Ms Oonagh Fleming:

I do not want to get too technical but the application process and the application form that is built on the early years hive portal has in excess of 20 validations built into it. It was tricky when people were learning to use it in year one. However, it allows for the things the Senator talked about, for example, that service providers that operate from 8 a.m. to 6 p.m. are paid for that staff capacity. There is no deduction for somebody going on a break because there is an assumption there is a cover. We used a typical week. We did not want core funding to be prohibitive. We needed it to be more intuitive to how services actually operate. It is a typical week. A provider tells us it intends to operate from whenever to whenever. I do not know need to know that it closed for two days that week because there was a funeral. Core funding is different. It is to provide a more consistent, stable income based on capacity, whether the capacity is taken up or not. The provider must name the staff and identify where it tends to allocate them. However, if a staff member was out sick for two weeks, it does not report that. We tried to build understanding into how services actually have to operate on the ground and we continue to try to improve that.

This year, for year two of core funding, to support the administrative requirement, we closed last year’s application. Services that did not make any changes or whose situation was the same did not have any work to do.