The INTO is demanding education facilities for all three-year-olds to address what it calls a major fault in the education system.
At a major conference on the issue yesterday, INTO general secretary John Carr said that, while the State provided education from age four to 24, the education of those under four was largely being left to free market forces.
Broadly, only those who could pay could access early childhood programmes, he said.
He said consideration must be given to the provision of year-round, out-of-school-hours activities; high-quality childcare from early morning until evening that would include a varied menu of homework, clubs, sports, music tuition, foreign languages and cultural activities.
Mr Carr accused the Government of being trapped in a historical time warp. It had failed to recognise that the family unit, family life and family pressures had changed radically in the last two decades, he said.
The INTO, he said, believed that early childhood education was an integral part of every child's universal right to education.
"Rather than seeing early childhood education as the foundation stone of all education and viewing it as an integral part of the education system, we have Cabinet Ministers playing pass the parcel with the issue," Mr Carr said.
"No one wants responsibility for early childhood education, not even the Minister for Education.
"The result is a complete fragmentation of policy, a lack of overall direction and cohesion, and knee-jerk responses to pressure points, all of which ultimately fail the young child as learner."
The Government, he said, had a duty and responsibility to ensure that every child had access to high-quality early childhood education.
But in doing so, "we must not subvert the purposes and aims of early childhood education by providing a response that meets only the childcare demands of a buoyant labour market. The challenge is to look at early childhood education from the rights of the child to a quality education from the State."
He said the INTO would be demanding a curriculum framework for the under-fours that knit in seamlessly with the primary curriculum and met the learning needs of young children.
The process of change, he said, "will mean scrutinising how best to alter the context of schools to meet the development needs and the learning needs of young children".
