New child support agency planned

A NEW Child and Family Support Agency would be one of the new bodies established under the aegis of the new Department of Children, a senior member of the new department has said.

Mary Doyle, director general of the Office of the Minister for Children – which will form the core of the new department – was speaking at a conference in Dublin yesterday. The new agency would “come out of the HSE”, she said.

Asked about the fate of the Family Support Agency, which operates under the aegis of the Department of Community, Equality and Gaeltacht Affairs, Ms Doyle was unable to comment.

Ms Doyle, who was speaking at “What Now for Children?”, heard calls from a number of speakers for a significant spending increase on early-years education.

“The huge challenge for the new department will be in looking at what’s already in place and how best to use it differently.”

She said the new department would take on new functions, which would require enabling legislation. It should be “up and running in the next couple of weeks” and would have a premises of its own.

Alan Sinclair, fellow of the Work Foundation – a British think tank on work and its future – and an international expert on the zero-to-five age group, said the biggest skills gap found among British workers were “talking and listening; working with customers and working with each other”.

“You get these skills before you go to school, not at school,” he said. They were skills learnt by the age of three from effective parenting and enhanced by quality early-years education.