Linked services

Young children’s care and education are inextricably linked and encompass their physical and mental health, their social and emotional development, and their early learning and cognitive development. Just as young children’s care, learning, health and development are linked, so services and supports for young children and their families need to be linked too.

All services for young children should be concerned with both care and education. From the very start, children’s care should be attentive to their capacity for learning and development, while their early education should be based on play and have a strong focus on social skills and emotional development.

We propose the development of ‘early childhood hubs’, to link together services for young children with supports for children’s families. They would use existing resources differently, rather than creating new organisations. They could link a wide range of services and supports, such as:

• Care and education services for young children.
• Advice and information for parents.
• Parent-and-toddler groups.
• Resources such as toy libraries.
• In-service training for early years practitioners.
• Support and training networks for childminders.
• Specialist supports on a referral basis.
•  Outreach to facilitate access to services.
•  Wider supports for adults including employment supports and adult education.

We also want schools to be ‘ready for young children’. In our vision, the infant classes of primary schools would be more like early years settings, with a real sense of continuity for young children as they make transitions from pre-school services into schools.

Immediate actions for the Government:

• Commission research on early childhood hubs. This could be done through existing research funds, and possibly accessing philanthropic funding. 
• Establish an innovation fund to support the design and implementation of a small number of early childhood hubs as demonstration programmes, to explore how best to implement hubs at local level, making maximum use of existing resources.
•  Assist primary schools and local pre-school services to cooperate in programmes to facilitate the transition of pre-school children into schools.

In planning for the future, we urge the Government to make commitments to:

• Roll-out a national programme for the development of early childhood hubs, following evaluation of initial models.
• Support primary schools to more fully meet the needs of children in infant classes, e.g. by amending adult-child ratios to match those for 4-5 year olds in other early years settings, revising the infant level of the primary school curriculum to bring it fully into line with Aistear, and facilitating lead teachers in the infant classes of primary schools to gain relevant training in early childhood education.