Students have questioned the closure of the créche in Tallaght Institute of Technology (ITT), a move they say will place serious pressure on the college’s student parents.
Concerns have been raised after ITT announced their campus créche, widely used by student parents, would close after a public tendering process failed to find a new provider that would meet the college’s criteria. An open-applications process for a new childcare provider must legally be opened every three years but, after several weeks between February and April, no new provider was found.
Students, Tallaght Institute of Technology Students’ Union (ITTSU) President Jason Kavanagh told The University Times, were happy with how the créche was run and are questioning why the current provider’s contract was not renewed. Publicly, ITT has given no sign that criteria have changed or standards have been raised, but the students’ union is questioning why a situation has arisen that could deprive over 30 student parents of on-campus childcare facilities.
Speaking to The University Times, ITTSU President Jason Kavanagh warned that there was a real risk of students not being able to go to college following the closure of the créche. Thirty-one students, he said, face choosing between childcare and college. Many new students, hoping to rely on the créche facilities from September onwards, will also be left questioning whether they can attend the college.
The college has said that it will re-open the public tender process in August, with hopes of the créche re-opening in January 2018. But the process has left both student parents and the students’ unions confused and angry, especially over the criteria used by the college. “Why has it changed?”, Kavanagh asked.
The promise of a re-opening in early 2018 has also done little to ease student concerns. “It could be realistic, but January is too late, way too late”, Kavanagh said. The main question that remains unanswered, the students’ union says, is what changed in the college’s criteria to mean that the créche’s current provider was deemed below the standard required.
The College, in a statement on their website released after the announcement that the créche was to close, set the criteria against which créche providers’ applications were scored. These include the “methodology for providing the childcare service including curricula and programmes”; “staffing and quality of food provision”; “reliability of continuity of supply”; and “overall fee proposal”.
While Kavanagh said he wouldn’t speculate on what had prompted the college to come to the decision, he did express frustration at the lack of clear reasons why the current provider, or any applicant, had failed to meet the criteria set out by the college in the public procurement process.
The college, Kavanagh said, is not “being as clear as we would like”. Part of this frustration is because the students’ union was not part of the first tendering process that began in February, a situation Kavanagh described as “unusual”.
In an email statement to The University Times, Adrian Payne, the Marketing and Communications Manager at ITT, would not be drawn on details beyond the statement on the college’s website. He also refused to discuss the possibility that, in the new round of applications, providers might not meet the criteria or why any providers had not met the criteria in this instance.
The créche, which opened in 2010, has since been widely used by student parents to ensure their children are looked after while they pursue their education. As recently as June, before the new statement on the failure of the procurement process replaced it, a short paragraph on ITT’s website stated that “the rationale for the development of the childcare facility is to provide support to students who wish to undertake higher education to be able to do so thus widening participation”.
Since the announcement, a social media campaign has grown quickly behind the calls for the créche not to close. Finding alternative childcare will prove a challenge, Kavanagh said, pointing to a cost of nearly €400 a month that student parents might now face following the créche’s closure. In the statement sent to The University Times by Payne and published on the ITT website, the college states that it will continue to “financially support qualifying students by contributing to the cost of childcare in statutorily approved créche facilities and/or child-minders registered and approved by the Department of Children and Youth Affairs”.
Concerns were also raised about the 14 staff in the créche, the majority of whom are part-time and are employed by the former créche provider. Commenting on the possibility of redundancy among the créche’s staff, Payne said: “Staff working at the créche are not employees of the Institute of Technology, Tallaght therefore there are no job losses resulting at IT Tallaght.”
