Seán Fleming (Laois, Fianna Fail)
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563. To ask the Minister for Children and Youth Affairs further to Parliamentary Question No. 644 of 11 October 2016, her views on correspondence (details supplied); and if she will make a statement on the matter. [35750/16]

Katherine Zappone (Dublin South West, Independent)
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The correspondence supplied relates to a situation where a childcare provider operating the Early Childhood Care and Education (ECCE) scheme will have been paid in respect of seventeen weeks childcare provision prior to Christmas 2016. The next ECCE payment is due to be received by providers by December 9th, at which point services will have been paid for up to twenty weeks of provision. For the 2016-17 programme year, ECCE providers have been afforded the ability to enter their own 'non-payment weeks' for the first time - these weeks are intended to correspond to the closure of services for Christmas, mid-term, etc, and this means that the actual number of weeks' payment received will differ from service to service.

Notwithstanding the above, I appreciate that services may face difficulty in budgeting over the Christmas period, and I am currently considering an amendment to the payment calendar in this regard.