Ms Frances Byrne:

Early Childhood Ireland, like our colleagues in the Children's Rights Alliance, welcomes the opportunity to present to the committee on the theme of child poverty. My main focus will be on the national childcare scheme. We also wish to bring to the attention to the committee an important issue which we believe is burgeoning and which will have a particular potential effect on disadvantaged children.

As the leading support organisation in our sector, Early Childhood Ireland welcomed the national childcare scheme from the beginning. We see it as a mechanism through which our system of childcare can be transformed to meet the needs of all young children and their families. The scheme has been described as Ireland's pathway to quality, accessible, affordable early learning and care and school-aged childcare. As members will know, it was intended that the previous childcare programmes would be replaced with a single, streamlined and more user-friendly scheme. The scheme's objectives, to improve outcomes for children and support lifelong learning, to reduce poverty, to facilitate labour market activation and to reduce the cost of childcare, are worthy. As the committee will be aware, however, the intention to bring the previous schemes under the national childcare scheme, NCS, was reversed, meaning that in some families there are children with different subsidies from one another, even though the family circumstances may have remained unchanged and the family may be in disadvantage. This is highly regrettable but, in hindsight, seems inevitable. While the policy objectives of the scheme are not dissimilar to such schemes in other jurisdictions, they are very challenging given their somewhat contradictory nature. There is in place a work-study test and a sponsorship system which, although improved in the recent budget, remains unwieldy for families and childcare providers. As members of the committee will know, it has left some families with reduced subsidies. We suggest that the Government needs to prioritise the poverty reduction objective, especially at a time when it intends increasing investment, which is very welcome. This would help the most disadvantaged families and meet the wider objective to reduce overall child poverty levels in Ireland. The mechanics of how this would work would need to be agreed but we hope that the review of the national childcare scheme will address this issue.

The second issue we wish to bring to the committee's attention is that, as many committee members will know, we operate a national information service for childcare providers for our members, and in the past few weeks, particularly since the sector reopened for the fresh 2021-22 year, we have heard of increasing numbers of baby room closures. We are monitoring this very carefully as we are concerned that there is a hidden crisis burgeoning in our sector. Our belief is that this is happening now as the Government winds back the employment wage subsidy scheme and providers are facing difficult economic decisions which were postponed by the Covid-19 pandemic. The closures themselves are of concern but this is also a key capacity metric about which no data are being collected. The issue of closures impacts every family but if we are facing into decreasing provision for very young children, that will have a particular effect on those who are disadvantaged. They may have a sponsorship agreement but not be able to find a place in an early years setting, thus reducing access to important early intervention for children. Early Childhood Ireland asks members of the committee to request that the Department of Children, Equality, Disability, Integration and Youth begin immediately to gather data on room closures in real time and to use those data to develop a robust policy response in order that all families, especially those who are disadvantaged, may have access to quality early years care and education.

I hope I have not run over my time. I thank the Chair and the members of the committee for the invitation to present to it and thank the clerk and her colleagues for all their assistance.