Ms Karen McCarthy:

Senator Freeman asked us to identify our measures and techniques. We evaluate our training on an ongoing basis. We must start with the teams that have undertaken early childhood environment rating skills, ECERS, and infant toddler environment rating skills, ITERS, training, which are recognised evaluation tools. Mentor support also forms part of the training. We take a baseline measure of quite a number of areas through ECERS, which is for older children, and ITERS, which is for infants, and we measure it again at intervals.

In terms of AIM, Deputy O'Sullivan asked about parents. There has been a change in mindset. The national schools are taking the same path. The school is assigned a support worker and the principal then decides which children would benefit most from their allocation.

We are delivering a number of workshops around the country whereby we target parents' groups with which we are familiar in order to give them more information about the schemes. We are not even at the end of year one with the new model. We provide information on access to supports and making an application. The length of time for decisions in early November and December was unduly long but we have really caught up now and decisions are being made quite quickly. The difficulty is getting information to people. We had a meeting with parents last Thursday night who have children starting in September. We are using a process with them whereby they can make their AIM applications at the moment although they still cannot register for the ECCE programme. At least we are getting the ball rolling and hopefully that will make the waiting time for decisions shorter and allow supports to be put in place for the services as well and make the budgets available to them immediately in order that provision can be made for staff resources. It is a change of thinking and we make sure we give that message. Currently, we have regional co-ordinators available to us. The teams come with us when we do presentations and we try to answer all of the questions or find the answers if we do not have the information to make sure parents have an understanding of the model. We have not had much negativity.