Ms Teresa Heeney:

I thank Deputy Currie for her question. She is right: while we will always welcome increased investment, and Early Childhood Ireland will always acknowledge the improvement in early years and the levels of investment, the budget did not point to the direction of travel for the next five years. That certainly was not clear to us. We know the national action plan is forthcoming but it is not clear to us what is within the scope of this plan and if it will be about affordability and about access.

We found it to be very much a stand-still budget and in that regard, we feel the problems we are experiencing will continue until it is clear that something significant is going to change. The budget will not help with the ongoing issue of staff recruitment and retention, which everyone knows about. There is a triangle of issues. Capacity and accessibility is an issue, quality is an issue and affordability is an issue. It is more than a triangle now, as I see it. Staffing is key to all those issues. If we are going to invest in early years education, we are wasting our money if we are not investing in quality services. We do not want children going into warehouses, where someone watches them on CCTV. We want services where children can grow and develop and achieve the kinds of changes in their material lives they get because their early childhood education is of a high quality.

At the moment, we have a 25% annual staff turnover across the country, which we should all be really concerned about because it is significant. If one in four teachers were changing in the staff group of a primary school, there would be a high level of concern. In some parts of Dublin there is a turnover rate of 52% and that is scandalous. It is simply not good enough for those children.