Ms Frances Byrne:

The Deputy asked about childcare availability in general and particularly around access for children with additional needs.

The availability issue sometimes gets caught up in a Dublin-centric narrative; that is absolutely the case. There are horrendous waiting lists and women will say, with their tongues in their cheeks, that they rang their partners, they rang their mothers and then they rang the crèche when they found out they were expecting because it can be so difficult to find a place. Within a rural context there might be a place available but it could be 45 km down the road. The Deputy knows about the challenges with rural transport better than I do. We come back to a lack of planning and during the Celtic tiger years this was not the case for a couple of years, including in the area of Dublin I live in. However, by and large if four year-olds did not land out of the sky and the Department of Education knew there were lots of houses being built in an area then it had the demographics, it planned accordingly and, by and large, it built schools. That does not happen with early years education and there is not the same kind of planning.

Before the most recent election Early Childhood Ireland had three asks, one of which was for a single agency. We were pleased to see that in the programme for Government and to get the support of Sinn Féin and other parties for it in the run-up to the formation of that Government. It is critical so that we can have proper planning and oversight for us as a society. More and more money is coming in and we have an unprecedented €221 million promised this year in a full year, which is welcome. We want that to continue. There needs to be transparency around that and we need to have better planning in the availability of places. We also need to know that we will have universal quality. In the Scandinavian model, as the Deputy has recognised, people understandably focus on affordability. The Scandinavian model also guarantees a level of quality and curriculum delivery to every child, regardless of his or her location, be it rural or urban, and regardless of their parental income. In Ireland, we have almost 30,000 educators who are delivering quality every day but we do not have the same universality. We cannot guarantee that because we are not investing enough and because of the issues the Deputy is well aware of, including staff turnover. Staffing, quality of staff and a continuity of relationship between highly qualified staff and young children is a critical factor in delivering quality. We know that if we have high staff turnover and churning within the sector, where people are staying in the sector but moving settings, that is bad for the babies and children in those settings.

I will turn to the access issue the Deputy raised. This is one of the positive stories about our sector and there is a wonderful programme called the access and inclusion model We love our acronyms in the early years sector so it is called AIM. It is only delivered through the early childhood care and education scheme, ECCE, and we would love to see it extended. It is one of the commitments that has been given in Partnership for the Public Good, the funding model report I referred to in the presentation earlier. We warmly welcome that but that needs to be extended. Although we are not a direct parent support service, we heard from parents as recently as last week who were concerned that their three year-old who is doing so well in the 38 weeks in preschool is going to miss the transition to school, and this includes older children as well.

There is a discussion to be had about the model and about extending it, and leaks are starting to come out about looking at that in the context of budget 2023. I am putting this in a light way, although I do not mean to be light-hearted about it. However, it is such a good news story about the sector. There are administrative difficulties within it, and there are assessments and we hear from members every year that they have difficulties waiting for money to come through. You do not get to hear this often but providers can end up out of pocket too but they sort of take it on the chin and build it into their finances. They should not have to do that because they do not want to have to turn way children with additional needs. That programme is valued and on the hard days, because of the lack of investment and so on, the sector can be proud that it has delivered it in recent years and that it has helped children and families. It has been an inclusive mark of the sector. It is a positive programme but it needs a lot more support.