Katherine Zappone (Dublin South West, Independent) | Oireachtas source

I acknowledge the Deputy's initial comments. I am very willing and happy to participate in any of the decisions that the business committee is now engaged in. With regard to the parliamentary question, I am aware that providing care for children below the age of three results in higher costs to services than caring for older children. This is as a result of the legally required adult-child ratio, which is as low as 1:3 in the case of the youngest children.

Some services providing this care have been impacted by the full implementation of the Child Care Act 1991 (Early Years Services) Regulations 2016, which requires that all staff should hold a minimum FETAC level 5 qualification when working directly with children. In several cases, services have been utilising staff working on community employment, CE, schemes to count towards their required ratios. Under the regulations, this will only be allowed when the individual in question has the necessary qualification.

In order to assist the services in addressing this challenge, I recently announced that €1 million of additional funding will be made available to child care providers who have been facilitating the training of community employment scheme workers to ensure that regulatory changes do not impact on service delivery or the availability of childcare places.

In preparation for the implementation of the Child Care Act 1991 (Early Years Services) Regulations 2016, which the Deputy's question refers to, child care committees Ireland were commissioned by my Department to investigate the impact of new child care regulations on community childcare providers.

This research indicated that the vast majority of services would not face financial hardship as a result of changes required under the regulations. However, it did find that some services had come to rely on community employment scheme workers and I determined that these services should be provided additional funding to enable them to recruit and retain qualified staff to work alongside their CE scheme participants.

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