Patrick Costello (Dublin South Central, Green Party) | Oireachtas source

To follow up on the employment aspect, Tusla's aim is to have 5,150 staff. Two points strike me from what Mr. Gloster said. The first relates to the retention issue. Many people who get into social work do so longing to work directly with children. If there are multidisciplinary teams and if it is a social work-led team, the social worker becomes, and this is already a complaint of some staff, a case manager and does not do the direct work. When I have spoken to some social workers about the in-house therapeutic supports, they argue if there were more social workers they could do that work. There is a danger that reducing that direct work with children in order to address the retention crisis will feed a retention crisis. My second question is on what is the figure of 5,150 based. We know the number of children in care. We have a tool to measure the pressure and from that we can gauge how many social workers we need. There is demographic information and from that we can estimate the likely number of children who will come into care and anticipate the demand. Based on measuring the pressure, we will know the number of social workers that will be needed. Has Tusla done that type of workforce planning exercise? I have one or two follow-up questions on fostering, which I will come back to later.