A report from the Child and Family Agency Tusla has revealed 131 cases of serious injury to a pre-school child were made to it last year.

Its Early Years Inspectorate Annual Report shows a total of 2,033 inspections were carried out in 2017.

The Inspectorate is responsible for inspecting services in pre-schools, play groups, nurseries, crèches, day-care and other similar services for children aged from infancy up to six-years-old.

Almost 4,500 early years services were registered nationally at the end of 2017, including 96 newly-approved services.

More than 90% of services assessed under regulations relating to premises, staffing levels, and first aid were reported to be compliant.

But 55% of services were compliant regarding safeguarding health, safety and welfare of a child.

Percentage of incidents notified by region | Source: Tusla

Some 276 complaints were investigated by the Inspectorate - the most common area of complaint referred to the health, welfare and development of a child.

The report said 117 service closures were notified to Tusla last year due to personal, accommodation, or staffing reasons - or having insufficient numbers of children.

The report outlined that there were 204 incidents notified to Tusla.

On one occasion a child's hand was accidentally pierced with another child's Epipen.

Another incident saw a child break their femur after falling off a slide.

There were also 11 instances where a child went missing.

Of the overall number, 64% (131 cases) related to a serious injury to a pre-school child, which required immediate medical treatment.

Source: Tusla

In addition, the 2017 data indicated that full day care services were most likely to have been assessed as having non-compliant regulations, compared to childminders who were the least likely to have been.

Brian Lee is the director of quality assurance at Tusla: "Tusla's Early Years Inspectorate promotes the highest possible standards of care for the youngest members of society in childcare service providers nationwide.

"It is essential that such standards are monitored and maintained so that infants, toddlers and children have optimum opportunities to learn and develop in high-quality professional early years settings.

"I'm delighted to see that the Inspectorate carried out 2,033 inspections in 2017, which resulted in positive improvements in key areas such as health, welfare and development, safety of services, registration, governance, and facilities."

An analysis of 500 randomly selected inspection reports with non-compliances in 2017 found that more than eight out of 10 services took actions, based on the findings of the early years inspector's report to improve their services, prior to publication.

It was also noted that improvements to a further 10% of services would be verified at the next inspection.

More than 47 full-time inspectors were in place at the end of December 2017.