Ms Moira O'Mara:

The Department of Children and Youth Affairs was established in June 2011 as the first senior Ministry for children and young people. Its mission statement is to lead the effort to improve the outcomes for children and young people in Ireland. Therefore, by its nature, the Department has a cross-departmental focus and remit. I will outline some of the key areas that might be of interest to the committee with regard to what we are doing to tackle child poverty. The Department is currently developing a high-level national policy framework for children and young people from birth to the age of 25. This is expected to include inputs from all relevant Departments and to be approved by the Government later this year. It will be supported by three detailed strategies which will focus on specific and overlapping age cohorts: children in the early years from birth to the age of six, children from birth to the age of 18 and young people from the age of 12 to the age of 25. This reflects the different emphases at different stages of young people's lives and the key transitional points between each stage. It is intended to have a single implementation plan which will be monitored and reported on to the Government over the lifetime of the three strategies from 2013 to 2018.

The issue of child poverty will be addressed by the Department through its policy framework by linking in with key Departments such as the Departments of Social Protection and Education and Skills, both of which are represented at today's meeting. In addition, the Department oversees a number of policy areas and forms of service provision which help to address the cycle of poverty. I will speak briefly about them in a moment. Early childhood care and education is provided through the free preschool year programme. Subsidised child care is provided to low-income parents. The Department is responsible for the National Educational Welfare Board and for youth work programmes. It encourages inter-agency work and implements prevention and early intervention programmes in areas of high disadvantage to break the cycle of poverty. This has the effect of encouraging more effective service provision at national level in the longer term. The free preschool year and early childhood care and education programme was introduced in January 2010 as a universal free programme to provide equal access to early education for all children, particularly the most disadvantaged who might otherwise not attend preschool. It has a take-up of 95% and currently costs €175 million per annum. It is availed of by approximately 66,000 children at the moment.

The Department implements two child care schemes which subsidise child care places for low-income parents. First, the community child care subvention scheme is operated through approximately 900 community child care services. Some 25,000 children receive subsidised child care under the scheme. The weekly subsidy - €95 for full day care - is paid to such services in respect of parents who are in receipt of social welfare payments such as family income support and who also have medical cards. A lower subsidy of €50 per week is paid to services in respect of parents who have medical or GP visit cards. The community child care subvention scheme costs approximately €50 million per annum. Second, the child care education and training scheme subsidises child care places in approximately 1,450 community and privately operated child care services. This scheme is open to qualifying FÁS and VEC trainees and students who are required to contribute up to €25 per week for a full day care place. Some 2,500 full-time equivalent places are available at any time under the scheme. It is estimated that this equates to some 8,000 students and trainees benefitting from the provision of places each year. Obviously, not everybody needs a full day care place, or a place for the full year. The child care education and training scheme costs approximately €20 million per annum.

The Department is responsible for the National Educational Welfare Board, which is due to become part of the new child and family support agency when it is established later this year. The board is responsible for supporting regular school attendance and advising and assisting schools, children and parents in cases of attendance or behavioural issues. The board works with between 8,000 and 10,000 children and families each year. Some €9 million is being provided to it in 2013. The board implements the educational welfare service and is responsible for the school completion programme, which supports 124 projects in 472 primary and 225 post-primary schools, most of which are linked to the DEIS programme. The aim of the programme is to keep young people in formal education until they have completed the senior cycle or equivalent and to improve the quality of their educational participation and attainment. Each project under the programme is tailored locally. The projects provide in-school, after-school and holiday-time interventions to approximately 38,000 targeted children and young people throughout the country who are at risk of leaving school early. This year's provision for the school completion programme is €26.5 million.

The third area for which the National Educational Welfare Board is responsible is the home school community liaison scheme, which is a school-based preventative strategy that targets children and young people who are at risk. As the 408 co-ordinators under the scheme are seconded teachers, their staffing costs are borne by the Department of Education and Skills. They work with parents, teachers and local voluntary and statutory groups to tackle issues that impinge on learning. Rather than providing support directly to children, they tend to favour more indirect forms of support. The National Educational Welfare Board is working to integrate the three services I have mentioned under the "one child, one team, one plan" model. It is intended to bring the three services together as a single seamless service for children, young people and families. The unified service will record assessments of need, provide intervention plans and take inputs into those plans from all three services.

The Department also has a significant youth work programme, which supports the youth sector in providing effective non-formal education and development opportunities to young people, thereby allowing them to enhance and develop their personal and social skills and competencies. Some €53 million is available for these universal and targeted schemes this year, of which €40 million is targeted at more disadvantaged youth. Youth work programmes and services are delivered to some 400,000 young people by approximately 1,400 youth workers. We also have a volunteer base of approximately 40,000. The Department also funds the development of youth cafes, of which there are approximately 75 across the country. These successful interventions are provided to young people in an alcohol-free environment. Another major concern of the Department is to promote inter-agency working at local level. To date, we have established children's services committees in 16 counties. These committees are important because they bring statutory and non-statutory service providers in local areas together to adopt a co-ordinated approach to their planning and delivery. This results in more effective service delivery as well as being more cost-effective. The work that has been done to date is being consolidated this year by the Department. We intend to standardise the process and, subject to Government approval, roll out children's services committees as a national system from next year.

In budget 2013, the Government announced two initiatives to support children and families that are being implemented by the Department of Children and Youth Affairs. The first of these involves an area-based response to child poverty. It has been given funding of €2.5 million this year, to increase to approximately €5 million in each of the subsequent years up to 2016. The initiative has been developed jointly by the Department and the Tánaiste's office. It continues and builds on work that was previously done by a previous initiative of the office of the Minister for children, which has been delivered in partnership with Atlantic Philanthropies since 2007.

This initiative, known as the prevention and early intervention programme, PEIP, tested a number of service interventions for children and families in Tallaght, Ballymun and Darndale. It was essentially the pilot phase of the area-based approach to child poverty. The programmes in the three areas in question have been evaluated and the impact on outcomes for children in an Irish context assessed.

The work of the prevention and early intervention programme will be continued in the new initiative, which will focus on the programmes that have been proven and found to be cost-effective. Commencing later this year, the initiative will be rolled out to a number of additional sites where there are high levels of disadvantage and poor outcomes for children. We also hope to begin the process of mainstreaming the proven and cost-effective programmes at national level. I hope this process will be assisted by the new child and family support agency when it is established later this year. It is hoped the agency will lead the charge on mainstreaming. The Department has been working on implementing the initiative since January and is being assisted by an interdepartmental project team. It is hoped to launch the application process for the initiative in April and, if possible, have projects selected by the end of June. The three sites which were under the PEIP are expected to continue in the new initiative, with the focus, as I noted, on proven and cost-effective programme delivery.

The second initiative announced in budget 2013 is a school age child care scheme, which will have a provision of €14 million in a full year. This funding is being transferred from the Vote of the Department of Social Protection to the Vote of the Department of Education and Skills. Work is under way between the two Departments to introduce the scheme, which will provide more than 6,000 school age child care places to primary schoolchildren of targeted social protection clients who are entering employment. Similar to existing schemes, parents will receive subsidised after-school care, resulting in their contribution being limited to approximately €18 per week. We hope to pilot the scheme from next month and have it fully operational from September. In addition to it being an additional scheme operated by the Department, we are also planning for it to fit into the continuum of our existing child care supports for low income parents in order that they can move from one scheme to another, as appropriate.