Ms Teresa Heeney:

I want to comment on some of these points, Chair. For the vision of the affordable childcare scheme, ACS, to be realised, it requires significant expansion. We in Early Childhood Ireland certainly have concerns that we do not currently have capacity planning infrastructure or workforce planning infrastructure. The existing early years infrastructure in the country, while already big and growing, is not sufficient to deliver ACS to all of the families to which it hopes to deliver. That requires the Department of Children and Youth Affairs and probably the whole of Government to look at what size they think the sector needs to be to deliver for all of the families it envisions being able to access the affordable childcare scheme. It has to ensure that no existing services are displaced while developing a capacity plan. There is currently no provision for that in the form of new contracts or new entrants into the free pre-school year contract and potentially into the affordable childcare scheme contract.

Currently we have a situation where there could be 25 services in Ennis, for example, and another ten could open without a point of view being taken about assessment of need in Ennis for Government-funded programmes. That all speaks to a need to develop a capacity plan and a definition of what we mean by our early years sector, what we want it to do for children and families and how we want to staff it and ensure that there are sufficient staff. When we have that capacity planning considered and policy developed, that will inform the development of a workforce planning strategy. Currently, while we sit here and talk about there being an issue with the workforce, the reality is there are not sufficient numbers of staff to deliver the affordable childcare scheme. There is a huge crisis of recruitment into the sector and a huge crisis, as we heard earlier, of retention within the sector. The advent of the new regulations, where people have to have a Further Education and Training Awards Council, FETAC, level 5 qualification, has created an acute shortage of new entrants at level 5 but at the same time, because the salaries are so poor at level 7, people are leaving the sector. There is a real problem about whether or not we can actually deliver the affordable childcare scheme because we do not know if we have enough staff. We do not have a workforce planning process.