Dáil Éireann Debate, Tuesday - 16 January 2018
1506. Deputy Dara Calleary asked the Minister for Children and Youth Affairs the status of the Early Childhood Care and Education Scheme, ECCE, scheme and the provision of two years for children with additional and/or special needs; and if she will make a statement on the matter. [1296/18]
View answerECCE entitlement currently averages at 61 weeks, up from 38 weeks when ECCE was first introduced. It will expand further, to 76 weeks / two pre-school years, from September 2018. The two years of ECCE will be available to all children, including those with disabilities. This is in keeping with good international practice.
The question I understand relates to a recent announcement that I would pause a decision on the overage exemption for ECCE pending consultation.
Overage exemptions were introduced at the onset of the ECCE programme in 2010. At that time, the ECCE Programme only operated for a 38 week period, or one programme year. For some children with special/additional needs, attending preschool five days a week was not feasible and so an allowance was made to enable them split ECCE over 2 years, for example, a child may have availed of 3 days ECCE provision in year one and 2 days in year two. Their total ECCE provision remained at 38 weeks.
In order to facilitate this, in the cases where the child would have been over the age limit for ECCE (5 years and 6 months when finishing ECCE) an overage exemption was approved. This flexibility was never intended to conflict with the legislative requirement to start school by age six. The law and policy on school start-age is clearly established in Ireland. Children should be in school by the time they are six and the primary school system has a variety of resources to support children with disabilities. If children are not in school by six, under the Educational Welfare Act, the Educational Welfare service of Tusla must be satisfied that the child is receiving a minimum standard of education in a place other than a recognised school. (Tusla does this by sending Educational Welfare Inspectors out to the place of the child's education. Should this be required, this would be in addition to the Early Years Inspectorates funded by my Department. )
Since ECCE was first introduced, DCYA has worked to improve the pre-school experience for children with disabilities and to optimise their early development. The two main enhancements are:-
- The expansion to a full two years for every child from September 2016 as stated above.
- The Access and Inclusion Model (AIM) has been introduced with 7 different levels of support for children with disabilities. Over 4,000 children have so far benefitted from targeted supports and many multiples of this from universal supports available under AIM.
Purely in the best interests of children, and for no other reason, a proposal was considered to remove the overage exemption to the upper age limit to the Programme. On 6th December 2017, I announced that I paused on the removal of the Upper age limit exemption for ECCE so that further consultation with parents can occur. This means that for the 2018/2019 ECCE year the overage exemption will continue to be available.
