Anne Rabbitte (Galway East, Fianna Fail)
Link to this: Individually | In context | Oireachtas source

1136. To ask the Minister for Children and Youth Affairs the status of her Department's review of the ABC scheme; her views on its effectiveness; her plans to continue funding these centres after December 2017; and if she will make a statement on the matter. [33983/17]

Katherine Zappone (Dublin South West, Independent)
Link to this: Individually | In context | Oireachtas source

The Area Based Childhood (ABC) Programme is a prevention and early intervention initiative led by my Department. The Programme commenced in 2013 and was designed as a time-bound co-funding arrangement for the period 2013 to 2017 in conjunction with The Atlantic Philanthropies.

The aim of the ABC Programme is to test and evaluate prevention and early intervention approaches to improve outcomes for children and families living in 13 areas of disadvantage in Dublin and throughout the country.

The Programme is currently being evaluated at a national level, by the Centre for Effective Services (CES). Data is being collected locally, at the area-level so as to assess the success and effectiveness of the totality of the investment across the five broad outcomes of the Programme.

Three national programme outcomes concern the achievement of outcomes for individual children and their parents participating in ABC-funded services;

I.Improved child health and development;

II. Improved children’s learning;

III. Improved parenting.

The remaining two outcomes are concerned with achieving systems change among service providers, focusing on:

I.Integrated service delivery;

II. Services embedded in mainstream services.

The national evaluation report will be produced in 2018. However, preliminary findings will be identified in the coming months.

A key purpose of the ABC Programme is to identify the learning across the site and transfer this learning into existing and established services. In budget 2016, my department secured additional funding to extend all of the existing ABC Programme to the end of December 2017. It is the intention of my Department to seek additional funding in this year’s estimates process, to extend the ABC Programme to the end of August 2018, to align with the national evaluation.

My Department is working to ensure that we take full account of the learning from all the interventions across the 13 ABC sites, and the national evaluation, in order to inform the delivery of prevention and early intervention initiatives and to achieve our shared goal of improving the lives of children and families throughout Ireland.