Roderic O'Gorman (Dublin West, Green Party) | Oireachtas source

The recruitment and retention of social workers and other grades is a major issue in Tusla. It is also a major issue in disability services. The Minister of State, Deputy Rabbitte, and I are focused on it. Before the recess, she and I met the Minister, Deputy Harris, to discuss the question of how to get more trained roles for the appropriate places. There are a number of ways of doing that, for example, opening up more CAO places, which would be particularly effective in terms of the various therapist posts, and using alternative grades. In the latter respect, we discussed a level 5 occupational therapy assistant or a speech and language therapy assistant doing some work and providing greater levels of intervention. Another way is setting up masters courses so that people with a background in an area can qualify more quickly.

There have been challenges in filling social worker places. This is one of the issues that was flagged last year. Work was done with UCD on trying to understand why people were not taking up social work on as a career. A key point that was identified was a concern about costs, so Tusla now provides a number of bursaries for distance degree courses so that staff can train over a number of years and become social workers. Tusla also has a focused graduate recruitment campaign where it targets everyone who graduates from an Irish university and offers him or her a place within the organisation. This went well last year and, I understand, is even doing a little better this year. I believe Tusla is looking to recruit 165 people or so through this campaign. That is a significant number. Other steps have been taken. Over the past three years during Tusla’s previous corporate plan, we added social work to the critical skills list for international visas. There is also a focused graduate recruitment campaign under way in the Philippines.

A range of measures have been taken and Tusla is taking even more now, including a consideration of the issue of bursaries and trying to make more young people, particularly in secondary school, aware of social work as a career. I believe there is a pilot targeting transition year students. We need to grow the pool of young people who are interested in taking on what is a challenging but incredibly rewarding career in the long term.

Tusla can give specific details, but these are the matters with which the Department can help. We meet quarterly and social worker recruitment and retention is always on our agenda.