I thank the committee for the opportunity to say a few words. The brief of the committee is wide, covering jobs, social protection and education. Our brief is narrower in one sense but every bit as wide in another sense.
We believe strongly that the key to enterprise in Ireland and to ensuring that people do not need social protection, except for during short periods, is education. We work in 40 locations in Ireland, mainly with children who are not getting the start in life we would all want our children to get. The main reason for that is economic. Our experience demonstrates that a child born into circumstances of poverty has a hill to climb to make it in life. For a child born into poverty in a dysfunctional family situation, and dysfunction is not a word I use to blame families, it can arise for a variety of reasons, the hill becomes Kilimanjaro. For a child born in poverty in a dysfunctional family in a disadvantaged community, Kilimanjaro becomes Everest.
The key to climbing Everest is education. The key to a good education for children whose lives are blighted by disadvantage is a good start. Our emphasis is on early years education. With all the children we work with, we use a curriculum known as the High/Scope curriculum that was developed in the US and tested over many years in longitudinal studies and in other ways. It provides children born into disadvantage with the skills and confidence to make it in education. We have invested heavily in recent years in adding components to the curriculum to increase the level of sociability and emotional well-being of the children we work with. We want all of our kids to start school with the skills, confidence and resilience to make it. We track our kids through school and try to be there to support them at the difficult moments of transition.
Like many other NGOs working in the field, we would suggest that the link between good early education and school completion is profound. The child who starts well will finish better. The link between poor school completion and continuing lifelong social disadvantage, anti-social behaviour, gang behaviour and criminality is also profound. Mr. John Lonergan, who is a member of our board and a former governor of Mountjoy Prison, would tell the committee that over many years as governor, the thing that made him despair was that the population of the prison was made up to a considerable extent of people who did not get a good start in education at two or three years of age. We argue the investment in education is the most important investment the State makes and that the cutbacks in education are disastrous, not just for the children who are affected by them but ultimately for the State.
The cutbacks in resource teachers, special needs assistants, language support teachers and visiting teachers for Travellers have all exacerbated the situation of children struggling in education. They do not have any great effect on children who are already well equipped but those are not the children we must worry about. We strongly urge Parliament and the Government to take seriously the task of investing in education, particularly at these levels and for children who are struggling in education. Apart from the social consequences and justice issues involved in depriving children of a decent start in education, it is a ticking time bomb. Every child who leaves school early is a child at risk and society is at risk from that child. We create that risk day in and day out, particularly when we cut back on resources that struggling children need and we are saving almost nothing. The cutbacks that have been made in resource teaching and language support save petty cash. The social and economic consequences of those cutbacks are a multiple of that.
Because we are involved with children and education, particularly at moments of transition, in recent years we have focused heavily on the cost of starting education and making the transition from first to second level. For the last five years, we have published an annual survey of those costs and demonstrated that the costs of starting a child in education and making the transition from first to second level are escalating year after year. This year, for the first time, we have generated not just public and media reaction but engagement at Government level, which is extremely welcome. We worked with Ministers on a range of ideas to improve the situation for children and families starting school. It would be our hope that by continuing that work, we will arrive at a point next year when the costs of school books and clothing will be influenced in a downward direction by Government policy and we welcome that. I would urge this committee to keep an eye on that, particularly on school costs when children are starting and when they are making the transition, and to keep up the pressure on Government to ensure things like the agreement with school book publishers and other initiatives are followed through.
Our experience suggests that the two most important gifts that a decent start in education can give to children who are challenged in a variety of ways by the circumstances are literacy and numeracy. We greatly welcome the Government's emphasis on literacy and numeracy. It is one of the great scandals that for more than 30 years, for as long as the figures have been gathered, the one statistic that has never changed has been the number of children from disadvantaged communities in Ireland who leave school, unable to read or write. In 1970, that statistic was one third of all children from disadvantaged communities, today it is still, more or less, a third of all children from disadvantaged communities, who leave school unable to read or write. It is extremely welcome that we are placing a new emphasis on literacy and numeracy, but it must be backed up by resources. It is simply not possible to deliver on literacy and numeracy, while at the same time stripping supports out of the system. We have a view that bodies such as the National Education Welfare Board, NEWB, the National Educational Psychological Service, NEPS, and other bodies which are critically important in the educational system, have become increasingly marginalised and are not regarded as part of the core function of the Department of Education and Skills. It is an exaggeration to say that the NEWB and NEPS in particular have been privatised but they have been cut a drift from the core work of the Department. We believe that must change. We have always felt that it was quite bizarre that the remit of the NEWB begins when children are six years old. Children are at the single most developmental point of their lives from four years when they are in preschool or starting their primary education. Children in the four to five year age cohort should be a key target of the work of the NEWB because if they are missing school at that age, the outlook for them individually is very bad. Children who miss substantial periods of school early on are almost doomed to fail in the education system. That is entirely preventable.
In broader terms we want to see children supported through education and families supported in particular, around the costs of education. We have consistently called for a national school book rental scheme. We have argued before a different committee of the Oireachtas that there should be no further cuts in child benefit. If there are to be further cuts in child benefit, they must be done in a much more sophisticated way than has been the case in the past, particularly at the time children are starting school, when there is hardly a family that does not require support. The crude cuts of recent years, which were not adequately compensated for in terms of families on low income, have exacerbated the problems of many families. At the same time, it is inarguable that changes need to be made in the management of things such as the back to school clothing and footwear allowance. We only discovered quite recently, for example, that allowance is available to children of two years of age. It does not make any sense that at a time when you cannot afford to support families whose children are going to school, the allowance is still being paid out to the parents of two year old children, who are not going to school and are not in preschool education. I think it is possible to reform this provision.
The essence of our message is that we must, as an economy, never mind as a society, support children to get a good start in education. We know that the experiments that have taken place in initially supporting parents around the cost of child care and the much better idea, in our view, of a free preschool year is under pressure. It would be a complete scandal, if the Government were, in the context of budgetary pressures, to abandon the free preschool year. We want to see it extended and driven by standards. At present the free preschool year is delivered to three year old children through a grant system that is paid out to in excess of 2,500 providers. It is not delivered through the education system. In fact the Department of Education and Skills appears to have little or nothing to do with it. It is delivered by the Department of Children and Youth Affairs through a mix of private and community providers. We do not have a major problem with that but with the fact there are no standards, no curriculum and as a consequence, the standard of the preschool year is variable from one provider to the next. The vast majority do their best and are very good, but there is no value to a preschool year if it is not educational. One of the expressions you often hear in this field is that there should be no care without education and there should be no education without care. It is horrifying to discover that even though there is a framework of standards known as Síolta, of the more than 2,500 providers in the field, less than 300 operate the existing framework of standards. They have been given little or no assistance in rolling that out.
I have come to the end of my presentation but Ms Tinsley may wish to comment. I am more than happy to answer questions.
