Dr. Fergal Lynch:

What was happening was that we were assessing numbers attending childcare facilities on the basis of what we called a snapshot period of a month, for some schemes. This meant that records, which were mostly manual because this was pre-electronic or computer-based records, were taken for a period of time - a month. When we went back to see what proportion of time children were actually using of the time they were recorded as using, there were differences. That is where the difficulty arose. Under the new system, both the national childcare scheme and ECCE where we are much better at this now, there is a much more specific system for recording attendances and funding childcare providers on that basis.