Anne Rabbitte (Galway East, Fianna Fail) | Oireachtas source

I thank the Deputy. He spoke about my Department actively engaging with other Departments. I believe that is what I am doing. If one can imagine a spider's web, I am stuck in the middle of it and I am trying to work across government and Departments and with all Ministers to find gaps where they exist in the system and address how it works or does not work. I referred earlier to play and language support, PALS, centres, which provide early year intervention for children with autism. Everybody working on a PALS site has to have a Teaching Council number. If a child is out for more than three days, it will lose its funding. We are talking about children aged two and a half to five and a half years. They are expected to be registered as part of the childcare programme and they are also regulated by Tusla. There are approximately 24 such centres in the country. It does not make any sense that there is that level of hierarchy in the delivery of supports for 25 early years providers while at the same time there are 4,200 childcare providers around the country.

What I am saying is that I am working with all Departments. I am working with the early years sector, special education, education and higher education. For me, it is all about the transition planning when a child leaves the early years sector and goes into national school, leaves national school and goes into secondary school, or leaves secondary school and goes on to third level. That is where the gaps are identified and that is where there are the blocks in respect of accessing places within education and higher education. It is about trying to tease that out together. Yes, there are good working relationships, but there are challenges within it as well and I am trying to iron that out. I believe that when I move fully to the Department of Children, Equality, Disability, Integration and Youth I will challenge every Department on the rights of equality of access for all children on a rights-based approach. Children have the right. At present, I am still in the Department of Health. When I move to the other Department I will be challenging Departments wearing an entirely different lens, and particularly with regard to the education space of early years, primary and post-primary.

The Deputy asked about recruitment. He is correct that it takes nine months. If the section 38 and 39 organisations are advertising they can do it in a shorter timeframe. It should not take nine months. It should involve the basics. It should involve child protection, CORU registration and the relevant qualification. It should not be necessary to go through 31 different processes to be recruited to a post. There has to be a swifter way of doing it. It is one of the avenues I am talking about with regard to the targeted national recruitment. The Deputy can see it in his area, although he might not be aware of it yet. A campaign is being put together in CHO 4. If it is a successful campaign, we will roll it out to all the CHOs throughout the country. It is to attract more people to it and more trained therapists. We are also looking at the apprenticeship programme for therapists. We are looking at various levels of getting people in as opposed to waiting for that nine months. I talked about the CORU piece to bring them in as an assistant and then qualify them while they are on the job. Again, it is trying to break down that barrier of the nine months.

I agree summer provision is not working and it has not worked. The let-down is what I hear daily from everybody. An awful lot of money is being put into that system. I genuinely believe in the proposals I have made, similar to the Deputy's, regarding using our therapists, our intellectual disability nurses, the trainee teachers and using everybody. It should not be just one model to deliver support to families during the summer months. The Deputy knows about the Rainbow Club in Cork. Karen O'Mahony could have it filled every day of the week if she had the support and proper funding to enable her to do it. She supports 1,000 children but she is only on a grant of €55,000. That is not good enough, yet she is supporting so many families. There are many more like Karen who are available to do it. We need to bring them into the circle as well as part of the July provision and support and reward them. We need everybody supporting us. It should no longer be just the four weeks. It should be summer provision as opposed to just a July one.

I find the CAMHS piece concerning within the disability space. If a child is diagnosed with autism and re-presents needing additional support, it is about access to mental health care and access to primary care. An integrated access to care policy needs to be refreshed within the HSE piece. Disability can no longer be just sitting out there. We were told when we did the reform that the 91 CDNT teams would sit predominantly over the 96 primary care units, and the reason for that was the integrated access to care. Unfortunately, as many of us know, it is not working right across the CHOs.