Charlie McConalogue (Donegal North East, Fianna Fail)
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871. To ask the Minister for Children and Youth Affairs if she will reverse the decision to increase child ratios from 1:10 to 1:11 for services offering the early childhood care and education scheme following the responses from experts stating that this will further reduce quality standards; and if she will make a statement on the matter. [27923/13]

Frances Fitzgerald (Dublin Mid West, Fine Gael)
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The Early Childhood Care and Education (ECCE) programme, which represents an annual investment of approximately €175 million, makes early learning in a formal setting available to eligible children in the year before they commence primary school. Participating childcare services provide age-appropriate activities and programmes to children within a particular age cohort. It is a fundamental principle of the programme that the pre-school year is provided free of charge to a parent whose child qualifies under the programme.

The challenge for this Department and all other Departments is to make effective use of the limited resources which are now available. While I am pleased that the ECCE programme is being maintained on a universal and free basis and that additional funding of almost €10m was provided in 2012 to meet the costs of demographic changes, it was necessary to make some changes to the capitation payments in the 2012/2013 academic year, to meet the need to reduce overall expenditure.

The weekly capitation rates paid to providers were reduced by €2 (approximately 3%) from September 2012. However, to give some flexibility to childcare services to manage this modest reduction, the staff to child ratios and the space ratios - for the pre-school element of childcare services only - were increased in September 2012. The staff to child ratio was increased from a ratio of 1:10 to a ratio of 1:11 and, to facilitate the implementation of these new ratios, a new space/area requirement of 1.818 square metres per child was applied.

While the ratio of staff to children is important, it was considered that an increase of 1 child per adult, from 10 to 11, would not have an unduly significant impact on the quality of the pre-school experience.

The increase in the ratio from 1:10 to 1:11 applies only to those children participating in the free pre-school year. These children are all over the age of 3 years 2 months. There was no amendment to the adult:child ratios applying to younger children.