Colm Burke (Cork North Central, Fine Gael) | Oireachtas source

I thank the Senator and I fully agree with her. As we now have full employment, there is competition when it comes to retaining staff. As I stated, the Minister, Deputy O'Gorman, has recently established a new supply management unit in his Department to undertake more detailed analysis of supply and demand. That is an extremely important development. His role is to develop a planning function for monitoring, analysing and forecasting of the supply and demand for early learning and childcare in a nuanced and specific way at local area level. The work of this unit is akin to a forward planning unit in the Department of Education and, as the Senator knows, that unit has been very successful in the Department. The unit will also oversee the administration of capital investment under the national development plan through the building blocks capacity grant. The primary focus of the building blocks capacity grant scheme is to increase capacity in the one- to three-year-old pre-early childhood care and education age range for full-day or part-time care.

The Minister, Deputy O'Gorman, intends to announce details of the latest strand of the scheme in the coming weeks. Under this strand, grants ranging from €100,000 to €600,000 will be made available to early learning and childcare providers to physically extend their services to deliver additional capacity, with a focus on places for children aged under three. The relative demand model has been developed by the Department using the latest census data information. There is a lot of work being done by the Department to expand the services and this new scheme of between €100,000 and €600,000 or €650,000 in grants is a welcome development.