Ms Mary McLoughlin:

It is not that Síolta and Aistear will go away, and they are very valid documents. We hope the first mentors will be in place and starting to work with community child care services by September, and the practice toolkit will be in place by then. Work has started and people have been recruited from the sector to help with the work. Deputy Conway mentioned how this applies to children from birth to six years.

In the legislation that went through before Christmas, we included the power to inspect after-school facilities. We have to go through a process. Children in after-school facilities are not the same as babies or toddlers in care. There is a lot of work to be done and we must have a major consultation on it. We are doing the initial work on it. I am not sure that Aistear of itself will be part of after-school services. We want people to focus very much on play. While the overall themes of Aistear might be desirable, I do not think we would see after-school services as being curriculum-based in quite the same way. While there might be connections, I do not think it would be quite the same thing.

In terms of a high-quality service, we are working at the moment with the city and county child care committees, CCCs, and the voluntary organisations. The Minister mentioned that earlier. The priority is to ensure that we have a national quality support service and not a small number of mentors who are only accessible to some people. At the moment the CCCs in particular provide a huge amount of local support in terms of training and active support for services. They visit services. We need to make sure we do not lose that and that what mentors do is both supported by and in turn supports the work of the CCCs and also the voluntary organisations. We hope that within three or four weeks the Minister might be able to make a statement about the overall quality of the service rather than just mentoring per se.

The learner fund and the training programme were raised. There has been some delay and it is the intention that any eligible training provider would be able to apply to provide the training. We would like all of the work to be done online. A process is required in order to build the system. We expect the system to be open for applications in mid-March for anybody who needs to upgraded to FETAC Level 5 – I assure Deputy Conway that it is level 5 – and the team leaders in the free preschool year will move from level five to level six. We are getting a lot of queries. The situation remains the same for anybody who has already been told that their qualification is equivalent to one of those levels for any other purpose by the Department.

We are dealing with childminding in the context of the strategy. The Minister said this morning that we put €10 million over ten years into the childminding advisory officers with a very specific purpose of getting them to voluntarily notify. They were offered a €15,000 income limit but they did not voluntarily notify. The issue is how we bring them on board. The suggestion has been made that we would include them in the schemes, but that is not always going to be effective. It is not as simple as taking the regulations and applying them. There is a lot of work to be done.

In most countries, certainly in the European countries with which we work at the moment, childminders are generally outside the sector. Very few countries are like Scotland, where childminders come within the system. It is apparent in the European group of which we are a member that it is an ongoing problem for many countries. Childminders are a very important resource but the CCCs do provide ongoing training and supports and they engage them in the networks. Grants are available which go through the CCCs. There is a lot of liaison with childminders and a lot of work with them but there is a lot of work to be done on how we make them part of a formal setting because there is much indication that it is not where they want to be. It is an issue we have to resolve.