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

I am committed to tackling disadvantage through high-quality early learning and childcare that is affordable and accessible. In line with a commitment in First 5 and informed by recommendations in Partnership for the Public Good, officials in my Department are currently tailoring a policy response to progress the development of a new strand of funding, the equal participation model. Through this work, services will be provided with a proportionate mix of universal and targeted supports to support children and families who are experiencing disadvantage to access services.

Following a detailed scoping phase, the consultation phase took place from December 2022 to May 2023. This phase included semi-structured interviews, thematic workshops, both in-person and online, focus groups and an online surveys. Non-governmental organisations representing the different cohorts the equal participation model aims to reach, for example, the Traveller and Roma communities, homeless persons, refugees, migrants and lone parent families, were engaged with during that process, as well as early learning and childcare providers, educators, practitioners and their representative bodies. Traveller, refugee and migrant parents, parents with a disability, parents of a child with a disability and one-parent families were also engaged with in that process. The policy is currently being drafted. It will be of real benefit. We will learn from the access and inclusion model, AIM, which includes a good mix of universal and targeted supports.

Other measures we have taken include the pilot of the provision of hot meals, which is currently under way. It has now been completed and is being evaluated. As the Deputy will be aware, early in my term of office, we removed the wraparound hours. Deputy Funchion flagged with me early on the practice of the wraparound hours and the impact it was having, perhaps, on Traveller children attending after-school programmes. We put in the finance earlier to remove that. The equal participation model will be exciting and we are working on developing that policy at the moment.

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