Ms Kate Duggan:

I thank the Chair and the committee for the invitation to appear here today. As the Chair has said, I am joined this morning by my colleagues Gerry Hone, Rosarii Mannion, and Pat Smyth. We are very grateful for the opportunity to meet committee members today, many for the first time, to discuss our work, the progress made and the challenges faced.

In the 11 years since Tusla’s establishment, the agency has grown exponentially, with a 100% increase in child protection and welfare referrals. In 2024, we received 96,666 child protection and welfare referrals, 5,823 young people were in our foster care, residential care and aftercare services and 8,659 young people were referred to our education support services for the current school year. In responding to this growth and the scale of demand in recent years, we have expanded our services and implemented new services in line with changing policy and legislation, such as the birth information and tracing service and childminding registration We have risen to the challenge of unprecedented situations such as Covid-19 and the HSE cyberattack and rapidly scaled up services to respond to an almost 500% increase in separated children seeking international protection. We are proud of the agency’s achievements to date and of the positive work we have done with children, families, and communities all over Ireland in response to a changing landscape and level of need.

Many of the challenges we are facing have been widely documented, including the increasing demand for all of our services, an inadequate supply of emergency and alternative care placements, workforce supply issues, particularly in social work and social care, and the challenges we face in providing timely access to special care beds to the most vulnerable cohort of young people in our care. We have also seen increased scrutiny and criticism from the Judiciary of the impact of our capacity challenges on children and young people in the care of the State who are under the oversight of the courts.

As well as the increase in demand for our services, we have noted a marked increase in children and young people with more complex needs, particularly those with disability, mental ill-health, addiction, and those at risk of exploitation or involvement with the youth justice system. Wider societal issues such as global movement, poverty, homelessness, domestic, sexual and gender-based violence, drugs, criminality, exploitation and social media continue to significantly impact the demand for our services. We continue to engage with other State agencies to promote interagency working to better meet their needs. We look forward to the review of the Child Care Act and the commitment to place inter-agency co-operation on a statutory basis. We also welcome the commitment in the programme for Government to whole-of-government support for the delivery of alternative care services. Further strengthening of interagency working and support across Departments is pivotal to enabling better outcomes for children and young people with more complex needs.

Internally, we are currently implementing our Tusla integrated reform programme, which is an ambitious transformation programme across five key pillars to ensure that children and young people receive the right response from the right professional in the right place at the right time and that our staff are supported and valued. Over the last 18 months, with the support of our staff, executive, board, departmental colleagues and Ministers, we have made significant progress. We have opened the first of four Tusla residential centres since 2018 and we are on track to open a further eight centres across 2025 and 2026. We have provided an additional 800 placements for separated children seeking international protection and have increased the number of Tusla foster carers recruited.

For the first time since 2022, we have ensured that, today, any young person requiring special care has been allocated a placement. We have, for the first time, reached our funded workforce, with the most social workers and social care workers ever employed in the agency, and increased our staff retention. We have launched new supply routes for social work and social care professionals into the agency, most significantly a new social work apprenticeship scheme with 35 social work apprentices commencing in 2024 and 75 places for 2025. We have published the first Tusla outcomes framework, achieved statutory compliance with birth information and tracing legislation and launched the childminding registration service across Ireland.

Tusla continues to make significant progress in our digital transformation, which aims to maximise the use of innovation in supporting the delivery of our services. Central to this transformation is our Tusla case management, TCM, system, which was used by 4,000 staff last year in managing 140,000 cases. This system was developed by our internal technical team in 2022 and has expanded each year to now provide a single integrated view of a child’s case file across 25 services our agency provides for children and families. We are preparing for the launch on 1 January 2026, for the implementation of the final phase of the transformation of our community services, restructuring our regions, areas and services to ensure equity in access, integrated service delivery, more focused governance and oversight, and more efficient services, to enable better outcomes and more positive experiences for children, families and communities.

I believe that the work we do is one of the most important roles in the State. It is a privilege for us to work for this agency. We are extremely proud of our staff who work tirelessly each day and of our partners in community and voluntary services across the country supporting children, young people, families and communities on our behalf. Together, we have made progress. We know from external oversight that we use our resources to ensure that those who are most at risk and in need are responded to. However, significant challenges remain and if we are to achieve our ambition of providing the right response at the right time to all of the children, young people and families referred on a daily basis, we need further investment in our child protection and welfare, therapeutic, alternative care, educational support and early intervention services, in line with demand.

I thank the committee for the interest members have shown in the crucial work the agency does in helping some of the most vulnerable children and young people in our society. I look forward to working with members further over the coming months. We are happy to answer any questions members may have.