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

I welcome this motion as an opportunity to debate the important issue of early learning and childcare and I will focus on that element. I acknowledge my colleague has focused on the issue of nursing homes and elder care previously. It is clear from this debate so far that we all recognise the importance of early learning and childcare for children and their families, and for our wider society and economy as well. In opposing the motion and in supporting the Government amendment, our objective is not to claim that there are no challenges in the sector. There absolutely are challenges. However, it is rather to demonstrate that the Government has set out a pathway to address these challenges. It is also to demonstrate that the Government has made significant strides in this regard. Indeed, the European Commission recently endorsed our approach and has welcomed the very substantial progress that has been made in the early years sector.

This reform work has been backed by extremely significant investment, which exceeds €1.1 billion this year. It is important to say this is in a context of when I started as Minister the investment in this second sector was €638 million. That is a 72% increase in investment in a four-year period. Very few Departments have experienced that steep an increase in investment in such a short period. We have used this new investment to introduce a new funding model that has been designed to address the most challenging issues the sector faces. This funding model, together for better, recognises early learning and childcare is a public good that demands more investment and more involvement by the State and a closer working partnership with providers with new responsibilities on both sides. It brings together a number of existing and new schemes, including ECCE, the one we know best; the access and inclusion model, AIM; the national childcare scheme and the subsidy given to parents to cut their fees; the new core funding scheme to support providers; and with a further programme Equal Start, which I will launch later this month and will roll out in September, which is basically a DEIS-type model for early years. We will introduce that for the first time and it is something we are very excited and proud to be bringing forward.

While only in place since September 2022, we are seeing substantial benefits for children and their families, the early learning and childcare workforce and providers. For example, the national childcare scheme provided a subsidy increase in 2022 and in 2023. It is supporting a record number of children and additional funding I secured in this year's budget will apply from September of this year. That will have meant in two years I will have on average cut out-of-pocket costs for parents by 50%. The universal ECCE programme is supporting more than 108,000 children to access preschool education. The award winning AIM is then supporting 7,000 children who have additional needs and who have an intellectual, physical or sensory disability in order that they can access the ECCE programme. It is a really good model supporting integration within our early years system. We will be able to increase the number of hours offered through AIM this year for the first time in a significant period due to increased funding that I secured in this year's budget. Core funding originally had a €259 million allocation in its first year. That has grown to €287 million this year and in year 2 that has allowed for a fee freeze in 94% of services. That means that when we increase the subsidy to the parent via the NCS, they will immediately feel the full benefit of that subsidy. The introduction of core funding has led to a 20% increase in the number of services that are signed up the NCS. Those parents using these services will be able to benefit from that subsidy. There has been a 52% increase in the number of sponsored children and a 100% increase in the number of children benefiting in the past two years alone, which has substantially widened access to this State support. This core funding has also supported the agreement of an employment regulation order for the early years sector.

That secured a pay increase for 73% of the workforce for childcare professionals in September 2022 under an employment regulation order agreed at the Labour Court by a joint labour committee. It has extended support for graduate-led provision outside the ECCE programme and led to sustainability and stability in the sector. There is now a minimum core funding floor of €8,150. No service gets less than €8,150 extra through core funding, which we introduced.

Together for Better is about ensuring stability and sustainability in the sector. I am strongly committed to that. I do not want any service to be faced with financial sustainability issues. I am fully committed to working with any such service to support them in delivering early learning and childcare for the public good. The allocation of core funding in year one and year two far exceeded the rate of inflation for those years. With ECCE capitation and core funding combined, services now receive a minimum of €78.20 per child per week under the ECCE programme and a maximum of €95.85 per week, with additional funding for graduate lead educators and graduate managers. In addition to this, small and sessional services benefit from targeted measures which I introduced in 2023 at a cost of €7.2 million, specifically, a flat top-up rate of €4,075 for sessional-only services and the minimum base rate allocation of €8,150. These measures saw the average allocation under core funding for sessional-only services increase by 30% that year. In year one of core funding, we just allocated according to capacity in hours used. In year two, we recognised that there were certain smaller, part-time services that needed additional support. We used our extra funding in year two to channel specific supports to those services. In September, we will move onto year three of core funding. I have an extra €44 million - a 15% increase in the level of core funding in year three. We will target and tailor it to allow for growth in capacity, as many services are opening up more places, which is good. We all know that capacity is a real challenge. It is also about using that money to support existing services, particularly those that may not be as profitable and have challenges with fixed costs and have found it hard with the cost-of-living crisis and the increase in rent and energy costs over the past number of years. That extra €44 million will support the delivery of a range of enhancements in year three of the scheme and, in conjunction with the targeted measures I introduced last year, will improve the financial standing of services with the lowest income levels. It will also pave the way for further pay increases for early learning and childcare professionals through a further employment regulation order, which we hope to see agreed in the next number of weeks. That will be a second agreed pay increase - the only time that has ever been achieved. Given the scale of Government funding, I stand behind the need to have validated financial returns. This is important as it assures the Government and the public that the extra public money we are investing is being put to that important use in delivering high quality, affordable and accessible early learning and childcare. Getting the financial returns also gives us evidence of how we use that extra funding. It allows us to identify that there may be certain types of service that are not doing as well and the extra money we have through core funding in year three could be targeted towards better supports for them.

That funding work does not take place in isolation. It is part of a wider set of measures which we are bringing forward. There is Nurturing Skills, the workforce plan, which is all about ensuring that people thinking of entering the early years profession can see a career pathway, an ability to improve their qualifications and, as such, get higher levels of pay, and that they have a future in that sector, which is important. There are recruitment pressures. I recognise that. There is a new scheme to help to encourage early years professionals to take up higher levels of degrees. The State will meet a significant part of those costs. That is all part of supporting recruitment and retention. There is the national action plan for child-minding, which is to allow parents who use childminders to draw down the NCS in the new appropriately regulated sector. There is the Building Blocks capital programme, which recognises that there are challenges on the capacity side. It is about the State bringing money in to support the expansion of existing services. There will be an allocation for that this year and a larger allocation in 2025, which I have been able to secure under the new national development plan.

To conclude, I have focused on three key issues since I became Minister: sustainability for providers; improving pay for early years professionals; and reducing costs for parents. We have made substantial progress in all three areas. There are still real challenges across all three. We have a new challenge with capacity. We are looking to address that as well. My final point is that early years education in Ireland only started to get State investment in 2008, with the introduction of the first year of ECCE. All the rest of Europe has been investing in this for decades. We are playing catch-up but in a four-year period, we have done a dramatic amount of catching up in investment and reform. I will continue to work with everybody across the sector - providers, parents and staff - to continue to address those challenges, make it a better system for everyone working and, most important, deliver better early learning and care for children.

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