‘You can see the difference. Definitely’: How the Finnish approach to preschool childcare is paying dividends in Cork

There is no shortage of people in the sector who believe Ireland could do with emulating aspects, or all, of Finland’s early-education and childcare system but when she first arrived in Ireland just over a decade ago, Minna Murphy’s ambitions on that front were modest enough.
Murphy hails from close to Helsinki and moved from Finland with her Irish husband, John, to his family farm in Kildinan, Co Cork, in 2013 with the intention of opening a small preschool service. She didn’t know much about how the Irish system before she got here but worked for a spell in the UK where she found the approach “horrible”; all about “ticking boxes”, she suggests.
The farm setting, she recalls, was central to her plan, offering the sort of opportunity for outdoor play that few services here really can. At the time, though, she says just persuading parents their kids should be spending a lot more of their time out in the elements was initially a challenge. A decade on, she reckons, it’s one of the key reasons they keep coming. “Parents understand it now and some come from a long way to have their children here,” she says.
Finland’s system is about far more than getting out in the fresh air, of course. In the mid-1980s the country formally recognised early education as a child’s right. From the start of the 1990s, every child was entitled to a place in a municipally funded facility.
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“They have a rights-based approach to early childhood education and care,” says Dr Sheila Garrity, lecturer in early childhood studies at the University of Galway’s school of education. “They see the child as a valuable citizen in their own right. And that being their starting point has allowed them to create a high-quality service that meets the various needs of children, a play-based curriculum that responds to the individual circumstances of each child and involves strong relationships with families.
“We talk about childcare fees being too expensive, stopping parents from working,” she says. That’s our lens whereas the Finnish lens, the Nordic lens, is a child’s right to an enriching early-learning experience.”
The upshot is a central system in which every child is entitled to, and guaranteed, a place in early childhood education and care, local authorities are the heart of providing or funding it, and parents usually pay between €30 and just over €311 per month for one child. Siblings cost up to an additional €124.
Most children attend services from between 18 months and two years up until seven, when they start school. Places generally need to be booked four months in advance but they can be obtained in a couple of weeks in instances where a new job or course of study is involved. Alternatively, supports are available for parents who want to hire childminders while those who choose to stay at home with their children after initial periods of parental leave, are entitled to a basic €377 per month with additional income-related payments.
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It is not perfect. Parental leave, for instance, is extremely generous by Irish standards but has not had quite the impact on workplace equality that was hoped for.
A key reason most Finnish children do not start in daycare until they are nearly two is the provision of 160 days of paid leave to each parent so they can provide care at home during the early part of the child’s life. Up to 63 days can be transferred meaning up to 97 can be lost if a father, for instance, does not participate.
Encouraging fathers to take the leave, a portion of which is at full pay, a portion at 60 per cent, is intended, among other things, to promote equality in the workplace and Murphy believes it has had a positive impact.
Still, research from Aarhus University in Denmark suggests the Nordic countries have generally struggled to meet their goals in this area. In Finland, for instance, the gender pay gap, an indicator of the proportion of senior, better-paid positions held by women, was put at 15.5 per cent in 2022 compared to 9.3 per cent in Ireland.
Unesco Social Justice Ireland and Early Childhood Ireland (ECI), an umbrella body to which most providers in Ireland are affiliated, are among the many organisations to have highlighted its benefits and when the Irish Government established an expert group to compile its Partnership for Public Good report, a document that has played a significant role in shaping public policy in the sector here, it looked closely at the wider Nordic model, specifically the Norwegian one, which shares many of the same broad characteristics.
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Predictably, it is all rather expensive to fund and a shifting political landscape there gave rise to the expectation in some quarters that spending might be curtailed in recent years. Instead, the last major review of the system, in 2022, extended services for the self-employed and others.
In Ireland, there is widespread acknowledgment of the fact spending has increased from €638 million to almost €1.4 billion during the course of this government but ECI has put a cost of about €4 billion on Ireland getting to Nordic levels of provision. Three years ago, the Department of Children suggested that matching Iceland’s proportion of gross domestic product expenditure would involve spending almost half as much again.
“I think we are moving slowly towards the better system but Ireland has to ramp up the funding and really stick with it,” says Murphy who is happy to see early education becoming a “political hot potato” in the run-up to the election with just about everybody promising more money.
To date, she suggests, there has been a tendency here to try to ignore the fact that “quality costs” but there have also been, she argues, substantial failures on the planning front.
Her own services – she has a second one these days in nearby Watergrasshill – cater for children approaching schoolgoing age but there are people “screaming”, she suggests, for places for smaller children in the area and the demand is only going to get greater, she says, as more houses are built.
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“In Finland,” she says, “the system is very much based on local decisions, made by the municipalities, so if they know locally there’s a big housing estate coming, and they understand how many families will be moving in the area, they know they have to offer a daycare place there. It will always be in the planning. The planning here is not forward-thinking, in my opinion.”
In Cork, she says, the local childcare committee has been “absolutely brilliant” and she would like to see these given more of a say in the development and running of the system.
Further improvements to services will, she feels, be a priority for the next government but, in the meantime, as the election campaign proceeds and the weather outside gets colder, parents are delivering their children to her in more layers and “welly boots”.
“In Finland, it is very much play-based, the learning, a lot of it outdoors,” she says. “Even the smaller children in full daycare usually go out in the morning and then again in the afternoon. Often, parents collect the children from outside.
“What we say is, ‘when it’s minus 15 we stay indoors,’” she says cheerfully, not making it entirely clear how literal she is being.
“Of course, it’s normal that we can’t be outdoors so much in the winter but they still go outside and enjoy the fresh air and do the activities and play which all then helps when we come back indoors. Everything is much more calm. The focus and listening is much better as well, really. It’s like ‘okay, that was our energy burst, now we are ready for a little snack and lunch, and then a little bit of calming down and reading a book.’
“You can see the difference. Definitely.”