The rollout of the new Early Years Hive , which will host the National Childcare Scheme (NCS) , will commence today. This will be done on a phased county by county basis. All of the County Childcare Committees have been informed of this approach and may already have been in contact with you.
The objective of the recent training delivered by each CCC was to prepare Service Providers for the arrival of the Early Years Hive and to be ‘parent ready’. This will be achieved through the completion of readiness tasks and completion of a programme application. This means that once NCS is launched and parents have obtained their CHildcare Identifier Code Key (CHICK) , service providers will be ready to register children with their service.
Today we are starting with the counties Longford, Leitrim, Carlow, Kerry and Mayo. The PAU for each organisation will get an auto generated email from EYP inviting them to follow the link to get their organisation/facility set up on the Early Years Hive.
In this phase only Service Providers who have activated an NCS contract on PIP will be invited to start the readiness processes on the Early Years Hive.
It is important to note that a PAU of a multi facility organisation will be permitted to complete the readiness tasks and programme application for all the facilities under the parent organisation, including those facilities in other counties.
Service providers who do not receive an invite in this phase but who have activated an NCS contract will receive their invites after 25th October.
Once NCS is launched, any Service Providers wishing to update their organisation/facility details must do so on the Early Years Hive, for this reason a second phase roll out will occur in November, where all existing Service Providers, will beinvited to complete their readiness tasks on the Early Years Hive.