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

My Department delivers capital funding to the sector to support capacity growth. This year, the building blocks expansion scheme is funding reconfigurations of services to enable them to increase the number of places, particularly for one- to three-year-olds. I will launch the building blocks extension scheme soon, which will make €25 million available next year in large-scale capital grants for services to undertake building projects to increase their capacity. Again, this will primarily be focused on places for one- to three-year-olds. Funding will also be available to existing community services to purchase or construct new premises.

The flagship core funding scheme, which began in 2022, is designed to support services with costs of delivery. Between year one and year two of the scheme, the number of hours of services delivered annually increased by almost 8%. Further capacity growth of approximately 6% is built into the forecasting of the scheme for year three, which began earlier this month.

The outcome from the joint labour committee, JLC, process continues to be supported by the Government through core funding. In budget 2025, I secured an additional €15 million to support employers to meet the costs of further increases to the minimum rates of pay in the sector. This translates into full-year costs of €45 million. Recruiting and retaining staff is crucially important to maintaining and growing capacity. In addition, I am increasing the availability of regulated and subsidised early learning and childcare. Following the commencement of new regulations on 30 September, parents who use childminders will soon be able to access the national childcare scheme.

It is important that we develop a detailed and nuanced understanding of the nature of supply and demand at local area level. To this end, I have initiated work on a forward planning model that will identify the number of early learning and childcare places in different categories in each service, whether or not those places are occupied and how that aligns with the numbers of children in the corresponding age cohorts at local level.

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