I thank the committee for inviting us. I wish to express our warm appreciation to the public representatives of our constituency in Tallaght west, Deputy Seán Crowe, the Minister of State, Deputy Conor Lenihan, Deputy Pat Rabbitte, Deputy Charlie O'Connor and Senator Brian Hayes, all of whom worked both individually and collectively to support the planning and investment for the childhood development initiative.
The area of Tallaght west comprises the four communities of Brookfield, Fettercairn, Killinarden and Jobstown and has a population of 22,000 with 7,000 children under 15 years and 2,000 children between the ages of three and five. It is a RAPID region but a region with a rich community life and a strong history of partnerships between the statutory, voluntary and community agencies. The presentation includes some photographs of the children of the area.
I wish to talk about the area in the terms of a story. The first part of the story is that the idea began in An Cosán which is a community development organisation in west Tallaght. That idea was a response to some changes in the direction of a philanthropy that had been working in the country for a number of years, Atlantic Philanthropies. It was changing its strategic direction and made a decision to invest in the area of children and youth, particularly in disadvantaged areas. Some of the ideas led to the formation of the CDI. In 2004, Atlantic Philanthropies supported us to bring together a consortium of 23 members representing community leaders and leaders from the schools, the HSE, the Tallaght Partnership, South Dublin County Council, and voluntary sectors in west Tallaght.
We decided to plan for better health and education outcomes for our children and also support for their families. This represented a new opportunity for us to work together in a new way. We were given resources to plan in a long-term way with some international experts in children's services, with community leaders and statutory providers. We worked closely with politicians in our constituency. We were in and out of the offices of Deputy Crowe and many others, including Ministers, in particular the Minister of State with responsibility for children whom we informed about our plans. We developed a ten-year strategy and did different things over a year and a half to develop this strategy. At the heart of the strategy was engaging the community of residents and workers within the west Tallaght area and inviting them to be interested in looking for a new way to bring about change in the community. We worked with the consortium and with a number of smaller working groups, with all the principals of the area, the regional managers of education, health, welfare and the Garda Síochána. We were particularly focused on identifying the outcomes we wanted for our children. Through analysis of the research, we identified that we wanted to improve their health, learning and achieving, their sense of safety in the community and encourage their deepening and a sense of belonging. Based on needs analysis we looked at how what we were doing would fit with policies that had been developed or were being developed. We also constantly reviewed scientific evidence and proven models in Ireland and other places to ascertain what we could do better in order to bring about those outcomes for our children.
In 2005 we brought all the results of that work together into a strategy which we called "a place for children at Tallaght west" which represented our hopes and ambition for the work we wanted to do. The Taoiseach launched the initiative and we were supported by South Dublin County Council in preparing for the launch. More than 1,300 people from the community and beyond attended the launch.
The strategy identified the outcomes we wanted for our children, the activities we felt produce those outcomes, the investment required and evaluation plans integral to the strategy. The evaluation was key. From the beginning we were committed to measuring the change we anticipated. The strategy represented a collaborative effort. All of us working on it have worked together in the community. We thought it represented a new way of working in an inter-agency capacity that was rooted in the community, incorporating its analysis of its needs, hopes and expectations. That was the first part of the story.
Shortly after that, at the end of 2005 the Office of the Minister for Children was established to bring greater coherence to policy making and overseeing the implementation of those policies for children in education, health, family welfare and justice. In the context of that office, Atlantic Philanthropies and the Government agreed to establish the prevention and early intervention programme, which is mentioned in the Towards 2016 partnership agreement under the life cycle framework for children, showing interest by Government and other partners to engage in some innovative measures to support new and better ways to implement services that work for children.
In 2006 the Office of the Minister for Children made a call for proposals to apply to the programme. In 2006 we entered a second phase of planning on that broader ten-year framework to develop more specific proposals and accurate costings of what we wanted to do in the first five years. We established a steering committee, chaired by the South Dublin county manager, Joe Horan, comprising representatives of our consortium and regional statutory managers from the Department of Health and Children and other Departments to oversee the development of the investment proposal. We were linking into both the local authority and the regional structures in Departments in a new way.
At the end of 2006 we completed our proposal and submitted it. It was assessed in many ways and we received an indication of an investment of €15 million for CDI. Funding was also granted for the other two proposals, "youngballymun" which received €15 million and a smaller programme in the northside, "preparing for life". Those were the three projects invited to present proposals in the context of this fund.
We are always focused on delivering outcomes and in the first five years we have a number of activities and new services we have been developing following a scientific process engaging community service providers and others. We want to introduce a two-year pre-school prevention programme to strengthen children's dispositions to learning so they are more prepared for the transition to school. It will incorporate family support over the course of these years. We hope that approximately 240 children aged three and four in sites in each of the four communities in west Tallaght will go through the programme. We will also introduce an after-school programme to improve children's literacy. Again we are developing that with members of the community, child experts and people in St. Patrick's College in Drumcondra. We hope 315 children aged five and six will go through this one-year programme. We are developing an after-school programme to support children's social behaviour for another 315 children aged eight and nine. The after-school programmes will happen in the context of the schools and all the principals in the area are actively involved.
In conjunction with the HSE we are developing a "healthy school" programme. We hope to bring a health professional, probably a public health nurse, into two of the primary schools to work in health promotion and to provide some school-based clinical services that would be closely linked to the newly emerging primary care teams. The first set of activities were targeted at children and families. We are also focused on improving the safety and the built environment in west Tallaght. We are embarking on a community safety initiative, which will be community-led and will have a participatory approach to develop and implement what we are calling a "community safety contract". We are working closely with the Garda Síochána, South Dublin County Council and community leaders to develop that. South Dublin County Council is also leading an activity to create a more child-centred and family-centred environment.
We will work with existing service providers to support quality delivery. We are also working with regional managers in health, education and family affairs, coming together in an integrated services forum to review how we are developing and implementing services in a more integrated fashion with all the key players. As I said earlier, evaluation is a key aspect of our overall work. We are making plans now for the rigorous evaluation of the programme as a whole as well as the individual services and activities we implement and our ability to integrate service provision. That is a brief overview of the number of activities we will have, and children and families we hope to reach in the first five years.
Focusing on delivering outcomes we have developed a newish model of governance which links closely at a national level with the Office of the Minister for Children and at local and regional level with the local authority. We also work closely with service providers, parents and children on the ground. We have a board and have established an independent non-profit agency — a small company — to support the implementation of this initiative. Members of the board will be experts in the areas in which we hope to deliver. The board is overseen by and has a reporting relationship to the Office of the Minister for Children, involving the monitoring of progress. We also report regularly to Atlantic Philanthropies. We will also be linked into county governance.
As part of Towards 2016 and in the context of reviewing and supporting developments in the area of children, all local authorities will eventually establish children's committees. Our area will be one of the first to pilot that scheme. It will be chaired by the HSE and will being together all the key regional statutory players to support this initiative and the co-ordination and integration of other initiatives and all services focused on children. We also have a forum of people from the community — service providers, parents and children — that will feed into the overall governance.
I will conclude with the vision we have been trying to develop and some of the implications we hope will follow having done this type of planning and worked with all these constituencies — community, government and philanthropy. We have been trying to develop a model of partnership involving communities, philanthropic organisations and the Government and also local, regional and national stakeholders. Moreover, we have been developing a model of innovation, collaboration and inter-agency work as we devise a strategy and service developments for children and families. We hope that, through our rigorous measurement and evaluation of the processes and outcomes, engaging both national and international experts, we will demonstrate that our services and programmes work. Learning from these programmes will be mainstreamed at national level because we will be demonstrating ways of working that have been measured, tested and monitored to produce results.