The Health Service Executive has today moved to reassure parents that it will prosecute pre-schools found to be in breach of legal standards for childcare.
It was revealed in today's Irish Timesthat inspections by the HSE of pre-schools and nurseries in Galway, Roscommon and Mayo found 85 per cent were failing to meet legal standards for childcare.
A total of 160 inspections were carried out in the year to the end of September last. Only 21 per cent of the pre-schools tested were found to be fully compliant with the child care regulations, which date back to 1996/1997.
The HSE has a statutory duty to secure the health, safety and welfare of pre-school children and is obliged to inspect any facility caring for three or more children who are not attending a primary school. The inspections cover sanitary conditions, standards of premises and facilities, fire precautions, insurance, staff and pupil records, adult-child ratios and overcrowding.
The HSE said in a statement today it carried out around 2500 inspections of services in 2004. It said today many of those pre-school services will have some issues of a "relatively minor nature", which the service will undertake to rectify. Others may need to agree a plan of action with the HSE to address serious issues while others may be forced to close if they cannot comply.
"Where standards consistently do not meet the required standard, the HSE's Pre-School Officers have recourse to court proceedings, which can result in a fine being issued or can order that the service cease operation," the statement added.
The legislation governing childcare provision is currently under review and may be revised shortly.
The HSE urged all service providers "to take a positive approach to reassuring parents about standards by making their inspection reports available to their clients."
Earlier, the National Children's Nursery Association (NCNA) called for creches and other childcare facilities to work with parents to fix problems, using the inspection reports as a guide.
Martina Murphy of the NCNA said: "I think for parents the issues are just to be very aware in their own scenario and discuss with their child's carers, with the operators of the service and also the people who are on a daily basis caring for their children, the outcomes of inspections and what are the action plans, what is actually being done to follow up on inspections."
Ms Murphy said the childcare sector has been lobbying Government since regulations were introduced in 1996 for standardisation of reports. Some community-based playgroups and childcare providers simply cannot meet the legal requirements because of funding. Others were simply not in a position to provide facilities such as outdoor play areas, she said.
Opposition politicians also called for more stringent testing of pre-school facilities.
Fine Gael's childcare spokesman, David Stanton said that even more alarming than the HSE report was that there exists an unregulated childcare sector which is not open to inspection and which parents have to take on trust. "That knowledge, coupled with recent reports of poor vetting of hotel baby sitters, would suggest that far from making progress on child safety we are actually regressing," he said.
He called for the Government to offer incentives to make this unregulated childcare sector subject to inspection.
The Labour Party's spokeswoman on children Senator Kathleen O'Meara blamed the problems of finances.
"The running costs of pre-schools are extremely high, and while the Government has spent on the capital programmes, there is still a significant difficulty around crèches being able to meet their day-to-day costs," she said. "Crèches are under-resourced, and more support of the childcare sector is desperately needed."
The Government announced a National Childcare Investment Programme of €575 million in last December's Budget.
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