LAST MONTH, A seemingly routine update from the Department of Children landed in the inboxes of childcare providers around Ireland which sought to “clarify” the records providers are meant to keep of staff attendance.

So far so good. Providers fully appreciate the need for accurate, transparent and verifiable records to support compliance while delivering quality early learning and care, and clarity is always helpful.

Tucked in amongst the various requirements, however, was a previously unknown requirement. As well as recording their arrival and departure at their childcare service, educators would now be required to record their every movement between rooms, including when they are asked to jump between rooms on a short-term basis.

It is hard not to question whether the authors of this update have ever observed the daily reality of a quality crèche or preschool. Educators are continuously responding to children’s emotional, physical and developmental needs — comforting a child who is overwhelmed, supporting a toddler learning to regulate emotions, tending to a fall, managing illness, or guiding emerging social skills.

This work is skilled, relational and responsive by nature, not something that can be neatly scheduled or monitored by the minute.

These movements are often brief and unpredictable — and essential to maintaining safe, responsive and high-quality early learning and care environments.

I’m certain that most parents, if asked, would be clear about where they want educators’ attention to be – it’s on caring and educating the children who were entrusted into their care, rather than focusing on recording their every movement on an attendance sheet.

Such micromanagement could be accepted if it was just an isolated example of departmental miscalculation. But sadly, the edict was just the latest in a now, well-established pattern of the department’s failure to understand the enormous pressure it is putting childcare providers under and how this threatens our ability to continue providing our essential service to parents and their children — a service rooted in quality care and education for our youngest citizens.

Core funding

The fees that childcare providers can charge were frozen in 2021 in exchange for a direct payment by the State to childcare providers known as ‘Core Funding’. Initially, the arrangement seemed like a good one to providers. We could see the enormous financial pressure parents were under to pay their fees and were keen to help.

Since then, however, the experience has been far from positive. More than four years later the fee freeze remains in place, and with many providers not having increased their fees for several years up to 2021, it means they are facing into almost a decade without an increase.

The Department will argue that it has increased Core Funding since then, which is true, but not nearly enough to keep up with the price costs providers are facing. Ask any small business and they will point to a plethora of cost increases they are facing – electricity, insurance, food, auto-enrolment, statutory sick pay and minimum wage increases to name just some – all of which add up to multiples of the most recent 6% increase in Core Funding.

Unlike other small businesses, however, childcare providers cannot increase the fees they charge to make up that shortfall.

Childcare providers have absorbed these increased operating costs in recent years out of a sense of duty but any business will tell you that there is a limit to how long this can continue before services start to suffer — or in our case the quality of children’s early learning and care.

Employment regulation orders

Employment Regulation Orders (EROs) were introduced for the childcare sector in 2022 with the aim of setting minimum pay rates and working conditions (like hours, leave, sick pay) for childcare educators. Their intention was good. Their design, however, was not.

The ERO model was designed for commercial sectors that can raise prices to offset wage increases, negotiate wages freely and manage their own income.

None of these conditions exist in childcare where fees are frozen.

Every pay increase providers pay out is entirely dependent on the following year’s allocations determined by the Department of Children, which holds the purse strings while remaining outside the negotiations.

The result is a wage-setting mechanism that looks participatory on paper but, in practice, is a closed loop. Employers are expected to blindly sign up to wage increases they have no financial means to deliver unless government funding follows. That is not negotiation — it is instruction.

Supported pay increases

This year, the Department introduced a Staff Funding Additional Contribution (SFAC) intended to help offset the costs of the most recent ERO in October which raised minimum pay rates by 10%. But the support only extends to those on the lowest salaries and does nothing to help with the ‘ripple effect’ whereby staff on higher salaries understandably expect an increase in their own pay.

The ERO also leaves out the administrators, cooks, cleaners, drivers, and support educators who keep services safe, compliant and functional.

These professionals are the backbone of every early years service, yet they remain invisible in the government’s wage model.

This inevitably breeds tension, staff turnover, and a sense of inequity amongst employees — all of which undermines stability and quality in early learning and childcare.

These flaws with the ERO system are the reason why I have resigned my position as an employer representative on the Early Years Service Joint Labour Committee that agrees them. Though well-intentioned, EROs are manifestly the wrong tool for the job.

Viability

The Government may be tempted to dismiss the issues outlined here as background noise, but I might finish with some friendly advice – if the sector’s viability remains under threat, everyone will pay the cost.

More providers will exit Core funding, leaving parents facing overnight fee increases of 30%. Other providers will simply shut up shop entirely, while the prospect of desperately needed new creches opening will become an impossibility. With income capped and costs rising, construction of new creches and extensions are becoming impossible, even in areas where waiting lists stretch for years. After all, what bank would lend to a business which can’t increase the fees it charges?

Increasingly, it feels as though the State expects the ELC sector to behave like a public service when it comes to fee control, but like a private business when it comes to risk. That contradiction is now bringing many providers to breaking point. As Minister Norma Foley prepares to publish her Action Plan on childcare this week, she would do well to begin properly listening to us — and to protect the quality of early learning and childcare that families rely on every day.

Regina Bushell is Chair of Seas Suas, the representative body for independent early learning and full-day care providers in Ireland, and MD of Grovelands Childcare.