Many of you were involved in our consultation process or our other work during 2010, while others may simply have been following our e-newsletter. Whatever your level of involvement in the past, you may be interested in getting more involved in Start Strong in 2011, as we strengthen our efforts to make politicians take up the cause of young children in Ireland.

Start Strong is now asking all our supporters to consider becoming members. In recent months we have been formalising our governance structures so that we can become a stronger coalition of members: both organisations and individuals. If you or your organisation would like to become a member of Start Strong, please email us now.

In 2011 we will have two categories of membership:

Ordinary membership: for organisations. We will be asking ordinary members to contribute €150 per year. Only ordinary members will be able to vote at our AGM.

Associate membership: for individuals, and also for organisations outside Ireland or which will not be actively involved in Start Strong. We will be asking associate members to contribute €50 per year.

We are very aware of the financial pressure that most, if not all, of us are under at the moment, but feel that the contribution we are seeking is realistic and reasonable.

Parents: We are also really keen to increase the involvement of parents in 2011. If you are a parent and are interested in getting involved in our work, please email us now.

While we welcome the continuation of the Free Pre-School Year, it is essential that the Government builds on the scheme in the years ahead though raising quality standards and extending supports to children who are younger than 3. While some measures will take time to achieve, some can be taken right now, even at this time of economic crisis. Our Children 2020 report points to key actions which a new Government can take - including actions that cost nothing - to improve the care and education of young children in Ireland. Read our analysis of Budget 2011 here.

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The Office of the Minister for Children and Youth Affairs (OMCYA) has just launched the long-awaited Workforce Development Plan. The plan should help to standardise training for childcare workers but, with no additional resources available, it looks unlikely on its own to give much of a push to the professionalisation of the workforce.

The plan is largely concerned with what training looks like - what the standards are for different levels of qualification and how training is delivered. The plan rightly calls for training to be delivered flexibly, with part-time options, distance learning and the recognition of prior learning. However, there is nothing in the plan about raising qualification levels through raising minimum standards or through easing the financial burden of training for workers or employers.

A positive feature of the Free Pre-School Year was that, for the first time, it introduced a qualification requirement for childcare workers, but the standard required (FETAC Level 5 for pre-school leaders, with no qualification requirement for assistants) is low. It is disappointing that the Workforce Development Plan does not make any proposal - let alone set out a time-frame - for raising the minimum qualification levels over time. The Government has also made it clear that there is no additional funding for the plan, so the plan offers no new training grants and no new incentives for workers to train (e.g. through the prospect of higher wages on the completion of training) or for employers to release existing workers on a regular basis for participation in training courses.

The Government is ultimately the funder of further and higher education and training (through VECs, FAS and Institutes of Technology as well as voluntary organisations) but it has in the past adopted a hands-off approach. The Workforce Development Plan does seem to signal a change to a more hands-on approach, with the OMCYA saying that it will now 'direct State investment' in training provision through regular monitoring of progress by training providers against agreed benchmarks. It remains to be seen whether the many training providers around the country will respond sufficiently to the challenges that the Plan sets for them. The OMCYA states that it will publish a bi-annual progress report on the Workforce Development Plan.

It is disappointing that the plan does not ring-fence the funding that is already there. The plan states that 'Protection of resources and investment must be guaranteed for a minimum time frame' but it makes no commitment to ensure this. The protection of resources will be hard given that the funding of training is dispersed among so different bodies (VECs, FAS, Institutes of Technology, etc.), each of which faces funding pressures of its own. The OMCYA has not yet put the plan on its website.

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Shortly before the Budget, the Government published a 'policy and value for money review' of child income supports, which include Child Benefit, the Qualified Child Increase (QCI) and Family Income Supplement (FIS) and, in the past, the Early Childcare Supplement.

The review, which was carried out over an 18-month period by the Department of Social Protection, provides a long and detailed analysis of the objectives and effectiveness of these different payments, and examines a range of options for reform. It is a policy review, not a statement of Government policy, but it is likely to inform the direction of Government policy in this area in the years to come.

Earlier in the year Start Strong made a submission to the review, as did the End Child Poverty Coalition, of which Start Strong is a member. Start Strong is pleased to see that the report recognises the cost of childcare to families as an important issue for Government policy. We are also pleased that the review acknowledges the need to see child income supports within a wider context of services for children, as services - such as early childhood care and education - are crucial in meeting several policy objectives, including facilitating parental employment and providing a route out of poverty for children and their families. As the report states, 'the balance between income supports and services are acknowledged to be out of line with the experience of other countries with better outcomes for children'.

The Department of Social Protection has stated that it will host a briefing session/seminar in January on the contents and findings of the report for those who participated in the review's consultation process. Start Strong hopes to engage in this process, working closely with the End Child Poverty Coalition. Read the full review here.

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The Department of Education and Skills has just published a Draft National Plan to Improve Literacy and Numeracy in Schools, and is seeking comments and suggestions on the draft plan by 31st January. While the main focus of the draft plan is on schools, it also encompasses pre-school settings as well as the role of the Aistear early years curriculum in changing practices within the infant classes of primary schools.

We are very pleased that the draft plan recognises the important role of early childhood care and education in laying strong foundations for subsequent educational achievement. We are also pleased that the plan recognises the importance of change within the infant classes of primary schools, with the need for Aistear to be fully embedded in the infant curriculum, and for infant classes to be prioritised in any measures to reduce class sizes. The draft plan also rightly stresses the need to professionalise the early years workforce. Care will be needed, however, to ensure that pre-school settings do not push children to read and write too early. The experience of countries such as Finland, which leads the world in educational outcomes for children, is that high quality care and education in the early years is tremendously important, but that it should be based around play and should aim at the well-being and development of the whole child, rather than narrowly focusing on achieving educational targets.

Start Strong will be making a formal submission to the Department of Education and Skills on the draft plan in mid-January. If you would like to make an input into Start Strong's submission, please email us. You can view the draft national plan here.

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Early childhood education and care services can play a major role in reducing child poverty and inequality - if they are universally accessible and staffed by a well-educated workforce. That is the conclusion of a new report on early years services in the EU, just launched in Brussels.

The 'Working for Inclusion' research project was funded by the European Commission and led by Children in Scotland, with partner organisations in other countries. Detailed country profiles are available on 10  European countries, as well as a summary report.

While acknowledging that early care and education services are not a 'magic bullet' for social inclusion, the report argues that they can make a major contribution. To do this, the report argues, high quality services need to be readily accessible to disadvantaged children, staffed by a professional workforce, where the staff itself reflects the diversity of society, and where there is good communication between staff and parents.

The report places a particular focus on the importance of integrating 'care' and 'education' within services for young children, avoiding distinctions in access, funding and the workforce between 'childcare' and 'early education' services. The report argues that 'Inequalities in access and among the workforce can and have been largely reduced in those countries that have fully integrated their ECEC systems. In such cases, full integration has typically included: extending entitlement to all children over 12 months (or sometimes younger); a common funding regime that reduces costs of attendance for all children; and restructuring the workforce around a core professional working across the whole early childhood age range, i.e. with children under and over three years.'

High quality is crucial. The report cautions that if services for young children are not integrated, do not offer access to all and are staffed by low-paid workers, without respect for diversity, then they can exacerbate inequality and inclusion, rather than reducing them. Read the full report here, or view the country profiles here.

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Earlier in the year, the British Government commissioned the Labour MP Frank Field to carry out an independent review of poverty in the UK. His report has just been published, and it is striking in the emphasis it places on the importance of children's experiences in their early years in determining their life-chances. As the report states at its outset, 'We have found overwhelming evidence that children's life chances are most heavily predicated on their development in the first five years of life'.

The report is titled 'The Foundation Years: Preventing Poor Children Becoming Poor Adults', and Frank Field argues that the term 'foundation years' should be widely adopted, to embed in the public mind the importance of the earliest years in life and the need for supports in children's first five years to have equal status to primary and secondary education. The report states that 'The Foundation Years should become the first pillar of a new tripartite education system: the Foundation Years leading to school years, leading to further, higher and continuing education'. The report also calls for the creation of a Cabinet Minister for the Foundation Years.

Frank Field argues that income transfers are not sufficient on their own to transform children's life-chances, and that Government funding should prioritise the 'foundation years', focusing on: supports for parents and parenting, support for a good home learning environment, and high quality childcare. The report also calls for a new set of indicators of children's life-chances, to run alongside existing indicators of financial poverty. The new Life Chance Indicators would include measures of children's early development, the learning environment in children's homes, aspects of parenting, and the quality of early childhood care.

At a time when there is a policy push in the UK to move away from universal supports, it is encouraging to see Frank Field's emphasis on the need to continue the universal nature of Children's Centres. The report calls for Sure Start Children's Centres to do more to target their services to disadvantaged families but at the same time it argues that the Children's Centres should remain 'hubs of the local community' - socially mixed, with universal services, including parenting courses for all new parents and with midwives and health visitors (public health nurses) working closely with the centres. Using language that connects with our own call for services and supports to be 'universal plus', Frank Field's review argues that 'The Foundation Years should be universal, with Sure Start Children's Centres providing support for all parents and a gateway for those that need more help'.  Read Frank Field's report here.

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Growing Up in Ireland - 9-month olds and their families

'Growing Up in Ireland' is Ireland's national longitudinal study of children. It aims to track the development of two groups of children, one who were 9 years old at the start of the study and one who were 9 months old. The first report on the 9-month olds has just been published. The study already has fascinating findings, and it will become even more interesting when it follows up the same children at 3 years old.

The data is incredibly rich, both in the range of questions asked and the number of children studied. The 11,100 children in the 9-month old cohort were a nationally representative sample of children born in 2007-2008.

The report contains a wealth of important information on the children, their families and their lives. For example, 14% of the 9 month olds lived in one-parent families, 5% in a house with a resident grandparent, 4% were not Irish citizens, approximately 25% of their parents were born outside Ireland, 15% of the children were not covered by either a Medical Card or health insurance, and 8% had not had their 6-month vaccination.

From a policy perspective, there is significant data on the age at which parents return to employment after the birth of a child. The data seems to confirm the importance of leave being paid, a point that Start Strong stressed in our recent 'Children 2020' report. Currently in Ireland there is 6 months (26 weeks) of paid maternity leave, which can then be followed by 4 months (16 weeks) of unpaid maternity leave, and 14 weeks of unpaid parental leave for each parent. The report shows that a large proportion of parents return to employment around the end of paid maternity leave and do not take up unpaid leave. Of those mothers who were working outside the home before the birth, 56% had returned to work by the time their child was 9 months old, with children on average being 6.7 months old when the mothers return to work - much less than the 1 year that Start Strong and many others have called for.

Of the 38% of 9-month olds who received regular non-parental care, nearly half (16% of all 9-month olds) were cared for by a relative (mostly grandparents), with equal numbers cared for by childminders (11% of the total) and in centre-based creches (also 11%). Most of the childminders were unregulated - only 2% of 9-month olds were cared for by a regulated childminder. The report notes the 'high reliance on informal childcare arrangements' and rightly states that 'the relative importance of this unregulated sector in childcare provision for infants of this age may be a cause for some concern to policymakers and others'.

In terms of supports for parents within the home, the report notes that 78% of parents felt they got enough help or did not need help from family and friends, and that the level of contact with grandparents was very high (89% reporting regular contact). However, 22% felt they got no help or not enough help from family and friends, with a significant proportion of these being non-Irish born mothers with no family in Ireland. Both the full report and a summary report are available here.

On 15th December, the Office of the Minister for Children and Youth Affairs (OMCYA) launched three new publications: the Workforce Development Plan; a Strategic Plan 2011-2013 for Early Childhood Care and Education Programmes (looking particularly at the roles of the City and County Childcare Committees and the Voluntary Childcare Organisations); and new 'National Standards for Pre-School Services'.

We comment on the Workforce Development Plan in another article in this e-newsletter. We will be examining the new National Standards in the January e-newsletter. The OMCYA has not yet put the publications on its website.

IPPA (the Irish Preschool Play Association) and NCNA (the National Children's Nurseries Association) have announced that they are merging, to form a new organisation called Early Childhood Ireland (ECI). In their statement on the merger, they state that 'there is a genuine opportunity to build a new and more effective organisation, to support the development of early learning and the very best childcare in Ireland, and to deliver exceptional services to childcare providers and others'. The new organisation will be launched in the coming months.

OMEP conference - call for papers

OMEP Ireland - the Irish branch of the World Organisation for Early Childhood Education - will be holding its annual conference on Saturday 2nd April 2011 in University College, Cork. The theme of the conference will be 'Childhood Unfolding'. OMEP Ireland has put out a call for papers - abstracts of 100 words should be sent by 10th January to info@omepireland.ie.