To ask the Minister of Education how his Department supports childcare and early years groups that want to increase their staffing capacity or purchase resources and equipment in order to make services accessible to families with disabled children.

My Department funded a three year SEN Early Years capacity building pilot in DE-funded early years’ settings which finished at the end of September 2014.

The pilot aimed to improve early identification, assessment and intervention for children with SEN and / or disability in statutory nursery settings and voluntary and private settings offering funded Pre - School Education Programme funded places.

ETI positively reviewed the pilot and subsequently the Early Years Inclusion Service, which is provided by the Education Authority (EA), commenced on 1 September 2015 and will build on the progress achieved during the Pilots and the Interim Arrangements.

I have recently provided further funding to the EA to extend the development of the Early Years training model used for pre-school settings to early years’ children with SEN entering primary schools at P1.