Norma Foley (Kerry, Fianna Fail) | Oireachtas source

I welcome the opportunity to discuss in the Seanad today the issue of early learning and childcare. The Government recognises the importance of early learning and childcare services to society and to the economy. Most importantly, we recognise the importance of the service to the thousands of children and families they serve every day. This is very clear in the programme for Government. On this note, I was pleased to be part of the negotiating team for the programme for Government. I am pleased with the commitments that have been made very specifically to the area of early learning and childcare.

Backed by record increases in investment over the term of the previous Government, early learning and childcare in Ireland have been transformed in recent years. In particular, there has been significant progress in the areas of affordability for parents, pay for educators and practitioners and, in particular, the inclusion of children with disabilities and children who experienced disadvantage. This is very important. I intend to build on this progress in the years ahead.

I recognise that we need to go further to support parents, educators, practitioners and providers throughout the early learning and childcare sector, with the focus always being on ensuring that children who utilise the service have the very best of, and positive, experiences. The pathway to developing the sector was set out in Partnership for the Public Good, the report of the expert group agreed by the Government in 2021. The key theme of this report was the need to strengthen State involvement in the sector through greater levels of public management, accompanied by greater levels of public funding. Significant reforms have been delivered since then and they provide a solid foundation for the next stage of development by the Government. The core funding scheme was introduced in 2022. Now in its third year, €331 million will be invested in the sector through the scheme to deliver improved pay for educators and practitioners, to control parental fees and to support providers. The scheme has been key to starting to unlock some of the long-standing challenges specific to the sector.

The joint labour committee, JLC, process has seen the agreement of two rounds of employment regulation orders, EROs, establishing new minimum rates of pay for staff at various grades supported by core funding. This has resulted in pay increases for a large cohort of staff in the sector. However, and I want to be clear about this, I recognise that we need to build on this to ensure that qualified staff are attracted and retained, and that more needs to be done in this area. With regard to progressing this, an additional €15 million is being made available from September, the equivalent of a €45 million investment in a full year, to support the agreement of a third round of employment regulation orders by the joint labour committee for the purposes of staff wages. It is my absolute desire that the full €45 million will be used for this purpose alone.

The national childcare scheme has increased subsidy rates paid to parents which, along with fee controls under core funding and other reforms of the scheme, are delivering much greater affordability for parents. This is important. Recent data from the OECD shows low-income households in Ireland now pay at or below the OECD average for early learning and childcare for the first time. Again, I accept that out-of-pocket costs for some parents remain far too high, in particular for parents with three or more children.

The access and inclusion model, AIM, has already been extended to children in the preschool programme outside of preschool hours in term and out of term. This is making an enormous difference to the lives of children with a disability. Further extensions of the access and inclusion model for younger children and school-going children are now being considered and I would like to see that move forward. Equal start - akin to the DEIS model we have in our schools - has also been introduced to support inclusion of children from disadvantaged backgrounds in early learning and childcare. Services with a priority designation under equal start are now in receipt of funding for additional staff hours. They can be used to support engagement between the services and families, services and other child and family support services, training in inclusive practices and to support other educators and practitioners in the provision of early learning and childcare to children with higher levels of need. An additional nutrition programme will be rolled out in these services from September.

The expansion of regulations to allow for access to the subsidy schemes by families who use registered childminders was also achieved late last year, fulfilling commitments in the national action plan for childminding. I hope to see childminder registration numbers gather pace in this three-year transition period until September 2027, before registration becomes mandatory. During the transition period, the Department is providing supports at local level through the city and county childcare committees. The childminding development grant provided by the Department is open for applications until 4 April.

The expert group report also made several recommendations regarding the role of the State in the sector to enable greater public management. It called for the State to play a larger role in capacity planning and developing the sector to align with need, as well as examining the introduction of public provision to complement private provision. These are areas where some progress has been made but we need to step up our efforts. The programme for Government builds on the initiatives in recent years since the publication of Partnership for the Public Good and provides the impetus now to go much further and deliver on that mandate.

Last year, a supply management unit was established in the Department and the programme for Government articulates an intention that the unit be resourced and transformed into a forward planning and delivery unit to identify areas of need, forecast demand and deliver public supply within the early learning and childcare sector where required. This is a positive step forward. We would effectively have a forward planning unit so that, at the earliest possible moment, we could seek to gather what the needs might be in specific areas across the country. The unit is developing the forward planning models to assist in identifying where unmet need or demand and areas of low supply exist. The model will be central to the Department's plans to achieve the policy goals set out in the programme for Government to build an affordable, high-quality, accessible early learning and childcare system with State-led facilities adding capacity.

For the first time, the programme for Government also commits to providing capital investment to build or purchase State-owned facilities to create additional capacity in areas where unmet need exists. The point of this – and I want to be clear on this – is to provide additional capacity. It is to complement what might already be there. State ownership of early learning and childcare facilities is a substantial and significant shift in the policy direction the Department has pursued heretofore. It offers the potential for much greater scope to influence the nature and volume of provision available and to ensure better alignment with estimated demand.

Importantly, we are committing to progressively reduce the cost of early learning and childcare to €200 per child in the lifetime of this Government. My officials are examining this ambitious commitment and exploring approaches to achieve this objective most effectively. I look forward to working with them on these proposals and I know that is important to this Chamber also. We are very much in the planning phase for what I anticipate will be an exciting number of years to come. Core to this planning will be engagement with stakeholders across the sector.

The programme for Government outlines the intention to undertake a broad consultation ahead of publishing a detailed action plan to build an affordable, high-quality, accessible early learning and childcare system with State-led facilities adding capacity. This plan will enhance parental choice through ongoing support for public, private and community provision, as well as childminders. I look forward to updating this House on the action plan as it develops.