Roderic O'Gorman (Dublin West, Green Party) | Oireachtas source

I thank the Deputies. Since I have come into this role I have been very clear that we need to change the way we operate childcare in this country. There are three major pieces of work going on at the moment which, when they conclude midway through next year, will give us the knowledge base to be able to, as the Deputy said, re-envisage how we look at childcare in this country.

One of the key problems is that we worked too much on an ad hocbasis. There has been response after response over the past ten years which is why the three pieces of work are ongoing. They involve the operating model and deciding what the infrastructure should be, which I will address in a question from Deputy Naughten later, the expert funding model, that is, how we target the money provided by the State to ensure we have good outcomes in terms of pay for childcare professionals and meeting the out-of-pocket costs for parents, and workforce planning make sure that childcare professionals have a long-term future in a career in this area. Those three pieces of research will be completed by the middle of next year and I hope to be able to start focusing investment in budget 2022 to be able to start focusing investment to achieve that new model of childcare.

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