In Drumcondra, parents and children protest the planned closure of their afterschool

On Tuesday morning, dozens of parents and children gathered on Gracepark Road to protest the planned closure of the First Steps afterschool.

Operating at Gracepark Educate Together National School since 2019, First Steps offers kids a place to go and learn and play after classes end in the middle of the day, until their parents can pick them up.

The protesters held an array of signs, including printed ones saying “Save our afterschool”, and a hand-written one saying “We are very disappointed in you”, and “You are making people sad”.

Among the parents was Kate Mooney, who has one son in the afterschool already and was planning for a second son to start there in the autumn.

But the school’s board of management have said they’ll no longer host First Steps after August.

“What do they expect us to do?” Mooney had said by phone the day before. “It just seems so disconnected from the realities of what working families face.”

She and her partner haven’t been able to find an alternative afterschool for their kids. So “we’re looking at my partner maybe going part-time”, she said, if his job will let him.

Then he could pick up the kids after they finish school and bring them home. But they wouldn’t be with their friends, or get all the teaching and activities, Mooney says.

When afterschools and creches close, the disruption ripples through the lives of the children outwards into the community, disrupting their parents’ lives, and their parents’ workplaces, and just keep spreading.

That’s why Early Childhood Ireland, which represents afterschools and creches, put out a proposal in November calling on the government to adopt a new approach to averting closures – and to helping reduce the resulting disruption if they are unavoidable.

The government’s already on top of this, said a spokesperson for the Department of Children, Equality, Disability, Integration and Youth.

From an invite to “no room at the inn”

Parents who have organised to fight the closure, which affects 76 students, say the planned closure has come as a shock. And so does Lisa Kendellen, who runs First Steps with eight staff members.

When she set up in 2019, “I had been approached by the acting principal at that time to

operate the service,” Kendellen said. “We were operating from pre-fab buildings at the beginning because construction of the school as it now exists had not commenced.”

At the beginning of 2024, the board of management asked Kendellen to re-tender for the contract to provide the afterschool service in the school. “I was later notified by the board of management that my tender was successful,” she says.

The group of parents fighting the closure said in a statement last week that they’d been told in February that “a successful re-tender process had been completed … with just finer details to be worked out with the current provider to extend the service for another 3 years”.

But the finer details didn’t get worked out, apparently, and in March, the board of management told parents it was not planning to offer a contract to First Steps to continue the service – or to any afterschool provider at all, for that matter, the group says.

The school’s board of management said, in a statement on Tuesday, that the school simply no longer has space it can rent out to an afterschool provider.

“There was classroom space available to rent to the afterschool service provider as the school developed in its early years,” the statement says. “The availability of that space has diminished significantly since the opening of the new school building in 2020.”

“The school is now at full capacity, accomodating for the first time this year all classes up to Sixth Class, and all classrooms are now fully occupied and in use,” it says.

“The reason that the continuation of the service could not be facilitated is that it was not possible to do so without adversely impacting on the education of the entire student population,” it says.

The statement did not say why the board asked Kendellen to re-tender, if it didn’t have rooms for her to provide the service in anymore.

Afterschool parents say they were blindsided by the school’s announcement, and have been frustrated since then with the board’s explanations for its decision.

“There are solutions, this could be solved,” Mooney says. “We just don’t have faith that they’ve exhausted all possibilities.”

Dealing with closures

Early Childhood Ireland’s (ECI’s) proposal would require a creche or afterschool that was facing a planned or forced closure to notify the government at least three months and preferably six months in advance.

Then a team would be put together with representatives of the Department of Children, Pobal, Tusla, the county childcare committee, local creches and afterschools, and parents.

That “stakeholder response team” would look at what could be done to avert the closure. Or if it can’t be averted, help to arrange places for the kids who need them.

There’s already a system in place to help avert closures, and help kids and parents in case they are un-avertable, the Department of Children spokesperson said on Tuesday.

“Any early learning and childcare service experiencing difficulty is encouraged to come forward,” he said, not directly addressing ECI’s proposal to make it a requirement.

“The City/County Childcare Committee and Pobal work with the service to assess and provide support,” he said. “This support focuses on operational as well as financial supports to assist services to manage their immediate difficulties and transition to a more sustainable model of delivery.”

“City/County Childcare Committees have successfully supported the reopening of closed services, and in the event of permanent closures, City/County Childcare Committees also assist parents with sourcing alternative early learning and childcare places where possible,” he said.

There are closures of creches and afterschools, but there are more opening, the department spokesperson said. Last year “witnessed the largest increase in new [creche and afterschool] services in a number of years, a smaller number of closures and a net increase in the overall number of services”.

The existing system has not solved the problem at Gracepark, however. If there was a more powerful team of problem solvers to swoop down and try to sort things out, could they help?

A spokesperson for Early Childhood Ireland (ECI) said the organisation doesn’t comment on individual cases.

And the school’s board of management didn’t respond directly to queries sent Friday asking if there was anything that could be done to avert the closure – and if so who was well placed to help, and what assistance would be needed.

But Kendellen, who runs First Steps, says she’s sure there’s a solution to be found.

“There is a crisis in childcare, especially in regard to demand for places and the lack of availability, we must work together for the wellbeing of the children and all the working parents involved,” she said.