Family context

•Ensure children and their families who need early intervention and therapy input can access that support in a timely way by increasing staffing, training more therapists, and prioritising children’s disability teams to deliver supports and services.

•Support families who are waiting too long for an Assessment of Needs to procure assessments privately.

•Build capacity in primary care therapy services to support a broad range of children and adults with lower levels of complexity in line with the HSE’s Access Policy.

•Set a new child poverty target and examine ways to lift more children out of child poverty.

•Examine the further expansion of free public transport for children.

•Encourage employers to publish statistics of the take up, by both genders, of parental leave and flexible working.

•Examine the extension of Parents Leave and Benefit and additional flexibilities.

Note: The emphasis on leveraging new and existing policies for families of

young children in this Programme for Government opens up further possibilities for data collected in Growing Up in Ireland to provide useful evidence for such policies.

Growing Up in Ireland - Cohort 24 at 9 months | Research Needs Report 2025

References