Ms Kate Duggan:

First of all, it is very important to say that the retention of staff is as important to us as the recruitment of staff. One of the things we did last November was the first ever Tusla-wide employee survey. It is very positive that over 60% of our staff completed that survey. That is very high in respect of public sector organisations' engagement and staff were very honest in that feedback. Staff told us that for the most part their physical environment was good, their technological enablement was good and working with their team directly was good. What they also clearly told us, however, was that they did not have enough face-to-face time with clients, that there were complex and standard business processes which were too complex, and that they felt that much of their work was compliance-based and, to use the phrase, box-ticking.

In response to that, we have a comprehensive people strategy, which we will not go into here, but this has very much been around getting staff to identify the solutions for us. Each area has now come back with their ideas for how we can improve all of that with regard to their working conditions and each area has their own retention plan. That has also come from the fact that there is inequity with regard to how our services are currently structured. There is inequity with regard to the level of risk that some teams are holding vis-à-visother teams. Therefore, our reform programme is very much around that multidisciplinary team, that variety of professionals, bringing in that element of a wider team, wider support, sharing the risk, and simplifying our business processes to free up and ensure staff have more face-to-face time, while at the same time recruiting through the international recruitment and through the graduate campaign but with a very clear and definitive focus on retention as well as recruitment for all of our staff. Our administrative staff are also burdened at the moment with the increase in the rate of referrals, as are our social care staff in the community and residential services. While it is very important to talk about our social work staff, it is also very important to talk about the diversity of staff and the challenge that is facing all of our staff when the demands are so great on the agency.