Mr. Jim Gibson:

Another interesting aspect of recruitment and retention of social workers is supply and demand. We have come out of a long period of austerity. We are expanding services. There is Government investment in our services and in other social work-dominated practices in other agencies. There is a strategic development initiative group within our agency. It is like a health check stocktake for each area of Tusla. It will come to Dublin South-Central as well and we will engage with Senator Devine about the concerns there. This helps us to examine the reality of what we need, which is to be more innovative in our recruitment and retention practices. We need to front-load the most experienced practitioners from social work and social care in the front-line intake and be more innovative in using other disciplines such as functional family therapists and public health nurses to provide a collaborative approach. We have moved forward and increased our senior practitioner grades across our service, particularly on the front line.

Through the strategic development group, we are sending messages and themes that emanate from areas into the Department of Children and Youth Affairs. It is clear there are not enough places in universities for social work training and the clear message to the Department is it needs to increase social work training programmes in order that we can look down the pipeline and have more graduates. The content of the courses also needs to change dramatically because we find that newly qualified social workers are not prepared for the reality of front-line child protection work. Recently, we conducted an audit in an area where we noticed a high rate of unallocated cases. We analysed that and what happened was we had mature, experienced workers being promoted or moving to another organisation being replaced by newly qualified social workers who did not have the experience, knowledge and confidence to make key professional decisions. They played safe and put them up as unallocated cases when they could have gone to family support intervention.