Marc Ó Cathasaigh (Waterford, Green Party)
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89. To ask the Minister for Children, Equality, Disability, Integration and Youth when he expects to announce further details of the proposed equal participation model; and if he will make a statement on the matter. [19261/24]

Marc Ó Cathasaigh (Waterford, Green Party)
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I am smiling wryly at the Minister's previous answer. Teachers are very protective of their classrooms: "If they come into mine, they better not mess up the copies or anything else."

As regards the fourth strand of the together for better programme, we have ECCE, the access and inclusion model and the national childcare scheme. The first three I understand quite well, but we have a proposed equal participation model on which the Department is working. I am not terribly clear on what we are proposing here and I would like to know about the timeline of it.

Roderic O'Gorman (Dublin West, Green Party)
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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.

Marc Ó Cathasaigh (Waterford, Green Party)
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I believe passionately in this and that we should not confuse equality of outcome with the equality of opportunity we often get in a meritocracy, whereby you start from 50 m and I start from 100 m, we say the finish line is in the same place and we say, "Was it not great we all got to run in the same race?" That is not really how society works. Well, it is how society works but it is not how society should work. I believe we should move in this direction. I read all the language on the together for better website but I still do not know how that translates into what will happen daily. The Minister refers to a DEIS-type model. That is fine and well. He says it could be within a placement or it could be more targeted. I understand the idea of targeting areas of particular social disadvantage but I want to know what that means in terms of people coming into a service and delivering something. From everything I have read about this, I do not quite understand. I have an idea of what we are trying to achieve but I do not really understand in that nuts-and-bolts way what it is we will actually do.

Roderic O'Gorman (Dublin West, Green Party)
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There will be a range of universal and targeted supports, just like there are for AIM. There will be universal supports as regards better training for everybody in settings in terms of social inclusion and how to act on that within the particular setting. Better information will be provided to all parents so they understand what the supports available to them are. Not all parents know about the NCS, for example, or AIM. It is a matter of better informing parents as to what is there for them. There will be targeted supports as well. One of the first set of targeted supports, the one we will start introducing from September of this year, is financial support for additional staff in settings which are in areas of high disadvantage, allowing staff to spend more time with children who need that additional time. There will also be additional financial support for things such as nutrition and meals, again recognising that services working in areas of high disadvantage probably do not have the same level of fee support. We can step in and ensure the best level of nutrition.

Marc Ó Cathasaigh (Waterford, Green Party)
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Additional staff and additional training for existing staff make all sorts of sense to me. The Minister will know that better informing parents is difficult. He talks about targeting that group. Trying to get people to actually interact with the services will be difficult. Will the Minister explain to me a little more about, as I said, the basic nuts and bolts? If I understand this correctly, it is aimed at early learning care and at school-age children. Are we talking about a wraparound support? Are we talking about after-school services? Are we talking about preschool services and that half hour before school starts? Also, in a sense, there is the rationale behind that. If we are talking about that kind of wraparound, are we saying we have an understanding that those parents will be out at work, or is it not that? Is it that we are getting the State to step in more in terms of the life of the child? The Minister might tease out a couple of those questions for me.

Ruairi Ó Murchú (Louth, Sinn Fein)
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Could I get a bit more detail? I think we all welcome any moves as regards AIMS, and I really like the idea of targeted supports, but the problem is that we are all aware of desperate sets of circumstances. We all know that we need to see full wraparound family supports and full interventions.

In an awful lot of cases we deal with issues where kids have been left in the most chaotic of circumstances and you can be dealing with huge issues where addiction meets intergenerational poverty meets any other issue you want to pick, all of them negative. The fact is we are then trying to get the council, the Garda, Tusla, HSE services and whatever else. None of them have the resources to deal with these issues. I remember and I have seen where we had very close and early family supports and were able to save a lot of families and kids. However, if we are not going to make those sorts of interventions we will be dealing with these chaotic scenarios afterwards and we will, unfortunately, need some nuclear options at a later stage.

Roderic O'Gorman (Dublin West, Green Party)
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One statistic that always strikes me is that Traveller children are 10% less likely to take up the free two-year ECCE scheme than children from the settled community. Those kids on day one of junior infants are immediately at an educational disadvantage and they are trying to catch up from day one. We are targeting those early years, but that also includes school-age childcare. It is to recognise that the education element here is so important. There are children who are slipping through the cracks and not getting the benefit of early learning and care. One of the funding streams in the first year will be to support a Traveller officer and a Roma officer in better start, which is the unit in my Department that oversees the implementation of early learning in care. This might not be in year one but we will also be looking at the development of an equivalent to a home school community liaison officer in early years, so there is someone in the area going out and getting kids into early years as opposed to getting them into junior infants. We are starting this in year one. We are not going to do all of equal start in year one, but there is a positive series of measures over the next three years.