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

Pobal administers both the early childhood care and education, ECCE, and targeted early learning and care and school age childcare programmes on behalf of my Department.

There have been no delays to ECCE standard capitation programme payments. All eligible ECCE standard capitation has been paid out in line with the payment schedule, published as part of programme readiness in August. The first preliminary payment was made on 23 August. This payment was made to all services that had entered into a funding agreement by the published deadline.

On the ECCE higher capitation payments, Pobal announced to services prior to the beginning of the 2019-20 programme year in September that it would begin processing applications in October. Regrettably, this start date was later than had been indicated the previous year.  Pobal has begun processing applications in October, in line with the announced schedule. Pobal is currently processing a large volume of applications and is working to approve applications and release funding as soon as possible.

There have also been some issues with the community childcare subvention plus programme, CCSP, whereby the processing of registrations has been taking longer than usual to complete, owing to the large volumes of CCSP registrations being made following the merging of this programme with the CCS programme. As of 17 October last, Pobal had registered 30,000 children to the programme, compared to 23,000 at a similar point in last year’s process. In addition, there has also been a significant block of work for Pobal associated with a large volume of re-registrations of children due to corrections that needed to be made to their registrations following compliance visits.  

Notwithstanding these issues, which Pobal are working hard to mitigate, I stress that the majority of registrations for the targeted schemes and the standard capitation levels for ECCE are being turned around within Pobal’s 15 day target for this activity.

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