Mr. Fred McBride:

I will start before passing on to my colleagues. It is difficult to recruit in terms of social work because there are only so many graduates each year and we are in competition with other agencies such as the HSE, the community and voluntary sector, the Probation Service and so forth. I outlined earlier some of the more creative measures we are trying to put in place to recruit staff and to retain staff. Regarding how big an issue it is, at present we have 246 social work vacancies and there is ongoing recruitment to try to recruit for them. However, there are 156 agency staff filling some of these posts so there is a balance of 90 for which there is ongoing recruitment. While there are 246 vacancies, we are not always good at explaining the fact that agency staff are covering a significant proportion of those posts. Agency staff can up and leave but we have in place a plan to convert the agency staff into three year fixed-term contracts to provide some stability. That is roughly the position with recruitment.

As we mentioned already, administrative staff are very much part of the plan and part of the considerations for changing and improving the skills mix. It not always about getting in social workers, but also front-line professionals such as social care workers and family support workers and the administrative staff to support them. We can provide separately a breakdown of the number of staff we are recruiting by grade if the Deputy wishes.

On staff training and development, some time ago we launched our continuous professional development strategy and as part of that we are doing training needs analyses. People will have personal development plans as a result of that - it is not all in place yet - which will contain their training and development needs on an individual basis for the future. Signs of Safety is the national approach to practise and we have trained about 1,200 of 1,500 social workers on this new approach. There is a great deal of staff training and development taking place at present.