Mary Seery Kearney (Fine Gael) | Oireachtas source

I have a couple of questions and comments. One of the banes of one's life in managing a childcare service is managing staff. There are instances where people are out sick, services have to be compliant with the Organisation of Working Time Act so staff need breaks, people need to take holidays and so on. There is a one to three ratio in a baby room and if a room is a certain size, a provider can have so many baby places. One can move up through the rooms and make a bare calculation of the staff needed but this will be lower than the number of staff actually needed to be in compliance with the need for breaks, relief and so on. The funding is following the child and one of the requisites is flexibility for the parents, which we want to encourage, but the childcare provider still has to provide employment in compliance with employment law. There must be a predictable contract of employment with predictable working hours and so on but how is that funded? When the Department sits down to figure it out, how does it fund for all of that, rather than putting a per-hour rate on a child? How does it fund for those sorts of things? This is where challenges arise in the running of services, as well as from the cost-of-living increases.