Special Educational Needs
Seanad Éireann — 2026-05-06
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Emer Higgins (FG), Dublin Mid-West

I thank Senator Tully for raising this important issue and offering me the opportunity to respond. I, too, welcome the increase in overall after-school facilities. Many of our communities have benefited from them. I commend the work of the childcare provider in Monaghan that the Senator mentioned. I was not aware of them and it sounds like they are definitely doing a lot of innovative and proactive work in this space. It would be a great opportunity for other childcare providers and regions to learn from.
The access and inclusion model, AIM, is a model of supports designed to ensure that children with disabilities or additional needs can fully participate in the early childhood care and education, ECCE, preschool programme, thereby reaping the benefits of quality early learning and care and realising the opportunity to reach their full potential. AIM provides a suite of universal and targeted supports across seven levels. Measures include: staff training; specialised equipment, appliances or capital grants towards minor building alterations; therapeutic supports; and the facilitation of a lower ratio of children to staff in preschool rooms, as the Senator mentioned, or funding for an extra staff member as a shared resource, where a child with additional needs is present. A core feature and strength of AIM is that it does not require a diagnosis. Instead, resources are allocated based on a child's individual needs. Over the past ten years, more than 41,300 children in over 5,000 settings nationally have received AIM targeted supports and many more children have benefited from universal measures enhancing inclusion in their service.
AIM is presently being extended on a phased basis as funding becomes available. As a first step in this extension, all AIM targeted supports are now, since the beginning of September 2024, available to ECCE children beyond the time that they spend in the ECCE programme, both in term and out of term. Children can now access these supports for up to six hours per day both inside and outside of the ECCE term. The programme for Government commits to "examine and expand the Access and Inclusion Model and make it available to younger children". Officials in the Department are currently considering the policy implications and appropriate mechanisms to extend AIM to children aged under three. Consideration will be given at a later date to an extension of AIM for children attending school-age childcare. I know that is the cohort the Senator is particularly interested in today. Such an extension would also require a redesign of AIM to ensure that it meets the different needs of children in the older age cohort.
Equal Start is another key policy model which focuses on inclusion. Equal Start is a funding model and set of associated universal and targeted measures to support access and meaningful participation, including in school-age childcare, for children and their families who experience disadvantage. Since September 2024, 806 priority settings serving 38,000 children have been receiving funding to support reduced adult-child ratios, and greater engagement with families, as well as other child and family support services. Of these, over 450 settings provide school-age childcare services.
As the Senator said in her contribution, a full extension of this to school-going children would need to be planned and would need systematic integration. That is something that we would be looking at on a longer-term basis.

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Record URI: https://data.oireachtas.ie/akn/ie/debateRecord/seanad/2026-05-06/debate/main
Retrieved: 2026-08-14T04:54:54+00:00
Sitting date: 2026-05-06