Holly Cairns
Ceist:75. Deputy Holly Cairns asked the Minister for Children, Equality, Disability, Integration and Youth the childcare supports that are available to one parent families. [28409/22]
Amharc ar fhreagraThursday, 2 June 2022
Ceisteanna (75)
Freagraí scríofa
The National Childcare Scheme (NCS) provides financial support to help parents meet the cost of childcare and to support better outcomes for children.
There are two types of supports available under the Scheme:
The Universal Subsidy is available to all families with children under 3 years. It is also available to families with children over 3 years who have not yet qualified for the free pre-school (ECCE) programme.
The Income Assessed Subsidy is available to families with children aged between 24 weeks and 15 years. It is means tested and is calculated based on individual circumstances. Those on the lowest incomes receive the highest subsidies.
The NCS is designed to be flexible and accommodate busy parents’ lives. The attendance rules for the scheme facilitate the need for flexibility and recognise that, in practical terms, parents are constrained by a range of individual circumstances.
The Scheme acknowledges that early learning and childcare needs differ widely across different families. That is why subsidies are offered on an hourly basis. The NCS allows for flexible arrangements to be made depending on the parents’ needs.
The Scheme has been designed to be flexible in its application process as well. The online application allows for the parent to complete the process at their own pace, and parents have the option of completing a paper application by post. The system caters for applications from all family types, and no one family type is in any way disadvantaged.
As part of the monitoring, review and evaluation of the NCS, Frontier Economics was commissioned to undertake a formal review of the first year of the NCS, with the report published in December 2021. The report noted that early learning and childcare costs in Ireland have been found to be a significant factor in contributing to low levels of participation in employment, education and training for mothers, particularly for lone parents. The NCS was designed to make early learning and childcare more affordable and, in some instances, free. In this regard, the report highlights that among claimants of the income-assessed subsidy, around a third were lone parents. It further noted that lone parents had a substantially higher mean hourly rate than couples, leading to a substantially higher mean weekly value for claims.
As part of Budget 2022, Minister O’Gorman announced a number of changes to the NCS, which will be of significant benefit to many parents.
These changes will result in more parents getting additional subsidised hours for early learning and childcare in Tusla registered services by extending the NCS universal subsidy to all children under 15 - benefitting up to 40,000 children.
A further change, introduced in May of this year, ended the practice of deducting hours spent in pre-school or school from the entitlement to NCS subsidised hours, benefitting an estimated 5,000 children.
Finally, Early Childhood Care and Education (ECCE) programme, is a universal programme available to all children within the eligible age range. The programme is provided for three hours per day, five days per week over 38 weeks, and the programme year runs from September to June. A child must have turned 2 years and 8 months on or before the 31st August of a given programme year in order to be eligible (and cannot turn 5 years and 6 months during the programme year).
2022 will see up to €73m being made available for Core funding, which equates to €221m in full year costs. It will require a commitment not to increase fees to parents from September 2021 rates. This feature of the scheme will ensure that parents feel the full affordability benefits of the NCS and ECCE.
Once core funding is embedded and the concurrent changes to ECCE and NCS take effect, my Department will be looking to build a wider strategy targeting disadvantage informed by the work of the Expert Group across ELC settings. This strategy will aim to provide for a proportionate mix of universal supports and for targeted supports to support services and families who use them in alleviating the effects of socio -economic disadvantage.