John Brady (Wicklow, Sinn Fein)
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1859.To ask the Minister for Children, Equality, Disability, Integration and Youth the measures his Department will be undertaking to assist with childcare costs for working families; and if he will make a statement on the matter. [32595/24]

Roderic O'Gorman (Dublin West, Green Party)
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In September 2022, I launched Together for Better, the new funding model for early learning and childcare. This new funding model supports the delivery of early learning and childcare for the public good.

Together for Better brings together the Early Childhood Care and Education (ECCE) programme, the Access and Inclusion Model (AIM), the National Childcare Scheme (NCS), Core Funding and the recently launched Equal Start. These schemes work to, inter alia, ensure children can access early learning and childcare at no or at significantly reduced out of pocket costs to parents.

The ECCE programme is available free of charge to all children for up to two years before starting primary school. 96% of children take part.

The NCS complements the ECCE programme, providing subsidies to reduce costs to parents for children to participate in early learning and childcare. The Scheme combines universal and income-assessed subsidies.

For some families, the NCS provides free access to early learning and childcare. In particular, the Scheme includes arrangements for specified target groups to receive free access, where referred by a sponsor body.

A review of the Scheme, published in 2021, found that over half of families in disadvantaged areas receiving support under the Scheme had over 50% of their costs covered.

A study of childcare costs by the OECD, published in 2022, covering the same period of the review found that the reforms of childcare support in Ireland provided significantly higher benefits to low-income families, driving the net childcare costs for low-income lone parents close to zero.

Following on from these reports, a number of enhancements were made to this Scheme:

• Removing of the practice of deducting hours spent in pre-school or school from the entitlement to NCS subsidised hours.
• Extending the NCS universal subsidy to all children under 15.
• Increasing the minimum hourly subsidy available under the NCS from 50 cent per to €1.40.

The fee freeze, currently in place among 94% of all services – supported through Core Funding – ensures parents are benefiting from these changes to the NCS.

The fee freeze will continue in the majority of services participating in Core Funding in year 3 of the scheme. However, there are two new developments to fee management under Core Funding:

• Where services feel their fees are not sufficient to cover costs, from end of July, my Department will introduce a fee increase approval process, whereby services with fees below a certain level will be able to apply to increase their fees up to an approved levels; and
• A cap on fees is being introduced for services joining Core Funding for the first time in the third year of the Scheme. A fee cap will apply to all services in Core Funding from September 2025.