Frances Fitzgerald (Dublin Mid West, Fine Gael) | Oireachtas source

To respond immediately to the question about Oberstown, I have received agreement from the Department of Public Expenditure and Reform for funding for a campus manager. The position will be advertised this month. Some legal advice had to be sought on the precise wording of the advertisement, as we will be introducing legislation during the year to provide for one campus. It is important that a campus manager be in place. The Commission for Public Service Appointments will be advertising this position shortly and, hopefully, the appointment can be made quickly after that.

I will bring members of the joint committee up to date on what progress has been made recently on the substantial responsibilities which fall within the remit of the Department of Children and Youth Affairs. I propose to mention the child and family agency, early childhood care and education, Children First, the area-based response to child poverty and the Irish Youth Justice Service, as well as my Department's youth affairs role in the recent Presidency of the Council of the European Union. I will be glad to discuss other areas of my Department's work in the subsequent discussion.

I introduced the Child and Family Agency Bill in the Dáil yesterday. I acknowledge the assistance provided by the Office of Parliamentary Counsel in bringing this particular part of the process to a conclusion. The establishment of the child and family agency reflects the commitment in the programme for Government to fundamentally reform the delivery of child protection services by removing child welfare and protection from the Health Service Executive, HSE, and creating a dedicated child welfare and protection agency while reforming the model of service delivery and improving accountability to the Dáil. We are going further, however, than just child welfare and protection. The new agency will bring together a range of functions relating to children and families which will, in turn, bring a previously unknown level of focus to issues affecting these groups. The aim is to identify problems and provide supports at the earliest possible stage. The chief executive officer-designate and most of the agency senior management team are in place. The Government also approved the appointment of Ms Norah Gibbons as the first chairman of the board of the agency.

The work involved in ensuring a seamless transition to a new agency should not be underestimated.

It involves the disaggregation of budget and services for children and families from the HSE, negotiations with unions and overseeing a range of transitional issues relating to the transfer of undertakings. It is a very large public sector body with 4,000 staff and a budget of more than €570 million. It is a very ambitious programme. I pay tribute to the staff of the Department, particularly Jim Breslin, the Secretary General, and Gordon Jeyes for the huge amount of work that has been undertaken in this disaggregation of budget. Obviously, it is a huge task to separate out the budget and personnel. Deputies will be interested to learn that in carrying out the disaggregation, we have discovered that the budget lines relating to children were very diffuse and it was not always clear what money was spent on children. Disaggregation has enabled us to carry out an exercise clarifying that and we have received good co-operation from the HSE. There is due diligence in place so that at the end of the process, we can go back if there is any doubt or ambivalence or if people want to raise questions and have another look.

I have already briefed the Chair on the early childhood care and education programme and the extra provision of €11.5 million for the after-school child care scheme to support parents in employment. A total of 6,000 places will be available when the scheme is fully rolled out. The Department of Social Protection is responsible for determining eligibility. This funding is expected to increase to €14 million per annum when the scheme is fully rolled out. I pay tribute to some of the schools who are already doing this and some of the services already providing after-school care. Clearly, an after-school service is very helpful to parents and in the take up of employment, education and training.

I have gone into detail about the preschool quality agenda which has been underway for more than a year and which was thrown into stark relief by the "Prime Time Investigates" programme on standards in preschools. The publication on-line of preschool inspection reports has commenced. All new inspection reports undertaken from 1 July will be published when they are ready. They take a number of weeks, the provider is given a chance to give feedback and the reports are published as soon as new reports are ready. In the meantime, the 2,000 older inspection reports are being published on-line. I emphasise that these are public documents and are available under the freedom of information legislation. It is absolutely right that they are available on-line and that parents can access them. Any good provider will make them available to parents when they ask and I would encourage parents and providers to have a discussion about their inspections and for providers to tell parents if they have made changes that are not reflected. Given recent publicity, any parent will want to know the status of inspections for their preschool service. In September, we will introduce registration for new services. It will no longer be enough to notify; one must be registered. The new national quality standards will be launched in September, will become part of the inspection regime and will replace the current guidance. We will, therefore, have regulations and the new national quality standards. Again, I pay tribute to my staff, including Ms Mary McLoughlin, who is here, and the staff of the HSE who have been working on these new quality standards for child care services. We need different standards, regardless of whether the care is part time, sessional or full time or provided by a childminder. A huge amount of work has been done and we will ensure that inspections from some point in September will replace the guidance currently available. The inspections will be more comprehensive and more about the quality of care and the inspectors will be then in a position to continue their inspections but to have far more regard to these new national quality standards than to the previous guidance.

I have briefed the committee on Children First on a number of occasions. There are very complex legal issues involved. I thank the Attorney General who has been very involved with the Department and its legal advisers in doing a huge amount of work in this regard. Much progress has been made and we are very close to finalising the heads of Bill. When one is introducing criminal sanctions for people not reporting, many issues arise about what it is intended to report and the responsibilities of organisations. Again, I thank the committee for the work done by the Chair but it has meant there is a huge amount of legal work to be done in teasing out the precise responsibilities of mandated professionals and organisations. Good progress has been made and a huge amount of work has been done. This was promised by previous Governments many years ago. I have brought it as the heads of a Bill to the committee on one occasion. We will bring the second heads of Bill to Government as soon as possible. There will be no delay but we are working on complex issues.

In respect of the Irish Youth Justice Service, I know the committee had an opportunity yesterday to discuss with the Ombudsman for Children the position relating to Oberstown. We are having discussions with both trade unions and meetings were held last week. There was a belief or hope that we would be able to transfer some of the beds currently being used by the girls' section to the boys' section. That has not proved possible for a variety of reasons. We are now pursuing a twin-track approach of recruiting permanent staff. In the meantime, we will see if we can use agency staff to increase the bed space. If members wish to ask further questions about that, I would be very happy to answer them. The capital project is going ahead. I have been in touch with the OPW and the Minister of State, Deputy Brian Hayes. Obviously, that tender is being completed. Tenders are always sensitive and I do not wish to comment further except to say that the project is underway and the beds will be available next year.

I have not had the opportunity up to now to talk about my work during our Presidency. I will bring the committee up to date with the work I did as a Minister in the Council of Youth Ministers. My priorities related to the contribution of quality youth work to young people's development, well-being and social inclusion and the potential contribution of youth work to youth employment and the Europe 2020 jobs and growth agenda. This is particularly important at present given that we have the youth guarantee and funding of €8 billion is becoming available within the EU over the next two years. Ireland can draw down from that. It is extremely important that youth work services benefit from that and that they are in a position to put forward proposals aimed at supporting the young people with whom they are in contact - often the most marginalised - to make sure they can access education, training or work. It is important that the skills young people acquire through youth work be recognised in the work programmes which will get funding under the youth guarantee. Some of the initiatives that arose as a result of our work during the Presidency include a new EU working group on quality youth work. There is a better relationship between the Council of Youth Ministers and other Council of Minister configurations. It is very important to mainstream youth work into the work of other Ministers and Commissioners. We need to recognise that youth work can make a contribution to the 2020 growth and jobs agenda. It has a very legitimate place in supporting young people to get back into work.

We want more co-ordination. I hosted an EU expert round table in June bringing together the youth sector, employers and business leaders, academics, the European Youth Forum and representatives of member states to explore the contribution of youth work to young people's employability. We launched what is called the Dublin Declaration, which outlined the principles about which I have been speaking here. That was very important. The main point that young people and representatives of youth work organisations made at that meeting was that they had not had the opportunity to meet with people in quite the same way. That mix of people from business, the academic world and youth work organisations came together to discuss how they can work together. For example, the National Youth Council of Ireland and representatives of Accenture attended; we brought together business and youth work organisations. The Dublin Chamber of Commerce recently expressed interest in working with youth organisations. That type of collaboration could be very important in terms of job creation for young people and making sure the work of our youth services is recognised and valued by employers.

Much of the work that young people are exposed to during youth work is about skills of confidence, building self-esteem and preparing to re-enter the jobs market. We also held a conference and consulted with 11,000 people across the EU to ensure the voice of young people was part of the conferences we held during our Presidency. Greece and Lithuania will continue that work with the theme of social inclusion and trying to further some of the conclusions we reached during our work.

I thank the Chairman for his continuing co-operation and interest in my Department's area and programme of work. There is much work to do during the lifetime of this Government and that is continuing. I look forward to continuing to work towards the very challenging goals for children and youth affairs which have been set out in the programme for Government.