The Government is sinking millions of euro into expanding childcare - butare bright rooms filled with toys really what children need in those crucialpreschool years? Childcare must be more than 'minding', experts will tell a conference tomorrow, writes Sylvia Thompson
You know the scenario. You've finally found a place in a crèche for your baby or a play school for your toddler after a long and tiring search. You bring your child along, and he/she settles in reasonably well. There are tears as you leave, but the staff assure you that this is par for the course, and you are, after all, in a rush to get to work on time.
As time goes on, you have some niggling doubts about the way the place is run or, more bluntly, how the staff interact with your child. But, you put these thoughts into the back of your mind and sooner than you realise your little baby grows into a child ready to start school.
Research now shows that these early childhood years are the most important in terms of a child's emotional, social and intellectual development. The learning curve is steepest in the first 12 months and from age one to three, children continue to learn at an incredibly fast rate. Yet, in Ireland, these are the years that many families muddle through, so exhausted are they by the combined demands of work and home life.
Recognising the shortage of childcare places (and keen to keep both parents in employment), the Government allocated €436 million to be used for childcare in the lifetime of the current National Development Plan (2000 - 2006). But what's the use of having more and more crèches and nursery schools for our children if what happens within them is of little or no benefit to their emotional, social and intellectual development? Can we expect a future generation of well-adjusted adults if their early childhood years are spent sitting bored in gaudily painted rooms full of toys which never vary, surrounded by adults who see to their physical needs but ignore the rest?
"Do You Know Me? - Quality in early childhood education from the child's perspective" is the title of a conference in Dublin Castle tomorrow, organised by the Irish Preschool and Playgroup Association (IPPA). Irene Gunning, director of training at the IPPA, is adamant that it is vital to address quality as well as quantity when it comes to childcare. And, by quality, she doesn't just mean clean playrooms filled with new toys and the sweet smell of home-cooked meals, she means quality relationships between the adult childcare workers and children in their care.
"In childcare, you have to get to know the individual child. You have to be interactive and watchful and follow their leads as a way of being with them and supporting them. We have to ask the questions - are we thinking enough about the child? Are we making assumptions about what they like, want and need?" argues Gunning.
Christine Pascal, professor of early childhood education at the University of Worcester, England, who will speak at the conference, agrees that there is no use in expanding the number of childcare places if the quality of the service is not uppermost in our minds. "In the US, the childcare issue was market driven and the quality was poor, which was found to be detrimental to children. There, studies have even shown that every dollar spent in preschool years meant a saving of seven or eight dollars dealing with problems later in the education system.
"In Britain, we were finding that children were going through the system disaffected, socially excluded, cynical and disillusioned. There has also been an increase in the amount of mental health problems in young children who suffer behavioural and emotional difficulties which are symptomatic of not feeling strong attachments," continues Pascal.
"If you think that we are trying to create good citizens for the future - and an individual's first experience of a group is in childcare and education - if you don't allow them to participate in decision-making at this stage, you take power away from them and they learn how to be passive. A disempowered child becomes a disempowered teenager and a disempowered adult.
"What's happening now in Britain is that there is an awareness at government level that we need more than minding shops for children. What we need are places which will support the development of the child and his/her long-term needs, and to support that family to support that child," adds Pascal.
Her colleague Tony Bertram, senior research fellow in Early Childhood Education at University College, Worcester, will also speak at the Dublin conference. He believes that the problems we are now facing stem from the fact that in countries such as Britain and Ireland - unlike in France, Germany and the Scandinavian countries - childcare has been seen to be a personal issue rather than one in which the state intervenes.
Therefore, in Ireland, for instance, recent state financial intervention is not part of a cultural understanding of what's most important for preschool children. It is simply an injection of cash. Now, the IPPA is leading the way by providing "quality improvement programmes" for childcare staff. So there will be ways of establishing ground rules on quality as county-by-county plans are drawn up to allocate funding for new crèches and playschools.
"We need to encourage children to self-manage, make choices and take responsibility, and to do that they have to have a level of autonomy in their worlds from an early age," says Bertram.
Another speaker at tomorrow's conference, Elly Singer, associate professor in the department of developmental psychology at the University of Amsterdam, and associate professor in the department of education at Utrecht University, believes that the children's needs are not always centre stage in childcare.
"The children live in a play world where there are too many toys left out all the time, and when I go to observe them, I find them looking out the window to see what is going on outside. Teachers need to remember to involve children in adult things like preparing the food, and not just expect them to play all the time," says Singer.
She also stresses that children need to be able to see the teacher while they play, but that the teacher should be wary about intervening too much in their little disputes.
"We often don't acknowledge how skilful children are," she says. She believes that when an adult intervenes, the problem often escalates, and blame is introduced, while all the children want is to get on with the game.
Understanding the world from the child's point of view and acknowledging individual competence in every child is central to the emphasis of quality in childcare.
"In childcare services, a lot of people get very busy and start thinking about teaching children, but there is a huge amount of inherent learning in play and opportunities for adults to interact with individual children," says Gunning. "What we recommend is that staff in childcare settings observe the children as part of their work and discuss their observations with other staff to make sense of what's on the child's mind."
Gunning believes that if childcare care personnel undertake this sort of observation and interaction with each child as part of their daily activities and discuss and exchange ideas about these interactions, they are already on the way towards running a more child-centred establishment.
Do You Know Me? - Quality in early childhood education from the child's perspective takes place tomorrow in Dublin Castle. Places are still available. For more information contact the Irish Preschool and Playgroup Association, the Early Childhood Organisation, tel: 01-4630026 or 01-4630011
