Catherine Connolly (Galway West, Independent)
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663. To ask the Minister for Children and Youth Affairs the actions which have been taken to tackle child poverty by increasing community based early intervention programmes as specifically provided for on page 77 of the programme for Government; and if she will make a statement on the matter. [7000/17]

Katherine Zappone (Dublin South West, Independent)
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This Government and my Department remain committed, as outlined in the programme for Government, to addressing the contributions to child poverty and the improvement of outcomes for children in Ireland. To this end, we are leading and supporting a number of key initiatives in the area of community based prevention and early intervention.

One of these is the ABC programme, which is a prevention and early intervention initiative led by my Department aimed at testing and evaluating prevention and early intervention approaches to improve outcomes for children and families living in poverty in 13 areas of disadvantage. The programme commenced in 2013 and was designed as a time-bound co-funding arrangement of €29.7 million, in conjunction with the Atlantic Philanthropies.

In budget 2016, my Department secured an additional €4.5 million to extend the entire existing ABC programme to the end of December 2017, bringing the total investment to €34.2 million. This extension also brings the existing programme closer in line with the expected timeline for the delivery of the national evaluation report by the Centre for Effective Services in 2018.

My Department will utilise the emerging learning from the ABC programme and the findings from the national evaluation to inform the design of prevention and early intervention initiatives that comprehend the Programme for Government commitments.

A key purpose of the ABC programme is to identify the learning in and across the sites, and to transfer this learning into existing and established services, thus bringing improvements not only in specific areas, but addressing all areas of disadvantage. With this in mind, my Department has also been preparing a significant programme that will assist in mainstreaming the learning from various prevention and early intervention initiatives, including the ABC programme.

This Quality and Capacity Building Initiative (QCBI) aims to embed prevention and early intervention in services for children and young people, through resourcing a system change across service provision in this area. QCBI involves creating valuable tools that capture key data and learning, and make it accessible, in addition to developing cross-sectoral capacity building measures. Such measures will seek to enhance the quality of prevention and early intervention approaches, as well as fostering partnership among agencies and professionals who engage with children at risk of poor outcomes. This work has been informed in part, by an important EU Peer Review hosted by my Department in 2016 which emphasised the importance of an evidenced based approach to tackling child poverty, and which specifically acknowledged the importance of prevention and early intervention in this regard.

My Department continues to engage with interested stakeholders in working on mainstreaming the learning from existing programmes and improving the lives of children across Ireland.