes for assessing their performance against the recently revised National Standards for Early Learning and Care Providers (Care Inspectorate, 2019[13]). Guidance is provided on how to turn the outcomes of self-evaluation into an effective programme of action to generate improvement; and additional ‘bite-size’ videos on using the guidance have been made available online. During the Covid-19 pandemic, while normal programmes of onsite inspection were suspended, the Care Inspectorate invited settings who would normally have been subject to onsite inspection visits to instead use these resources to undertake and submit a self-evaluation report, which was then discussed with inspectors by phone or video-call.
The Care Inspectorate is also providing a more intensive programme of improvement support for staff in almost 90 ECEC settings which were identified as needing help to move forward. A dedicated team is providing staff with training in quality improvement methodology, and providing ongoing support through learning communities, ‘practice clinics’ and one-to-one collaboration.
Sources: Education Scotland (2016[12]), How Good is our Early Learning and Childcare?, https://education.gov.scot/improvement/self-evaluation/how-good-is-our-early-learning-and-childcare (accessed 6 October 2021); Care Inspectorate (2019[13]), Supporting Self-evaluation for Improvement – your guide, https://www.careinspectorate.com/images/Self_evaluation_for_improvement_-_your_guide.pdf (accessed 6 October 2021).
Context
In order to understand the standards and quality against which they will be assessed when inspected, Irish ECEC providers who engage with the ECCE programme need to pay attention to two main frameworks. These have been developed separately by Tusla and the DE Inspectorate, reflecting the division of functions and focus areas between them, albeit with attention to promoting consistency between the two (Figure 3.1).
The first of these is the Quality and Regulatory Framework (QRF) in which Tusla has helpfully articulated the standards that providers need to meet to achieve and maintain registration, as set out in the Child Care Act 1991 (Early Years Services) Regulations 2016 (Tusla, 2018[14]). Tusla inspections use the QRF as the key reference point for their evaluations of provision. Stakeholders interviewed during the policy missions confirmed to the review team that publication of the QRF has helped clarify expectations for registration and ongoing compliance with regulations, which had apparently been less clear in the past. As indicated earlier, an e-learning programme has helpfully been made available to support providers and practitioners in preparing for inspection and to meet statutory requirements. Quality standards and regulations include structural and process aspects, such as minimum qualification requirements for staff, staff-to-child ratios and space requirements (Frontier Economics, 2021[4]).
A second relevant framework is the one which the DE Inspectorate has produced and which they use as the basis for their evaluations in inspections. This quality framework is known as the Quality Framework for Early Years Education Inspection (QFEYEI) and is articulated in the Guide to Early Years Education Inspection (DES Inspectorate, 2018[15]). It looks beyond structural aspects and the core requirements for registration, focusing on a deeper consideration of process quality. The framework sets out four areas of practice to be evaluated during the inspection process:
1. the quality of the context to support children’s learning and development
2. the quality of the processes to support children’s learning and development
3. the quality of children’s learning experiences and achievements
In addition to the specific frameworks developed by the inspectorates, centres focusing on quality assurance and improvement need to engage with two other key documents which have been developed by government to guide practice in the ECEC sector, Aistear and Síolta (Frontier Economics, 2021[4]), already mentioned further above.
The Aistear framework, published initially in 2009 by Ireland’s National Council for Curriculum and Assessment (NCCA), sets out a national curriculum framework for the early childhood years. It is a strong framework which embodies principles recognised as best practice internationally and it has strong support among ECEC practitioners. The NCCA is currently in the process of consulting with the sector about updating Aistear and have recently published initial documentation Updating Aistear – Rationale and Process (NCCA, 2021[16]).
As this document indicates, it will be important, in the process of this revision to ensure clear and coherent articulation with the curriculum framework for primary school education. Indeed, care should be taken to ensure that the primary school framework, which is also being reviewed, is updated in ways which ensure that a consistent, progressive approach becomes fully embedded across both sectors. The OECD’s study Starting Strong V: Transitions from Early Childhood Education and Care to Primary Education highlights the importance of ensuring smooth transitions if the benefits of good quality ECEC experiences are to be fully realised and reviews a range of ways in which OECD member states are seeking to ensure they happen consistently (OECD, 2017[17]).
Síolta, which was first published in 2006, is described as the National Quality Framework for Early Childhood Education, designed for practitioners to use for their own development. It provides ECEC practitioners with a set of principles, standards and components of quality, and gives advice and guidance on how individual practitioners or groups of staff can use these to reflect on the strengths and weaknesses of their own practice and develop plans to improve. Appropriate involvement of parents and carers in the process is encouraged (Frontier Economics, 2021[4]).
Good frameworks and resources to support quality development have been developed but now need to be rationalised
Each of these four frameworks have been developed for specific purposes and have value in their own right, however, taken together they present a somewhat complex landscape of documentation for small providers to navigate.
Steps should now be taken to rationalise the key quality documents that providers and practitioners need to engage with, integrating them into a coherent overall package, and presenting them more clearly as an inter-linked suite or ‘family’ of guidance documents for quality development in the ECEC sector.
As indicated earlier, Aistear is being updated through a consultation process led by the NCCA and in its updated form will contribute a key part of this package.
To sit alongside this updated curriculum guidance, work should now be taken forward to rationalise and integrate existing quality frameworks with the aim of developing a single shared and jointly-badged quality framework which forms a common reference point for all inspection and self-evaluation activities. The government has already recognised this need and made a commitment in the First 5 strategy to “develop a revised self-evaluation framework for ELC to replace the existing Síolta Quality Assurance Programme (QAP) so that providers can assess their own performance along the quality spectrum, from compliance to excellence.” This integrated framework should address both structural and process aspects of quality, bringing together aspects currently covered separately in the QRF and the QFEYEI.
Both Tusla and DE inspections should draw selectively on this common framework based on their needs. It should also provide a key reference point for internal evaluation and could be developed and published in formats adapted for use as a self-evaluation tool. An integrated quality framework of this sort should be designed in ways which promote continuous improvement, encouraging evaluative reflection which encourages settings to look beyond achieving minimum compliance and towards achieving increasing levels of excellence in quality.
A very active process of engagement and consultation with practitioners should be built into this development process for an integrated quality framework. A multi-agency group should provide strong leadership for the process, including a strong role for both Tusla EYI and the DE Inspectorate working in partnership with bodies who are experienced in providing improvement support, such as Better Start.
Co-ordinating inspection programmes
The OECD’s study of monitoring quality in ECEC (OECD, 2015[2]) found that where external inspection programmes exist, their frequency is not generally fixed by statute or otherwise. Rather a more flexible approach to the programming of inspections is becoming common, with a risk-based element to the selection of settings alongside a broad expectation of the maximum gap that should elapse between successive inspections. This means that, where a setting has been rated poorly in previous inspections, or where the inspectorate has intelligence to suggest that it may be having difficulties, it will be inspected sooner and/or more frequently. Settings which the inspectorate believes are performing well may be inspected less frequently, or experience less intensive inspection processes. This intelligence-led approach, sometimes known as proportionate inspection programming, is increasingly common among European school inspectorates (Maxwell and Staring, 2018[18]). It makes more efficient use of resources, applies support and pressure where it is most needed, and reduces burdens on providers that are already evaluating and improving their own performance effectively.
In the Irish system, Tusla uses a risk rating model to determine its schedule of inspections while delivering an overall commitment to ensure that every service is inspected at least once every three years. The risk rating incorporates different factors: inherent risks in the service; the provider’s record of compliance; the provider’s record of reliable processes and practices; and the provider’s record of addressing previous non-compliance and incidents received. The rating is used to target inspections to settings with high risk and to ensure a consistent national approach to prioritisation.
The DE Inspectorate is programming inspections on a somewhat longer time scale, aiming to inspect the ECCE-funded centres at least once on an approximately five-year basis (Frontier Economics, 2021[4]).
As the system is still in the relatively early stages of promoting the spread of a quality culture among ECEC providers, it makes sense for the inspection process to engage directly with all providers within a reasonable timescale. In the longer term, as the capacity to undertake self-evaluation and improvement planning becomes more strongly developed in the system, consideration should be given to moving even further in the direction of risk-based or proportionate programming of inspections. This means targeting providers for inspection more or less frequently depending on the level of risk which they present, judged from the analysis of intelligence gathered about them, as is already done by the Tusla EY Inspectorate.
The review team recognises that the further development of such an approach will take time given the highly variable capacity to engage with quality development currently evident across the sector. It will also be important that, even as inspections are skewed more strongly towards less effective services, the inspectorates continue to engage at some level with others in order to continue to promote further improvements in providers that have already reached high standards. The development of more risk-based and proportionate approaches to programming inspections will, in turn, rely on further developments in the gathering, analysis and sharing of data, as addressed later in this chapter.
Co-ordination of inspection programmes between Tusla and the DE Inspectorate is a challenge, as it is for other systems with two distinct inspectorates operating in parallel in the ECEC sector. The review team understood that the inspectorates took steps to share their planned programmes to avoid the undesirable scenario of two inspectors turning up from different inspectorates at the same or similar times, apparently unknown to each other. Continuing attention should be paid to ensuring proactive, systematic co-ordination of inspection programming between Tusla and the DE Inspectorate. Going forward, there may be benefit in arranging some joint inspections within the overall programme, providing an integrated experience for the setting and promoting exchange of expertise and collaborative practice between inspectors.
Parents and children should be more strongly engaged in quality processes
Systematic ways of tapping into the experience of stakeholders, especially the direct users of services, should be seen as a priority for development in the monitoring and quality assurance strategies for the Irish ECEC sector. The OECD’s Starting Strong III and Starting Strong VI reports identified family and community engagement as one of five key quality targets that can be leveraged for better child development in the ECEC sector (OECD, 2011[19]; OECD, 2021[1]). With regard to education quality strategies more generally, the European Commission’s Education and Training 2020 Working Group Schools’ report on quality assurance policies stresses the importance of stakeholder engagement in both self-evaluation and external inspection processes to ensure the experiences of users are taken into account, informing the judgements reached, and building public confidence and credibility for the processes themselves (European Commission, 2020[11]).
Engaging parents’ and children’s voices in inspection processes has some particular challenges in the ECEC sector. For example, the short duration of most inspections does not lend itself to the systematic survey approaches often adopted for longer school inspections. Eliciting the views of young children in ways which can feed effectively into evaluation processes is also clearly challenging. As a result, the Eurydice review of ECEC in Europe found that children’s voices were rarely heard during the evaluation process (European Commission/EACEA/Eurydice, 2019[3]).
In Ireland there is considerable scope to increase the engagement of both parents and children in inspection processes. At system level, some innovative steps are being taken to build children’s views into consultations about ECEC reform. Tusla has recently undertaken a systematic consultation with parents and stakeholders to gather their views on how their inspection approaches could be improved. However, the systematic exploration of the views of parents or children has not previously had a strong role in ECEC inspection processes. Having recognised a need to address this issue, both Tusla and the DE Inspectorate are actively exploring ways of better engaging both groups in future inspection models, having been tasked by the DCEDIY to do so. This development work includes consideration of the appropriate use of questionnaires, interviews, focus groups and other means (Frontier Economics, 2021[4]). From 2021, feedback from parents or guardians is now being proactively included in the Tusla inspection process. Parents and guardians can give their views on the service their child attends by completing a new parent/guardian feedback form.
Complaints provide another important way in which stakeholders, usually parents or other family members, can make their voice heard in the quality assurance process. Under current regulations, all registered providers are required to have a comprehensive complaints management process in place. If users of services remain unhappy after exhausting their local provider’s complaints processes, they can highlight their concerns to Tusla EYI, who treat such approaches as ‘unsolicited information’ which is analysed and used to inform inspection activity. In 2020, the Tusla EY Inspectorate received 253 pieces of ‘unsolicited information’ from stakeholders, 104 of them from parents. These are reviewed, risk assessed and a follow-up inspection is carried out as necessary. Stakeholder representatives interviewed by the review team were not confident, however, that users of services were widely aware of this process, how any such individual submissions of unsolicited information would be dealt with, and what action and feedback the complainant could expect as a result.
A more explicit and widely publicised national system of complaints could have a number of benefits including ensuring a more consistent flow of relevant intelligence into the monitoring and inspection process and increasing public confidence that concerns are being addressed robustly where they occur. It would ensure that the inspectorates are directly aware of patterns of concerns arising locally among service users. At present, there seems to be a perceived lack of clarity about processes for parents to escalate concerns about children’s health and safety or the quality of service delivery if they are not satisfied with the provider’s response.
Context
A third area which is worth consideration is how the outputs of monitoring and inspection activities are used and how data is deployed to support quality development in the system.
A comprehensive comparative review of evaluation and assessment in school education systems (Synergies for Better Learning) described the purposes of individual school evaluation in terms of two broad purposes which apply equally well to the evaluation of ECEC settings (OECD, 2013[10]). The first purpose is essentially to directly promote development in the individual setting being evaluated by identifying strengths and weaknesses in the individual setting and promoting action to secure improvement. The second purpose is to provide accountability and transparency by providing information to authorities and stakeholders on how well a service is performing. Both the developmental and accountability purposes are seen as important and needing to be kept in appropriate balance for the system to work effectively overall.
A third purpose can also be defined which extends beyond promoting development and accountability for individual services. That is providing a flow of evidence and feedback for policy makers on how well service provision is developing across the sector as a whole. Regular analysis of the patterns of outcomes emerging from inspection programmes, often combined with complementary analysis of other forms of data gathered about the system, can provide ministers and policy officials with valuable information on which to base policy decisions and where to focus national resources to best secure higher performance.
Ensuring effective action where services are falling short of expected standards
The developmental purpose of inspections is clear in the Irish ECEC system in a range of ways.
In the first instance, every inspection provides staff, leaders and managers within settings with an independent perspective on the setting’s strengths and weaknesses, drawing on wide experience of evaluating settings across the sector. Developing the style and methods of inspection in ways which encourage open professional dialogue throughout the course of inspections helps maximise effectiveness in delivering this developmental function.
In designing their approach for education-focused inspections, the DE Inspectorate have deliberately employed an ‘improvement-focused’ style of inspecting, reflecting the approach they have developed for school inspections. This was noted and appreciated by practitioners interviewed by the review team, as they had experienced it positively in practice.
Every Tusla inspection report identifies areas of compliance with regulatory requirements, as well as areas of non-compliance, identifying their potential impact or risk. Inspectors focus on correcting areas that are non-complaint with regulations and continue to support the provider to make the necessary improvements to resolve issues and prevent them from re-occurring.
The need for inspections to succeed in promoting development and secure improvements becomes increasingly urgent when settings are found to be persistently non-compliant and/or falling well short of expected standards.
The DE Inspectorate undertakes follow up inspections where it identifies serious weaknesses. Inspectors can direct services to sources of external support such as the Quality Development Service of Better Start, a dedicated agency established in Pobal for the coaching and mentoring of services although no direct route of referral has been established.
Tusla EYI undertakes follow up visits to services which it finds to be non-compliant with regulations. In such circumstances, services are required to submit a corrective and preventive action plan. Arrangements are in place which allow Tusla EYI to refer services directly to Better Start Quality Development Service for support, with the service’s consent, where potential for improvements in process quality has been identified.
In the case of continued breach of regulations, Tusla can ultimately remove services from the register although this only happens in a very small number of cases. According to Tusla’s summary report on ECEC inspections covering the period 2018 to 2019 (Tusla, 2021[20]), just over 30% of regulations assessed by inspectors were judged to be non-compliant. The most common regulation for which non-compliance was identified related to ‘safeguarding health, safety and welfare of child’. A subsequent review of outcomes from the regulatory enforcement process looked at 500 non-compliant regulations. It found that almost 86% of services found to be non-compliant on inspection were compliant at the end of the process (Tusla, 2021[21]).
The review team heard evidence that it has sometimes been difficult to address persistent quality concerns arising from some inspections and to enforce the necessary remedial action. There were some indications that ECEC centres can continue operating for some time despite repeatedly failing to address serious failings in their provision. The range of statutory options open to Tusla EYI to ensure providers take prompt action to address concerns, short of moving to the ultimate ‘end point’ stage of seeking de-registration, appear to be too limited.
Processes for intervening robustly in such cases should be reviewed and consideration should be given to how any obstacles to speedy and decisive action can be removed, including the benefits of introducing stronger intermediate steps in the statutory intervention options open to Tusla EYI. The goal should be to ensure a rapid response for effective action from ECEC providers in situations where they are falling seriously short of standards related to both structural and process quality.
Information about the quality of services should be made more readily accessible to stakeholders
The outcomes of Irish ECEC inspections are also deployed to serve an accountability function to some extent. The results of individual inspections undertaken by Tusla are available on their website. DE inspections are published on the Department for Education’s website. Stakeholders interviewed by the review team seemed to have limited knowledge about what information was available and where to find it.
Consideration should be given to increasing the transparency of evaluations and to making the results of inspections more accessible to the public. Using transparency as a driver for improving quality would appear particularly relevant in a heavily ‘market-based’ system of provision, as currently exists in the Irish ECEC sector. At present, it seems difficult for parents to access a clear and succinct analysis of the quality that the services in their area provide, having no access to a comprehensive resource that brings together all relevant evaluative judgements made by Tusla EYI and the DE Inspectorate where appropriate. In so far as parents are being provided with information derived from inspection processes to help them choose between competing providers, priority should be placed on ensuring that high quality is incentivised in their decision making process. That means making explicit the quality of curricular and pedagogical provision as well as levels of compliance with statutory regulations.
To improve access to all information available, consideration should be given to developing and publicising an integrated, easily accessible and user-friendly ‘parent portal’, which brings together the relevant information and evaluations about each ECEC provision (in line with the existing commitment in the First 5 strategy).
In due course, as regulation and inspection arrangements evolve further in areas like childminding, it should likewise be possible to give parents access to some information on standards and quality of those local service providers.
External support for quality improvement and capacity building is patchy and fragmented
Complementing the role of the inspectorates in providing independent evaluations and feedback on the quality of provision, a number of organisations in Ireland’s ECEC sector have developed services to provide ongoing support and guidance to providers on quality and improvement issues (Figure 3.1) (Frontier Economics, 2021[4]).
These kinds of services can serve at least two distinct functions in any quality system. One is a quite specific role in helping individual providers and their staff respond effectively to improvement needs identified by inspections. A second, broader function, not specifically related to inspection activities, is providing ECEC settings with guidance and coaching on developing and implementing self-evaluation and improvement strategies.
Ensuring providers have access to a strong support infrastructure, to complement and work alongside the inspection arrangements, is seen as an important strand of the overall quality strategy for the ECEC sector in Ireland. This will be especially important given the predominance of small and potentially isolated providers, the intention to bring a large number of previously unregulated home-based providers into the system, and the general need for the upskilling of practitioners and service managers and leaders in quality development as discussed in Chapter 2.
Some valuable sources of external improvement support are currently in place. For example, the Quality Development Service of Better Start, which was established within Pobal to provide support for DCEDIY-funded centres needing ‘hands-on’ guidance and support, provides an important source of active consultancy, including for centres seeking to address urgent development needs identified by Tusla EYI inspections. At a more local level, 30 City and County Childcare Committees (CCCs) receive national funding to provide local co-ordination and support for the ECEC sector in their areas and a number of National Voluntary Childcare Organisations (NVCOs) provide a source of guidance and relevant resources (Frontier Economics, 2021[4]).
Overall, however, beyond providing support to centres where an urgent need has been identified through inspection, access for providers to external guidance and support for improvement is limited and patchy overall. The capacity of the CCCs to provide such support appears to be variable, for example. Some are small and have very limited resources to deploy (also see Chapters 1 and 2). This lack of capacity will become even more critical if greater attention is to be given to supporting quality development and improvement in the childminding sector as well as centre-based provision. There is a need to consider ways for how to increase the capacity for providing such support, to ensure it is consistently accessible and of good quality for providers and practitioners across the country.
Developing a stronger and more coherent infrastructure for providing development support, which complements the inspection infrastructure, should be a priority for the next stages of national policy development. There should be a focus on maximising collaboration and exploiting fully the synergies between inspection activities and support activities, while ensuring that inspection teams have the operational independence to evaluate and report on their findings ‘without fear or favour’. This will require a major and potentially challenging programme of reform but the review team encountered broad acknowledgement of its importance and a keen desire to make progress in giving shape to the way forward and establishing a timescale for implementing it. Review of the existing arrangements falls within the remit of an oversight group looking at the ‘operating model’ for the ECEC sector, which is currently developing proposals for reform. The objectives of reform should include developing a more easily accessible ‘one-stop-shop’ approach to directing providers to all relevant guidance and sources of support relevant to them. The extent to which the existing CCCs, or perhaps larger organisational units bringing together resources for a larger area, could provide a stronger ‘middle layer’ in the quality assurance system merits exploration.
The review team were aware that a commitment to create a new national body, provisionally named ‘Childcare Ireland’ will be directly relevant to these considerations, especially if it is envisaged that this body is to serve a strong support and development function for services and practitioners, delivered down to a local level either directly or through local subsidiaries. The review team noted a strong desire in the system for further clarity about how the development of this overarching body will be taken forward, its role, functions and resourcing. This was reflected in the Children’s Rights Alliance’s ‘report card’ on the Government’s progress on the children’s agenda, which strongly urged faster progress in establishing the new body (Children’s Rights Alliance, 2021[22]). Defining the right role for the body is a complex process, however, and a carefully managed transition process will certainly be needed if, as expected, it involves major shifts of roles and responsibilities from other parts of the current system.
Analysis of data and evidence is playing a growing role but could be shared and combined more effectively to support the quality system
Well-designed arrangements for the gathering and analysis of data and evidence from across the sector should play an important role in a comprehensive quality assurance strategy. Such arrangements are playing an increasing role in the development of quality assurance approaches in education more generally (OECD, 2013[10]) and the important role they can play in quality assurance processes for the ECEC sector has also been highlighted (OECD, 2018[23]). This latter report argues that data and the outcomes of monitoring processes can play a key role in informing policy makers about patterns and trends in terms of the nature and characteristics of different provision and the extent to which equitable access is being achieved. They can also provide valuable evidence about strengths and weaknesses to inform judgements about where the system most needs to improve.
Data and evidence typically come in varying forms and from different sources. It includes quantitative statistical data on issues such as enrolments, hours of attendance and demographic characteristics of service users. It also includes data which is based on more qualitative professional judgements, sometimes codified through a pass/fail decision or rating scale, such as the outcomes of inspection processes. Data and evidence can also be generated by commissioning pieces of research to provide insight on issues which are not readily addressed by analysis of routinely generated data. All of these should be considered together to provide a holistic view of the characteristics and performance of the sector, addressing both structural and process quality in an integrated fashion.
In the Irish ECEC sector, there are a growing number of ways in which data and evidence from monitoring activities are being gathered and analysed to support quality assurance, with the different bodies engaged in inspection or regulation activities focusing on information relevant to their specific areas of interest.
Pobal collect a substantial amount of data on the sector nationally through its monitoring activities, focused on the ECEC centres funded by DCEDIY, notably through the National Childcare Scheme (NCS) and legacy schemes, such as the Community Childcare Subvention Plus (CCSP). With the introduction of the NCS, data systems used for the administration of schemes are transitioning from a Programmes Implementation Platform (PIP) to a new dedicated system, the Early Years Platform (EYP), which includes a parent and service provider portal (‘Hive’) (Pobal, 2021[24]). Analysis of patterns and trends in the development of provision and the workforce is undertaken and used to inform policy development.
Tusla collects a range of data on all registered provision through the registration process. They also have access to other significant forms of evidence relevant to the quality of providers in the form of ‘unsolicited information’ submissions from users. Tusla EYI and the DE Inspectorate both separately undertake systematic analysis of the results of their inspections, providing important sources of evidence to inform policy and practice. This includes more broadly focused analyses of patterns and trends in their inspection findings and more specific reports on particular aspects of provision, such as the composite reports on STEM education and digital learning in the education system as a whole, from ECEC to upper secondary, published by the DE Inspectorate.
More generally, a strong culture of using evidence and evaluating policies is apparent in the Irish ECEC context. This is evident, for example, in the use of research in the development and evaluation of the First 5 strategy, which includes a Research and Evaluation programme as well as a Trials programme to explore and evaluate innovative initiatives (Government of Ireland, 2020[25]), and research commissioned by the DCEDIY to develop a new funding model for the sector.
The inspectorates also have an increasing interest in using data and intelligence to help target their own activities appropriately. Ongoing access to continually updated, robust profiles, bringing together all available data and intelligence on each provider, will be a key asset as they continue to refine their approaches to using such intelligence to feed into risk-based and proportionate inspection programming.
Interviews undertaken by the review team indicated, however, that there was considerable scope for making more effective use of the various sources of data and intelligence now being collected in the quality assurance system. While valuable data appear to be gathered and analysed to varying extents by each of the bodies engaged in monitoring or inspection, there is a need to explore how data and intelligence can be shared more easily between the various national bodies involved (and potentially other organisations involved in quality support) and integrated in ways which could strengthen quality assurance arrangements and inform policy developments. The need for more effective data sharing agreements among the national bodies in ECEC policy and monitoring was also highlighted by Ireland’s Comptroller and Auditor General in a recent Annual Report (Office of the Comptroller and Auditor General, 2019[26]).
Possible options could involve the development of a shared ‘data lake’ or central data hub which integrates the data and intelligence from each of the bodies into a single coherent database. Each body could contribute data to the hub from its own activities and be able to access and draw from it as appropriate to their operational needs, with different levels of access taking appropriate account of data protection issues. Some data sharing protocols are in existence. These may need to be reviewed while others may need to be developed to form an integrated data management environment. There should also be consideration of access and use of data for other institutions, such as the City and County Childcare Committees (CCCs) or any future ‘middle layer’ bodies as decided in the review of the operating model. During its missions, the review team heard of concerns that with the change of IT systems for the administration of the NCS, the CCCs no longer had access to data on the services within their area, for example.
A shared ‘data lake’ approach could also enable rationalisation, ensuring that providers are not asked for the same data multiple times by different national bodies.
More effective arrangements for the pooling and integration of evidence from the inspection bodies could also have benefits by enabling a more integrated analysis of the performance of the system, covering both structural and process quality. This would strengthen the evidence base on which to base national policy decisions such as the targeting of staff development strategies through the identification of skills needs, the identification of priority areas for quality support or the targeting of differential funding allocations.
References
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[20] Tusla (2021), Report of Early Years Inspection Reports 2018-2019: Analysis and Trends, Tusla - Child & Family Agency, Dublin, https://www.tusla.ie/uploads/content/Early_Years_Inspection_Reports_2018_-_2019,_Analysis_and_Trends.pdf (accessed on 6 October 2021).
[21] Tusla (2021), Report of the Early Years Regulatory Enforcement Process: Outcomes, Tusla - Child & Family Agency, Dublin, https://www.tusla.ie/uploads/content/The_Early_Years_Regulatory_Enforcement_Process-_Outcomes_Final_02.02.2021.pdf (accessed on 6 October 2021).
[14] Tusla (2018), Early Years Quality and Regulatory Framework, https://www.tusla.ie/services/preschool-services/early-years-quality-and-regulatory-framework (accessed on 6 October 2021).