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

In budget 2024, I secured €4.5 million to commence the initial roll-out of equal start from September of this year. That allocation is equivalent to €13.5 million in a full year, and I will be very pleased to be able to fully announce equal start in May of this year. Equal start is a funding model and set of universal and targeted measures to support access to, and participation in, early learning and childcare for children and their families who experience disadvantage. It will consist of a series of measures to support children and their families, educators and practitioners, and settings.

The commitment to develop a programme of additional supports in early learning and childcare to help address disadvantage was made as part of First 5 and in the programme for Government and was later examined in the Partnership for the Public Good publication. The expert group made a series of recommendations on the nature of the programme to be developed and how it would fit with the other primary funding schemes for early learning and care, such as the ECCE programme, the access and inclusion model, AIM, and the national childcare scheme. I always describe equal start as a DEIS-type model but focused specifically on the area of early needs. A little different from DEIS, however, it is not just a "Yes" or "No", you are equal start or you are not. It looks at the children as well as the setting so it can target a setting or a childcare service in an area of very high disadvantage and provide additional supports, but it can also be designed in such a way that children attending a setting in a non-disadvantaged area, but where a number of those children experience particular social disadvantage, can be supported as well. It has the kind of enhanced level of flexibility we have already seen with the AIM programme and it will target children from particular groups: children from the Traveller and Roma communities, children experiencing homelessness, children from international protection families, children sponsored through the national childcare scheme and children from areas which have a very high deprivation index score.

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