Dáil Éireann Debate, Tuesday - 14 October 2025
788. Deputy Grace Boland asked the Minister for Children, Disability and Equality when the forward planning unit within her Department will publish outputs from its work on mapping childcare provision and identifying gaps; if this data will be made available, by county and constituency; and if she will make a statement on the matter. [55254/25]
Amharc ar fhreagraImproving access to quality and affordable Early Learning and Care and School Age Childcare is a key priority of Government.
A Forward Planning and Delivery Unit is undertaking important work to identify areas of need, forecast demand, and prepare for the delivery of public supply of early learning and childcare sector in areas where it is required.
A forward planning model is in development which will be central to this Department's plans to achieve the policy goals set out in the Programme for Government to build an affordable, high-quality, accessible early childhood education and care system, with State-led facilities adding capacity.
The development of the forward planning model is currently underway utilising the expertise of statisticians on secondment from the Central Statistics Office, GIS mappers and other specialists. The model seeks to identify the nature and volume of different types of early learning and childcare places across the country and how that aligns with the numbers of children in the corresponding age cohorts at local area level. An extensive data analysis and cleaning exercise has been undertaken to map available publicly subsidised supply. This involves combining data from multiple administrative sources, including child population data and applying mapping tools.
The analysis of the Forward Planning model will provide a key input into the approach to the capital programme to be resourced through the allocation in the revised National Development Plan 2026-30.
The Forward Planning model is being designed primarily as a tool for internal analysis. The maps and data that the model will produce will contain protected categories of data and will therefore not be made generally available in full. As the model is further developed along with accompanying policy work related to supply, aggregated statistics, including statistics broken down by geographical area, may be made available if this is deemed compliant with data protection obligations.
Overall, early learning and childcare capacity is increasing. Data from the Annual Early Years Sector Profile shows that the estimated number of enrolments has increased by 19% in the previous two years. Data on capacity at county level is available at www.pobal.ie/childcare/capacity/
