Kathleen Funchion (Carlow-Kilkenny, Sinn Fein)
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184. To ask the Minister for Children, Equality, Disability, Integration and Youth the number of children in receipt of AIMS support in early years settings for 2020, 2021, 2022 and 2023, in tabular form. [42939/23]

Roderic O'Gorman (Dublin West, Green Party)
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The Access and Inclusion Model (AIM) is a model of supports designed to ensure that children with disabilities can access the Early Childhood Care and Education (ECCE) Programme. Its goal is to empower pre-school providers to deliver an inclusive pre-school experience, ensuring that every eligible child can meaningfully participate in the ECCE Programme and reap the benefits of high quality early learning and care.

The main supports are grouped into universal or targeted supports. Universal supports are designed to create a more inclusive culture in Early Learning and Care settings, through training courses and qualifications for staff. Where universal supports are not enough to meet the needs of an individual child, targeted supports are available to ensure the child can meaningfully participate in pre-school.

Below are the statistics for number of children who have been approved for these targeted supports. Many more children benefit from the universal AIM provision towards provision of more inclusive settings but these are not readily quantifiable.

Kathleen Funchion (Carlow-Kilkenny, Sinn Fein)
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185. To ask the Minister for Children, Equality, Disability, Integration and Youth the current full and first year costs associated with the AIM programme; the cost per child; the total cost per hour to deliver the programme; the cost to extend the programme to five hours per day, per child, in total; and if he will make a statement on the matter. [42940/23]

Roderic O'Gorman (Dublin West, Green Party)
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The 2023 expenditure for the Access and Inclusion Model (AIM) is estimated to be approximately €48m.

This funding covers the cost of the seven levels of AIM, which encompass a range of both universal and targeted supports during ECCE for pre-school settings. ECCE, the free preschool provision is 3 hours per day, 38 weeks per year.

This funding covers training of staff, communications and other forms of related sector wide supports. It provides access to therapeutic services where they are critical to enable a child to be enrolled and to meaningfully participate in the ECCE programme, and access to expert early year’s educational advice and support from a team of dedicated Early Years Specialists.

This funding provides a programme of capital grants for specialised equipment, appliances, assistive technology and/or minor alterations for pre-school settings to ensure children with a disability can participate in the ECCE programme.

These elements cannot be meaningfully quantified on a cost per hour basis.

The component which might be roughly quantified as an hours allocations is for the additional staff member/ reduction in ratios under Level 7 of AIM. The weekly cost per allocation is €240. The hourly cost per allocation is €16. To note that this allocation may cover more than one child in the same session so it is not strictly an hours per child cost.

As it is not feasible to quantify an overall hours per child model given the multi-stranded nature of AIM, the calculation has only been applied to current Level 7 funding allocation. Assuming that the overall increase is from 3 hours day of ECCE to 5 hours per day, the cost of this Level 7 would increase by approximately €26m.

To note, in addition to caveats above around applying hours based costings, that this assumes that all services are in a position to uplift provision to 5 hours per day and that all families currently availing of AIM Level 7 would avail of 5 hours.