Minister Zappone Announces Early Years Capital Grants Funding
8 July 2016
Dr Katherine Zappone, TD has today announced that more than €6.5m in capital funding has been allocated through the Department of Children and Youth Affairs to 1,006 pre-school providers nationwide. This represents an increase of over 2.5m on the amount of €4m announced for this programme in February 2016. Grants of up to €10,000 per provider are being provided.
The funding being made available today is specifically for pre-school providers – both community/not-for-profit and private providers – who want to expand their services to cater for more children from September 2016.
Minister Zappone said: “The extension of the Early Childhood Care and Education (ECCE) pre-school scheme so that every child will be able to access free pre-school from the age of three until they start school (entering pre-school in the September, January or April after they turn three) is a welcome development for children, parents and Early Years providers. It will see more than 60,000 additional children enrolled in the programme by April 2017. Children will now benefit from an average of 61 weeks of the scheme, up from 38 weeks. In order to ensure that there is sufficient capacity in the sector to provide for these children, this is one of a number of measures my Department has developed to assist services to expand.”
The funding being made available today is specifically for pre-school providers – both community/not-for-profit and private providers – who want to expand their services to cater for more children from September 2016.
The grants that are being awarded may be used to cover the following:
· Build / fit out / refurbishment of an additional room /extension;
· Minor building alterations; and
· Costs for additional play equipment (to a maximum of €5,000) to facilitate an increase in childcare places.
This Department of Children and Youth Affairs, with the assistance of Pobal, invited applications from all services contracted to deliver its various childcare programmes. All submitted applications were considered in order to find those that most closely and completely met the criteria and objectives of the programme