Emer Currie (Dublin West, Fine Gael)
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371. To ask the Minister for Children, Disability and Equality the status of the 2025 mid-term review report of nurturing skills, if the Monitoring Committee and the Advisory Group has met to examine nurturing skills and its progress in 2025; when the 2025 mid-term review will be published; and if she will make a statement on the matter. [60815/25]

Norma Foley (Kerry, Fianna Fail)
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Staff in this sector play a key role in supporting children’s development and well-being, working in partnership with families. Recognising their central importance for the quality of provision, the Department continues to implement 'Nurturing Skills: The Workforce Plan for Early Learning and Care and School-Age Childcare, 2022-2028'.

Nurturing Skills sets out plans to raise the profile of careers in the sector and establish role profiles, career pathways, qualification requirements, and associated policy mechanisms, along with leadership development opportunities, and will work towards a more gender-balanced and diverse workforce. It also includes a commitment and actions to achieve a graduate-led workforce by 2028.

Commitments in Nurturing Skills are organised under five "pillars":

* Establishing a career framework.

* Raising qualification levels.

* Developing a national Continuing Professional Development system.

* Supporting recruitment, retention, and diversity in the workforce; and

* Moving towards regulation of the profession.

A Monitoring Committee is in place to monitor the implementation of the Nurturing Skills Implementation Plan. The Monitoring Committee meet twice a year, with the most recent in June 2025. The committee also produces an annual report on the progress of the Nurturing Skills Implementation Plan and the report for 2024 was published in May of this year. All of the annual monitoring reports on the implementation of Nurturing Skills can be viewed at: www.nurturingskills.ie

Nurturing Skills also contains a commitment to conduct a mid-point review and preparatory works have commenced within the Department. The intention is to review progress on the implementation of actions to date and to allow for a re-focus on priorities, if needed, for the development of a new implementation plan for the second stage of the implementation of Nurturing Skills.

Key components of the review, as outlined in Nurturing Skills, is both the staff data from the TALIS Starting Strong 2025 report and the CSO Early Years Graduate Outcomes report which are due Q4 2025. This data is essential to help identify priority actions for the implementation of Nurturing Skills going forward. Therefore, the Monitoring Committee at it last meeting agreed to postpone the preparation of the midpoint review until such time as the data from these key reports were available for analysis.

The Advisory Group will be established upon publication of the report, which is expected before the end of the year.