Professor Michelle Norris:

In response to the Senator's question, we have been raising this on a regular basis. I took over as the head of my school in UCD five years ago. We had a meeting with Tusla at that stage with a view to establishing a third level liaison group. There was a series of meetings. The issue still was not resolved. Since then it has become more problematic for us within the Dublin region because the availability of placements reflects the availability of social workers in the sector.

I used the analogy of UCD's relationship with St. Vincent's Hospital in UCD earlier so I do understand that the social work profession is more fragmented and diverse but our figures on our placements last year in UCD show that approximately 40% of them came from Tusla and another 25% came from the HSE or HSE-funded organisations. If we could form relationships with those two major employers that would resolve many of our problems. CORU, the regulator of qualifications, requires our students to do two placements. We have a policy of giving them mainstream statutory placement in a major area of social work such as child protection, which many of our graduates would go into, and then perhaps a more specialist placement in an NGO or disability organisation. If a stock of placements were provided centrally from the two major employers, we have an infrastructure for securing them within our third level institutions which we can work with. Other organisations would provide us with smaller numbers. The issue is the lack of certainty year on year.