We had an assurance from the Minister in his speech that the Task Force on Child Care is adequately staffed. I will take this opportunity of asking him to have another look at the staffing and see whether an extra staff member or two might make the necessary difference to produce the report before the end of the year.
Section 1.2 of the motion urges the establishment of a Child Care Development Unit in the Department of Health. The reason for this is also related to the impending report and the legislation which will be based on the report. Sections 1.2 and 1.3 in a sense go together because they call for structural change in the administration of services for child care which would have an on-going effect. The task force will report—we do not know what its report will be like—and the legislation will be drafted and introduced, but we do not know what the legislation will be like. The task force report will be published and the legislation will be passed, but unless there is a continuous and specific input into the whole area of child care by way of review, the danger is that the impetus which child care will have got from the Year of the Child will have been decimated.
The motion envisages basically two mechanisms. One is the Child Care Development Unit within the Department of Health and the second is the National Council for Child Care Services outside the Department. We do not see these two mechanisms as being in any sense hostile to each other We see them in a fundamental sense as being complementary to each other. The need for a development unit within the Department is fairly clear. There is—and this is not by any means a criticism of any of the hard-working public servants in that Department—a shortage of professional expertise in the area of child care. I believe there is only one specific child care adviser in the Department of Health at the moment and one child care adviser in the Department of Education. It is better to have one than none, but we want more than that. We want a development unit inside the Department of Health.
The Minister will remember that one of the most fundamental and successful developments in the field of education in recent years was the creation of a development unit inside the Department of Education and the creation of that unit was the sole recommendation of the OECD study on Investment in Education. Many of the better ideas for the development of our educational system sprang at that time from the development unit which was therein established.
We must have something permanent and substantial, something that will carry weight in the internal councils of the Department of Health. Outside the Department we need a watchdog. We need an organisation like the National Council for Child Care Services which will have various rights. I said I did not see it as being hostile to the Department. I would envisage such a council having among its membership public servants as well as people from the world of child care and public figures outside the Department, but it should be independent and be seen to be independent. It should act as a consultative body to the Minister for Health and should have the right to publish reports, presumably on an annual basis, in order to determine what lines of development action might take in the future.
At the moment, for example, there is very little informed criticism of what the health boards are doing in the area of child care. We have our suspicions here and there that feet are being dragged, but we do not really know. A body like the National Council for Child Care Services would have as a major priority the monitoring of activity in the child care area in the health boards, would be able to take almost a quasi-supervisory function off the Minister's shoulders and would be able to advise him on the effectiveness of individual health boards in administering child care services and on the effectiveness of different methods of child care that may be adopted by different health boards.
Better than that would be the action by such a national council in proposing a five-year plan for the development of child care services. The Minister for Health in his intervention suggested that he was somewhat suspicious of the call for a National Council for Child Care Services because it might be based on the idea that children were in some sense different and separate. He preferred to see child care in the overall context of community care and family care. With respect we must differ from him on this because the critical thing about children is that they have nobody to speak for them. They do not have votes. They do not have advocates in our society. We tend to talk a lot about them and use a lot of rhetoric about them. Everybody is in favour of child care but there is no public organisation as such, like the National Council for Child Care Services, which would put the welfare of children first and which would act as their advocate both in public and in a consultative forum with the Minister for Health. This is why we endorse the CARE proposal that such a national council should be established and should report to the Minister on the operation and development of all child care services.
Section 1.4 deals with two particular issues which it suggests should receive priority. The first is that of foster parents. As Deputy E. Desmond pointed out last night, there are about 2,500 children in public care at the moment, and a large proportion of them are in residential care. These are mostly legitimate children who, for one reason or another, have been taken into care. They cannot be legally adopted but they can be legally fostered. Last night the Minister for Health gave us whatever assurance he was able to give that health boards, whose responsibility the promotion of fostering is, were doing all that needed to be done in this area; but we would have needed more evidence than he gave us to be absolutely certain that this is the case.
The whole tradition of fosterage is something that has a very honourable and ancient background in Ireland, yet there are still 2,500 of these children in public care. Obviously, some children come into public care and others leave; we are not talking about the same 2,500 children all the time. If there was any really satisfactory attempt to get a positive system or network off the ground we should see the over-all number of such children reducing by at least 100 or 150 a year. Obviously, there will have to be always some children in public care, but we should be trying to reduce that number of children to the bare minimum.
Money and staff need to be allocated if necessary to the health boards in order to promote a greater public awareness of fostering. It is a very labour-intensive job, but there are few things on which money could be better spent than in helping to provide for the welfare of children who are at present in residential care. A distinction is sometimes made and sometimes accepted by the public between productive and non-productive employment in the public sector. It is often assumed that employees of the State who do not actually make things are in some sense non-productive. Here we are talking about productivity in terms of human happiness which cannot be measured in terms of GNP; it cannot be counted or bought. This is an area in which the spending of public money can in no way be regarded as non-productive.
The second part of section 1.4 of the motion refers to the review of the staffing and financing of residential child care facilities. A couple of points can be made on this which are so obvious that they have not been noticed. For example, it is a sad fact that there are very few male staff engaged in residential child care. When you think of the implications of that for the growth and maturity of the children in residential child care facilities, many of them at very impressionable ages, we really must wonder. We are well aware that in the society in which we are living there is a move away from the sharp differentiation of sex roles, certainly in relation to marriage, and indeed, in the rearing of children. I am not saying that the children in these homes are not getting the best care they can possibly get from the people recruited into and working in those homes. However, in so far as children normally have two parents, one of each sex, and in so far as this is part of the normal pattern which any child has a right to expect, the lack of adequate numbers of men in residential child care poses very serious potential problems for the personal development of these children.
I suspect that one of the reasons why so few men are employed in the residential child care area is that the staffing, the pay and the promotion prospects in these institutions are extremely poor. It is almost axiomatic at this time that men tend to gravitate towards jobs that are better paid and have better promotion prospects. If the pay and promotion prospects are not good, men will tend to look elsewhere and women will generally be left to take up the jobs available. I am not aware of any over-all standard of remuneration for staff in residential child care facilities. The owners and managers of these institutions have to make whatever money they have go as far as possible, and so they are greatly tempted, especially at a time when many of them, who, of course, are religious orders, are suffering from a decline in vocations, to employ relatively young and relatively inexperienced people because such people are comparatively cheap to employ. We must look at this seriously if we are to tackle the problem of providing an appropriate level of experience and a reasonable balance between the sexes involved in child care. We will not do that unless we look at the pay and promotion prospects.
One aspect of the pay and promotion problem is that the employees are paid by the institutions which are largely in private hands, many of them in church hands. Could the Government investigate the possibility of setting up a system such as exists for primary and secondary schools? I am not totally in favour of the recruitment methods in either of these kinds of institution, but the framework under which people are employed in them is that they are hired—and if necessary fired—and generally controlled by the private body who own the school but are paid directly by the Department of Education on a national salary scale with nationally agreed promotional prospects. Surely something of the same kind could be worked out for our residential child care facilities. If this could be done we would see a very substantial and perhaps even a very rapid improvement in the over-all quality of child care.
Of course it would cost money. Not all the best things in life are free but when we think in terms of our priorities we would be well advised to put our money into this kind of area. At the moment most of these residential child care facilities are financed on a capitation grant basis. The capitation grant is barely adequate; so much so that it is part of the financial logic of the situation that these institutions have to keep themselves full to the doors in order to be able to break even every year. It may well happen that one institution or another may have a proportion very much higher than average of very difficult or troublesome children who need a rather higher degree of care and more individual attention than can be provided in an institution which is absolutely full to the doors. Yet the financial logic of the situation compels them to take in children until they have every place filled, otherwise they cannot afford to keep their financial heads above water. We should be looking at the question of differential financing if necessary for areas of child care which are in special need rather than at the flat rate capitation basis. This raises an administrative hornets' nest, but the alternative of simply maintaining the capitation grants on a flat rate basis at a level which forces institutions to remain crammed to the doors is going to deprive some children of some of the dedicated help which they need. At the moment those institutions which are least imaginative in a sense get the best value out of the resources made available to them and out of the existing system.
In relation to section 1.5 I do not propose to go into much detail because Deputy Mrs. Desmond referred at some length to it last night. I can only make a plea for some sort of national monitoring system in the whole area of pre-school child care. At the moment we are part of a society in which more and more mothers, either by choice or by necessity, are taking up paid employment outside the home. The natural consequence is that there has been a sharp growth in the need for child care facilities, most of which are provided privately. There is absolutely no control over them. The Irish Pre-School Playgroups Association, a responsible body, time and time again have called for the introduction of national guidelines. I believe such guidelines are essential if we are not to run the risk of opening the door again to the baby farmers, threatening the possible future well-being, and the emotional and personal development of very small children by a haphazard approach while their mothers are out at work.
It is a relatively small thing to ask. There would be some administrative cost involved in the monitoring of such a system, but at this point we are not even asking for total State provision for such a service. We are asking for only the bare minimum by the State in its responsibility to all the children of the nation—that the State should at least go some length to ensure that whatever services are provided, whether by public or by private agencies, will match up to certain basic standards.
Paragraph 1.6 of the motion asks for:
the expansion of opportunities for preservice and in-service training and support for non-residential social workers and residential care staff working in the area of child care.
This is part of a general educational aspect of the problem on which I should like to spend a few minutes. At the moment there are a couple of courses for non-residential child care workers. The Minister for Health last night said he is to make money available for a three-day residential course for such workers. The main courses at the moment are held at Kilkenny, Cathal Brugha Street in Dublin and in the Regional Technical College in Sligo. I suspect that there are not enough courses and that there is a need for some kind of overview of what is happening in these institutions in the area of training for child care. This would be important in any case but it is particularly important now when the foundations of the child care system for the next two or three decades are being laid. It is now that the people who will not only be the child care officers in the future but who will manage and administer the child care system are being trained, and it is the quality, the depth and the relevance of their training now that will determine how flexible and adequate the child care system will be to respond to the needs of the children whom it will be serving.
We need some form of closer liaison between the Departments of Education and Health in relation both to the initial provisions of these courses, their monitoring and co-ordination. We also need the provision of more advanced courses. Child care is a science as well as an art, and it is extremely important that any advances in it should be, wherever possible, built into our educational programme for the future generation of child care workers. This means there is a need not just for the basic course but for advanced courses of specialisation and so on. I do not know if we have any advanced courses at the moment. The immediate priority is our basic primary courses but we must not lose sight of the need for advanced courses.
Paragraph 2 of the motion calls on the Minister for Education first of all to reduce the size of infant classes in national schools. Under successive Ministers for Education the average size of classes in national schools has been decreasing slowly. Less successful has been the attempt to limit the maximum number of children who may be in individual classes, and least successful of all has been the attempt to reduce overcrowding in infant classes.
There is something seriously wrong with a system in which overcrowding, where it appears, tends to happen where it does most psychological and educational damage. We accept that we cannot overnight reduce all primary school classes in the country to 25, or even to 30, as an absolute maximum average, even though the average now is just less than 30, including many of the small rural schools. Many classes are substantially bigger than the average.
The tragedy is that so many of the bigger classes are congregated at the bottom end of the school, in junior and senior infants and in first class. We must remember that a junior infant is four years of age. He is going into school for the first time, he is leaving home for the first time, which is perhaps even more important. Even in the best of circumstances such an experience is likely to have a potential for trauma. Yet the inexorable ghastly logic of the system we are operating at the moment is that such a child is far more likely to be in a large class in his first day in school than at any subsequent time in his school career.
Surely something could be done, even administratively, to ensure that the burden of large classes will be spread more evenly throughout individual schools and that a particular priority can be given to children in the infant classes. That will be their first experience in school and we all know that for many children unhappily school becomes something of a prison sentence. Therefore we much ask ourselves if this is so simply because their first experience of school has been so unsatisfactory. It is inevitable that a child's total experience of school will be coloured by his initial experience, and that is why it is so essential to reduce the size of infant classes in particular. The other main reason why this should be done is that damage done at this age is far more difficult to repair just as its corollary the good which is done at this age is easier and cheaper to achieve and more lasting in its effect.
Paragraph 2.2 of the motion calls for the extension of the Schools Psychological Services to cover all primary schools. It is sad that the psychological services seem to be located for all effective purposes in the post-primary area because the logic of human development is that it is easier, cheaper and ten times more effective to engage in preventive measures than in curative measures. It applies in medicine, in psychology and in almost every other area. Instead of spending tens of thousands of pounds on a psychological service for primary school children, we are spending hundreds of thousands of pounds, millions perhaps ultimately, trying to patch up the personal and social problems which are created by the absence of such a service at primary level. Instead of paying for psychologists in the primary schools, we are paying for hard-pressed guidance teachers at second level. We are paying for probation officers, garda and all sorts of other people, whose sad duty it is to try to contain the results of not having had enough preventive money spent earlier on in the system.
Section 2.3 of the motion talks about the expansion of the free school meals service and the free books scheme. The Minister for Health spoke about the free school meals service and said he had a report completed on this service and that it revealed that there were substantial anomalies in it—which, of course, we all know—but that the implications of providing an adequate school meals service in budgetary terms are very substantial. I do not think that will be news to anybody in this House, but we have to look at it seriously.
The Minister posed the question: if you have X amount of money to spend, is it the right thing to do to spend it on a school meals service, or to spend it on some other aspect of family or community care? Of course, that is a question which ultimately he has to answer himself. What I would urge the Minister to do—and what I think should be done more often in our society—is to publish and let us see this report; let us have the benefit of the expert advice he has had. Too many Ministers—and I am not criticising this Government in particular—believe they have to act like gods on Olympus whose decisions reach the public fully formed, and the public have to either accept or reject these decisions without knowing in any detail at all, or even in the broadest outlines, what kind of advice the Minister has had in relation to the decisions he has made.
It would be very positive and of considerable assistance to the development of a public debate on our priorities in educational spending if the Minister were to publish this report. It would not commit him to making a decision on it, but it would make available to a wider public the fruits of publicly funded and I have no doubt very relevant research.
In the area of school meals in particular it is true that this is one of the areas in which we are sometimes asking schools to make good deficiencies which exist in society at large. There is a certain temptation to make schools the scapegoat for all the ills of society, to try to pin the blame for society on schools, to try to pin the job of solving society's problems on the schools. The schools cannot do all of this, but they can help. It is absolutely inescapable that the benefits of education—and they could be debated in their own right—are only indifferently available to children who are undernourished.
We talk about school meals and school dinners at a time when, perhaps, we ought to be talking about school breakfasts. One of the hidden statistics of misery of our time is how many children come to school every morning without anything in their stomachs. Then we complain about rowdyism in the classroom, about vandalism, inattention and all the problems with which many of our very dedicated teachers have to cope. They cannot cope with children who are undernourished and who, because they are undernourished, are listless, uninvolved, or disaffected with the whole educational process.
We must have a school meals scheme which has been updated and has had some of its anomalies removed. It is absurd to think that because of the present operation of the school meals system not one child in the whole of the Tallaght area is entitled to a free school meal. We can make changes here. We should be thinking in terms of improvement. If the Minister cannot in conscience see his way to spending all the money the report which we have not seen might urge that he should spend on improving the system, he can at least make some improvement because the situation as it exists simply is not good enough.
The same is true of the free school books scheme. Of course, it is not a free school books scheme. The number of children in any school who get totally free school books at primary or post-primary level could be counted on the fingers of one hand, I believe. At best, they get a small grant covering one-quarter or one-third of the total cost of school books, and this for the neediest of children. At the very least the Department of Education should be considering the possibility of a buy and lease system for school books.
For the capitalised cost of three years at post-primary level of the annual allocation of money for the free school books scheme it might be possible for post-primary schools to buy all the books they need for their children and lease them out, and make sure they are returned at the end of the year. Of course there would be wastage. Books would be lost, or burned, or defaced, or whatever, but the annual topping up cost thereafter of keeping such a scheme going would be ten times less, I dare say 100 times less, than the present ineffective, impartial and discriminatory scheme.
The Minister for Justice spoke about Loughan House. He gave the impression of a victorious general retreating from the battlefield. He almost went so far as to imply that all the critics of Loughan House had now been silenced by the manifest success of this experiment. I beg to differ from him on this. It is undeniably true that there was a need for a secure place for child offenders, but providing a secure place for child offenders must be seen in the context of overall child care provision. When you look at what has happened, you have to scratch your head and ask yourself: where are the Government's priorities now?
There are approximately 80 staff in Loughan House. From the Minister's point of view, this is an advertisement for the excellence of the institution. It has the best inmate-staff ratio of any institution in the country. What better evidence can there be that he is caring for these 20 or so children? That is fair enough as far as it goes, but look at the little distance it goes. The essential political point is not to take pride in the fact that there are 80 staff for the 20 troublesome boys in Loughan House, but one of shame that there are only the same number of social workers in the entire Eastern Health Board area. There are probably only the same number of probation officers in the entire country. That is what I mean when I talk about our scale of priorities having been totally turned upside down.
We will be looking at the sums at the end of the year. If those sums show, as I suspect they will, that the annual cost of keeping a child at Loughan House may run into five figures, we will have to look at the situation and ask ourselves how crazy have our priorities come. The Minister spoke also of the in-service and pre-service training of gardaí. This comes under section 3.2 of the motion. What he said was unexceptional, but there was a real lack of any hard evidence that the kind of effort needed is being made to transform the work of the gardaí with young people into an effective and positive social instrument. At the very least there should be a youth section in each Garda division and not a section staffed by the youngest and least experienced members of the force. Child care is too important to be left to the young, especially to those members of the force who, with the best will in the world and the best intentions in the world, are comparatively young and comparatively inexperienced.
