Debate contribution: Childcare: High-quality and Affordable Provision

Debate contribution by Ms Kate Nicholl on 12 February 2024.

MLA

Ms Kate Nicholl

Party at the time

Alliance Party

Date

12 February 2024

Type

Debate contribution

Business

Private Members' Business

Heading

Childcare: High-quality and Affordable Provision

Assembly identifier

Official Report component 4217991

Read the official Assembly record

Text

Principal Deputy Speaker, I congratulate you on your elevation to the role, and I wish you all the best in it. This is my maiden speech, so I would like to pay tribute to my predecessor, Clare Bailey, who was a fierce champion for the environment, women's reproductive rights, social justice issues and marginalised voices. Those are areas in which I will not fall short. I arrived in Belfast from Zimbabwe when I was 14 years old. I have always been grateful to this city and its people for welcoming me and for becoming my home when I no longer had one. So much of what I do and what I did as a councillor is done out of a sense of duty and indebtedness, but also with a strong sense of having arrived as a child, feeling like an outsider and wanting to make sure that no other children felt that way. That is why I have done so much work with asylum seekers and refugees. When I was elected to the Assembly, I had stood for election for children, but this time it was because of my own. My husband, Fergal Sherry — he is watching at the moment and was one of the other brilliant things to come out of moving to Belfast — and I are very proud to live in South Belfast and to be raising our children there. Whilst I was canvassing during the Assembly election campaign, heavily pregnant, every day, multiple times, people raised the issue of childcare. I was experiencing the issue in my house, and colleagues were experiencing it in their houses. Constituents were suffering from the sheer lack of affordable childcare in Northern Ireland, and I realised that something needed to be done. I made a promise that I would do everything in my power to address it if I got to the Assembly, so here I am. Shortly after I was elected, Naomi Long appointed a childcare working group in the Alliance Party: a number of MLAs and researchers. For the past two years, we have been put to work looking at childcare policy and how we can address the issues in it. We met Employers for Childcare, whose Aoife Hamilton has done amazing work on the all-party group along with Nicola Brogan. It is a wonderful all-party group to be in, and it has raised so many important issues that, perhaps, have not previously been brought to the fore. Including the Federation of Small Businesses, the Northern Ireland Childminding Association, the Northern Ireland Chamber, Melted Parents —some of whom are here today — Early Years and the Stranmillis College early years academics, the list of stakeholders who have done such amazing work in the sector goes on and on. While all brought different perspectives to the childcare crisis, there was one resounding message, which is that there is a childcare crisis, and the crisis is now. We developed our policies, and we listened to stakeholders and heard what they had to say. We saw what was happening across the water and how the free hours model is not working and not serving families. It works very well for a very small number, but, for the majority, it does not. It is actually widening inequalities, and we need to address that. We have proposed an affordable, bespoke childcare scheme that is child-centred and puts quality, flexibility, affordability, training and experience at the heart of our policy.

We want to see supply-side funding with the requirement that providers ensure that those mechanisms are all put in place.

There is a lot of work for the Minister in his in tray, and I know from the several occasions that I have bumped into him in the corridor that childcare will be a priority of his. That is welcome, and it is welcome that all the parties are united in prioritising it. We have to get it right, because childcare is not just babysitting. It is child development, early education and early intervention. It is a means by which to improve economic activity levels. It is about gender equality in the labour market. It is essential social and economic infrastructure, and it has to be invested in accordingly. It will be expensive — we know that — but it is far more expensive not to invest in it. I am delighted to be on the Education Committee, and I am delighted to work with all parties on this important issue. I look forward to our delivering a scheme that will really suit parents and children, because, at the end of the day, that is what it is really about. It is about our children, and there is no better investment that a Government can make than in the next generation.

798 words. Text as published by the Northern Ireland Assembly.

Assessment

Not qualifying

Jev’s structured answers

Assessed 21 October 2026 at 09:36 UTC by jev-1.13.0 (requested as typesafe/jev) under rubric 2026.10-r9, methodology 1.9.

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