Ms Frances Byrne:

I thank the Senator for her questions. I hope I remember and address them all. Ms Heeney and I will cover them between us. On the DEIS model and equal participation, we keep asking people to say "DEIS-like" or "DEIS type" because we are very conscious that, given the way our sector is set up and the various different service models within it, there are disadvantaged children in settings in areas that may well look affluent on the face of it or that may well be affluent. One of the positive things to say about the sector is that it is one of the places where children mix very well regardless of their family's income. We absolutely and completely support the equal participation model. There was an important event last week where Pobal launched its brilliant new data. It was really heartening to hear the assistant secretary in the Department say that these ground level data will absolutely help but that the universality of subsidies, the system and supports will remain. That is the only word of warning. We will watch it very carefully but entirely support it. A teacher or principal in a DEIS school or one who is interested in and alert to disadvantaged children will say that DEIS is not always perfect. The other thing we are very conscious of is that children have no agency over their lives. Parents may lose their jobs or acquire a disability. Circumstances can change. We completely and warmly welcome it.

I will address something that moves me. It was not the subject of the Senator's next question but it was built into her questions. We have lifted the better data language from Partnership for the Public Good and make no apologies for doing so. We agree with that report. If it did not before, the Department now knows more about every setting that has signed up for core funding because of the volume of data required for the applications and so on. We believe there are better ways of organising and responding to need. We have thought this for a long time, as the Senator will know, and we lobbied hard to get a single agency into the programme for Government.

We were delighted to see it and to see other parties that did not end up in government supporting it before the most recent general election. That would certainly help to gather and understand data better. It is about the gathering and using of the data. The Senator mentioned the census. I may get clobbered publicly for saying this, and I live in an area where this did not happen so I hope no one will give out to me, but if a five-year-old needs a place in school, by and large, he or she will get it, because somebody in the Department of Education is looking at that census. There is no similar system at the moment for early years and that is why we looked for the single agency.

The other reason Early Childhood Ireland looked for it, which was the main reason at the time, was that we believe bringing everything under one roof would absolutely help for better planning and better organisation of finances but also unify reporting, apart from on the inspection side, and bring the reporting for the programmes and for financial audits under one roof. At the moment, and this is why we were able to make the argument, settings can report up to seven State agencies and Departments, particularly if they also make food. It can be different information but sometimes it is duplicated. We have suggested technological solutions and there are issues about that, but there has to be a better way to do this. To be fair, the Department has tried and talked about it. The problem is that people have their own ways of doing things, going back years, and if a new system is introduced, that can be difficult.

On a related issue, the Department has signalled clearly that the long-term goal is an amalgamation of the funding programmes, but what Early Childhood Ireland is looking for, long before we get there, is that in respect of the capacity aspect relating to core funding, with which everyone, even those who complain about core funding, agrees, we have to get away from a system where both parents and providers are impacted financially if, for example, a granny or grandad who has not seen their grandchild since Covid is up from Cork and in Louth every Wednesday, or whatever might suit the family, and after a number of weeks, there is a text message about this not being the deal that was signed up for under the national childcare scheme. When we describe that to our international colleagues, they look at us in disbelief.

We need to move away from that. We have to go back to capacity. It has an impact, in particular, on services that have very low numbers of children because they are rural, for example, or perhaps they live on a tiny estate and children go only from that estate. We need to get away from this attendance rules nonsense. There has to be a better way. There has to be financial accountability, to which we have no objection, but we have to be much more child centred in our overall approach. That is what we mean by the capacity issue, easing the burden and amalgamating the rules, which would help tick a number of boxes.