BY all possible measures, this country loves bizarre policies.

Our government puts millions into incentivising child-bearing though subsidies only to claw back billions from the parents by heavily taxing child-related consumption and investment.

This state spends a fortune covering university tuition, while leaving quality early and secondary education inaccessible to large sections of the population. Our policymakers give investors in physical capital vast tax breaks, but turn into classic tax-andcharge monsters when it comes to investment in human capital through incentives for educational childcare and schooling.

Last week, two events reminded us of the ludicrousness that we call our family and education policies.

First, the OECD's annual report, Going for growth 2007, outlined a set of policy priorities for the Irish government aimed at increasing our investment in children.

The OECD called for strengthening work incentives for second-income earners and lone parents to re-enter the labour force. One of the major drawbacks in this area is that the increases in support for families with children are not linked to the parent participation in the labour force.

Under this policy, an unconditional cheque delivered by the government to the parents represents a missed opportunity to incentivise earlier entry by children into the educational system.

Yet an early entry pays off not only in terms of immediate learning but also in lifelong benefits, as early learning increases productivity with which educational investments at the later stages will be transformed into even more skills. Early learning begets later learning.

Thus the OECD is right to point out that the government should "tie childcare support such as the Early Childcare Supplement to employment or the use of childcare services and phase out the Home Carer's Tax Credit".

Having made the point about the need for transition into formal early education, the OECD calls on the government to "reduce the phase-out rate of the One Parent Family Payment". This is a bizarre statement.

Overall, Ireland has the highest level of disincentives for lone parents returning to work in the OECD, amounting to an implicit tax of almost 125% of gross earning in the new job.

However, according to the OECD data, the cost of childcare accounts for more than the half of this tax. The drop in benefits due to lone parents transitioning into employment adds up to only 20%. Twelve out of 27 OECD countries experience more adverse effects of the benefits cuts than Ireland. Yet the OECD makes no suggestions on this matter to them.

The real problem with our welfare system is not the rate at which the benefits fall as people enter work. It is the fact that the lone parent benefits are so generous that the predominantly uneducated and unskilled welfare recipients are unable to secure jobs that pay enough to cover the lost benefits.

Surely it would be more logical to rationalise the benefits, not to continue subsidising ex-welfare recipients after they enter the labour force?

In perhaps its most important recommendation, the OECD calls on the government to improve quality of access to preprimary education.

According to the OECD, there is an acute need to "generalise pre-primary education from the age of three". As a glorified baby-sitting service, our early education lacks the standards that link up directly with later educational requirements.

And this brings us to the second event. Earlier this month, the Department of Education decided to introduce standardised assessment into our primary schools.

Assessment test scores in mathematics and reading will be reported to the parents only in respect of their own children's results. According to the department, these results will not be used to create league tables for measuring a school's performance, but "to inform the child's own parents of the child's progress or weaknesses".

Thus, having learned about their child's weaknesses, the parents will not be able to identify the causes of underperformance. Was learning adversely affected by the parents' own actions at home? Was it a function of the low quality of teaching at the school? Was it caused by a specific teacher's performance or by underperformance of the whole school?

This information is crucial to devising a parental response to the problem. Yet the Department of Education feels that parents should not have access to full information about the school's and teachers' performance.

By retaining such a nontransparent approach to education quality assessment, the Department of Education revealed once again that its primary concern is protecting the teachers from any competitive pressures and any overseeing by parents. The quality of our schools and their accountability to parents are once again sideline issues for our education mandarins.

And here lies the crux of the problem.

In order to have an effective reform, one must be willing to tackle the interest groups defending the status quo. In the case of our child and education policies, this means cutting off state welfare to subsidydependent parents and forcing accountability onto our teachers.

Until this happens, all the reports in the world will not fix our broken child policies.

Dr Constantin Gurdgiev is an economist and editor of Business & Financemagazine