Ms Teresa Heeney:

I thank the committee for the opportunity to have a very good discussion today to tease out a lot of the issues. To summarise, and I will not repeat what Dr. Feely has said, ongoing investment in equal start is really important if we want to support these children who we are speaking about today. Alongside the ongoing investment in equal start, we need to invest in affordability measures as well. As we know, all families can experience poverty at different times in their lives. We certainly recommend that the attendance rules I spoke out about earlier, which really have the capacity to negatively impact on families and particularly these families, are reviewed by Government. Not only do they create a huge administrative burden, they could lead to discrimination where services might be discouraged from including or offering places in their services to families where there are parental capacity issues, unstable housing, disability, children from the Travelling community or transport problems. We do not want that to happen, so if the attendance rules could be reviewed, that would rule out some of those issues.

As I said earlier, we need to have a plan to target the childcare deserts where children simply do not have access to places. They are not getting access to that protective early years service at a very young age. I make that point again. Most definitely, we have to take a very cold look at our workforce for early years. We have to have a plan for how will we make sure we have a professional, well-qualified workforce to work in services in five years' time because at the moment, it is very hard for services. We hear our members talk about the stresses of a Sunday when the phone rings and they need to close rooms the next day because they literally have no staff and nobody to cover the rooms. That is really not good for children who need to get into those services on a Monday morning. The idea of the workforce is not an abstract concept. It is very real because these people have a very meaningful role in the lives of children.