Dr. Niall Muldoon:

I thank Deputy Murnane O'Connor. With regard to education, she asked what the procedure is if a board of management changes processes within a school. An area we had hoped would work out much better than it has is the student-parent charter, or the school community charter as it is now being called, which would have provided for more engagement between students, parents and the whole school community to agree processes for procedures, plans and targets for the school. That was the whole idea of the new charter. That was meant to bring the whole school community closer together so that parents did not feel that processes and procedures were being imposed on the school and they had no say in it. That has not come to fruition yet. At the moment the procedure would be that if parents are not happy, they have to complain to the school, to the board of management. If they are not happy with how the complaint is dealt with, they can come to us. We would much rather prevent that happening. That is where the student charter, the whole community charter, needs to come into being. We were promised it would happen in this legislative term. It is to be hoped there might be still a little bit of time left to make that happen. That would result in a situation in which parents and students would have a voice in the whole school, and that is the way it needs to be because that is how you create co-operation, collaboration, communication and things become more "us" rather than "them" imposing on us. That is the future.

In regard to the HSE, staffing and such matters, I get frustrated at this time with the constant of the moratorium. We are one of the richest countries in Europe. We are well up there in the world, yet we are being told we have to tighten our belt all the time in the places where children are vulnerable. That is the piece I get very cross and frustrated about. I am now ten years in this job. We have known we have needed psychologists and more social workers since then. We should be well down that path. We should be perhaps 10% or 20% short, but at the moment we are between 50% and 70% short in our staffing levels in certain places. We need to start moving forward on that soon. The moratorium is very unfortunate at a time when we seem to have financial surpluses. The choices that are being made are not for the children. That is the piece we said at the top of Uncertain Times. Children are fighting for the attention of the Government and the Government is saying we cannot deal with children because we have to deal with homelessness, housing and the cost of living. Children are at the centre of every one of those titles. If we fix it for the child, we fix it for everybody. The lack of staffing within the HSE is a symptom of us not focusing on children. I will come back to early learning. Ms Ward will take that.

The other piece was the mental health service. Radical and brave change is what we needed. What we have is not even tinkering at this point. We hired two new staff members at a higher level to run the child and youth mental health service. That is why I reiterated in the speech that we still have not given regulation to the Mental Health Commission to regulate CAMHS, to inspect it and to be able to follow up, and giving it the resources to do that. That was recommended 18 months ago in the interim report of the Mental Health Commission. It was promised 12 months ago when the final report was issued, and it still has not even been moved forward, never mind actually implemented. That is a very simple and small thing. We also made a number of other recommendations we need, such as the ring-fencing of the children's mental health budget so that we know exactly what we are spending on CAMHS and what we are spending on children within mental health. That is a record I have been repeating for many years and none of those changes has been made. We have been tinkering around the edges of mental health services for children. We saw last week Deputy Cairns saying that within primary care, where we need to move upstream and stop children from going into CAMHS, there is a four-year waiting list in Cork alone. We do not have the national figures for that. We have not done anything for our children in the mental health area. That is a real sadness for me.

Ms Ward will answer the question regarding early learning.