Regulators’ views of quality in early childhood care and education settings in Ireland

ABSTRACT

There is a substantial literature on the importance of good-quality early childhood care and education services. There is also, however, some agreement that service quality is a nebulous concept which is difficult to define and therefore difficult to assess. While there is growing literature in the area, the views of one stakeholder group—that of regulators—is relatively scarce in the academic literature. This article presents the views of this stakeholder group using the findings from a systematic analysis of reports of pre-school inspections carried out in the Republic of Ireland. A total of 3007 individual inspection reports comprising 81,189 regulation references were analysed in this study. The findings indicate that regulators are of the view that the majority of services are compliant across most of the 27 regulations inspected, with three-quarters (73%) of all services inspected reported to be non-compliant on five or fewer regulations. The three areas reported to have the highest levels of non-compliance were “management and staffing“ (46.2%), “safety“ (43%) and “records“ (35%). Variation in the findings was identified according to the type of inspection (follow-up inspections had the highest levels of non-compliance), type of service (drop-in services had the highest levels of non-compliance), geography (Dublin North East had the highest level of non-compliance) and extent of the commentary (children's health, welfare and development generated extensive commentary, far in excess of other regulation areas). While international comparisons are not possible due to different approaches and foci for assessment, variation has also been a feature of studies conducted in other jurisdictions including Scotland and the United States. The findings from this study provide an understanding of the views of regulators across the breadth of regulations that legally underpin the service and can act as a benchmark for a variety of stakeholders.

KEYWORDS:

• Quality
• child care
• regulators
• inspectors
• pre-school
• Ireland

Notes

1 The full text of the Child Care (Pre-School Services) Regulations 2006 is available online: http://www.dcya.gov.ie/documents/publications/Child_Care_Pre-School_Services_Regs_2006.pdf

2 Broad areas: food and drink; general information; health, welfare and development of the child; information on the pre-school setting; management and staffing; premises and facilities; records; and safety.

Additional information

Funding

The analysis for this study was commissioned by the Child and Family Division, Health Services Executive, and reports of the findings subsequently published by Túsla, the Child and Family Agency in 2014.