Mr. Pat Smyth:

I thank the members for the opportunity to speak on Tusla recruitment and retention issues in respect of social work and social care staff. They have been introduced to my colleagues and we will be happy to engage and take questions at the end, and to inform them on any areas I have not covered in the opening statement. For clarity, we submitted the opening statement as well as a more detailed background report with more information. I will update the committee on the issues associated with recruitment and how these impact on helping to resolve the recruitment challenges faced by Tusla. In addition, I will point out some of the initiatives the agency has undertaken to retain staff. As I said, additional information is in the separate document as well as in Appendix I of this document.

Since its establishment in 2014, Tusla has taken a number of significant steps to ensure that it is best placed to recruit and retain social work staff. However, despite recruiting in excess of 800 posts since 2014, this has only resulted in a 4% increase, just over 60, in overall social work staffing. The reasons for this are complex and relate to both the supply of social workers as well as the challenge of retaining staff in the area of child protection and welfare services. When we look at international comparators of social workers to children, the number of child protection social workers per 1,000 children, which is the international comparison we are using, in Ireland it is half of the closest number we found, which is in the UK. The implication there is that if we were to staff up to UK levels, we would require another 1,500 social workers. We have approximately 1,500 social workers currently, so it would mean doubling that number. It shows the challenge we are facing. Currently, Ireland trains 215 social workers through universities. In 2018, Tusla recruited 140 social workers. In a rough calculation, if they are all new social workers, we are getting 65% of the new graduates. The HSE is also competing for the same cohort of graduates, as well as voluntary sector agencies. This underlines the challenge. Ireland is not educating sufficient numbers of social workers to meet service demands for the coming years.

In addition, Tusla has invested in strategies to retain staff recruited to the organisation. While the numbers leaving the agency have fallen somewhat since we have commenced these initiatives, the challenge of the work involved in child protection and welfare means that graduate social workers are attracted to other social work areas having gained the experience and completed a number of years of work in child protection and welfare services. The solution to the recruitment of social workers and other key staff will take a number of years to resolve and it will require support from the universities, educational institutions and CORU, as well as political support.

Some immediate options are being progressed by the agency with partners. There have been discussions between the Department of Children and Youth Affairs and universities about increasing the number of undergraduate places available. Those discussions are ongoing. We have trained and developed our staff in a significant initiative, entitled Signs of Safety, which is about the implementation of a national, uniform practice model to ensure staff are sufficiently supported and trained for the very challenging work that is child protection and welfare. We are commencing the development of a strategy to create multidisciplinary teams who will work alongside social workers to create additional capacity within current resources to manage the delivery of services at the front line.

When Tusla was established in 2014, the agency was in more than 400 locations nationally, dealing with more than 43,000 child protection and welfare referrals each year. In 2018, there were almost 60,000 referrals, a significant increase on previous years. In respect of child protection services, the agency inherited 17 different areas of practice. The underlying systems in those were disparate, including five which were exclusively paper-based. In addition, the agency relied heavily on a memorandum of understanding, MoU, with the HSE for a range of critical services, including human resources and recruitment. Soon after establishment, it became apparent that Tusla's recruitment requirements could not successfully be met through the MoU as both agencies were seeking to hire the same staff. When greater financial resources became available in 2016, we commenced the development of our recruitment service, called Tusla Recruit.

While child protection and welfare is the main area of our work, we have to deal with many other areas of service. These inevitably capture often the best skilled, older and more experienced social workers on staff when we need to recruit to those areas. We have provided a long list of those services but areas such as adoption, separated children seeking asylum, therapy services, homelessness, educational support services, family support, domestic abuse, alternative care regulation, alternative educational assessment and registration and early years service regulation demand experienced social workers and they take social workers away from the child protection and welfare services as well. These services are supported by other directorates in the organisation. However, the point is that they are another source of drawing away from the child protection and welfare side.

The next point is how recruitment overall as well as social work have increased through the five years of establishment. Currently, we have just under 3,900 whole-time equivalent, WTE, staff in the organisation, of whom 1,453 are social workers. In addition, we employ just under 500 agency staff, of whom 226 are social workers and 160 are social care workers. We can go into detail about the arrangements relating to those later.

It is important to note the key achievements since the agency's establishment. One of the points that consistently comes through in HIQA reports - and we have had some very challenging reports from the authority in terms of services - is that where there has been an immediate risk to children, we have been able to put immediate protective responses in place that keep the child safe. That is at the core of everything Tusla tries to do - the idea that a child who might be at risk would not get a service because of whatever issues there may be in any part of the organisation is a human issue for any of us - and we have put in processes to ensure that it happens as far as we can make that possible. There is also the establishment of other areas related to our discussion this morning. They include Tusla Recruit and central vetting for employees as well as foster carers, Garda vetting and so forth. We have developed a comprehensive child protection and welfare strategy, which has been informed by all the gaps we have identified over the past number of years such as service gaps, recruitment and the risks that exist. That strategy has been in process over the past two years and has brought a significant improvement to our services.

We have established a child protection notification system, CPNS. That is part of our automation and investment in information and communications technology, ICT. In terms of support for families outside our system, the prevention partnership and family support initiative has been a major success. National University of Ireland, Galway, NUIG, evaluated that earlier in 2018 and found the initiative to be very strong. It is about trying to support families and children who are not in care but outside our system and in our attention sphere. The national childcare information system, NCCIS, went live in July 2018. For the first time, that brought a single system to child protection systems where the recording of data and the facility to allow social workers to work online on the recording of cases and so forth have been done. There is still work to do on it but it has been a major step change in our progress. Programme management as a practice has been brought into many of the changes, including service development, service initiatives and service improvements in which we have been involved, and we have developed a comprehensive ICT strategy and department and enhanced mobility with the workforce in terms of mobile devices and so forth.

I will briefly mention the complexity of what social workers do. In Tusla, the majority of social workers are employed in child protection and welfare in addition to children in care work. Our goal is always to try to make lives better for children. In social work cases, we intervene in complex situations where sometimes parents and children experience severe difficulties that have developed over time and require complex solutions.

In addition, we are also constantly balancing the need to intervene effectively in private family life to protect children, but also not to over intervene and damage the autonomy and rights that parents have to a private life, nor to unnecessarily remove children where other alternatives to their safety might exist. That is where the Signs of Safety process training of social workers has been heavily weighted towards.

We need to move from a culture of blame to a culture of shared responsibility, and the creation of a learning environment for staff, and civic discussion involving children and families that appreciates the complexity of child protection work. In public discussion, social work decisions are criticised for being overly interventionist, while in other situations for not taking action quickly enough or not intervening enough in families' lives. That is a challenge that we and social workers at the front end constantly have to balance.

A number of factors influence why social workers leave the profession. Through international research and Tusla's own consultation process, we know the factors that influence a social worker's decision to leave child protection. They are as complex as the area of work itself, including issues such as a culture of blame where often the positive work is ignored with a focus instead on the "bad" stories. Such focus leads to a risk-averse culture which, in turn, gives rise to professional decision-making being pushed upwards resulting in micromanagement and low job satisfaction. Furthermore, social workers, in particular, those in the area of child protection and welfare report higher levels of stress and burnout. Unfortunately, this can be compounded by overly bureaucratic systems, which reduce the time a social worker spends on direct work and have an impact. Finally, while we acknowledge and are supportive of the role of inspections, by their nature these focus on areas of deficit. The absence of commentary on the positive work in an area results sometimes in increased workloads as staff focus on the issues to be sorted rather than on the wider picture. It decreases consistency. Staff will leave areas where there are consistently high levels of criticism, .

As for how we are addressing this, we have experienced a small reduction in staff turnover in the 2016 to 2018 period. Behind that, we have established Tusla Recruit, which is a recruitment service specifically for Tusla. Up until 2016, we shared panels, recruitment services, etc., with the HSE. As I stated earlier, the competition for the same resources was never going to leave us in a position where we could get the best recruitment service for the social workers that we wanted and, therefore, we established our own recruitment service. At present, we handle 98% of our recruitment campaigns.

Through our workforce learning and development programme, we have enhanced training opportunities supporting the continuous professional development provided to social workers, including leadership training, supervision as well as organisation-wide training in Signs of Safety. Over the past year and a half, we have trained in excess of 2,000 staff in the delivery of that. There is a comprehensive ongoing programme with that. It provides a method of work which is relationship and strengths-based and works exclusively with the family and the others who are around the child in the community to create better outcomes for children and it has been widely welcomed and adopted by staff. It is positively rated by staff as they go through that process.

Through our graduate programme, we have been reaching out across Ireland, Scotland and Northern Ireland to link with universities to try to promote Tusla as a good place to work and, hopefully, as an employer of choice for graduates.

We worked consistently throughout 2018 on the development of a sophisticated workforce plan, which is about trying to develop multidisciplinary teams. In terms of trying to develop an alternative to the social worker model, we must identify, test and agree what these multidisciplinary teams will look like to ensure that the complexity of the care that one is trying to deliver at the front door is enhanced with care givers other than social workers and social care staff. That work allows us to capitalise on the other disciplines that we have within the organisation to support the front-line staff but also safeguard not only their time but also the service and the practice.

We have developed a pioneering initiative for social workers called the empowering practitioners in practice initiative, EPPI, which covers the major themes encountered by them in their daily work. This toolkit sets out clear and concise mentoring arrangements for social workers who engage in the initiative.

We have provided a large range of family friendly policies. In social work services, 85% of our employees are female and there is a large demand for term time, career breaks and parental leave. We have also been proactive in addressing issues of stress and burnout by providing enhanced employee health and well-being programmes and access to a critical incident stress management programme.

We face a number of challenges. Our demand for social workers is not being met by the supply of graduates from the universities. We are competing with other sectors for the same cohort of graduates. Similar to nursing and other professions, the mobility, choice and demographic profile of graduates, who often leave within two years, is very apparent. Child protection work is seen as the most challenging within the social work profession. Some of the retention initiatives give rise to recruitment demands. For example, promotional opportunities and career progression require back-filling, and family friendly policies place additional demands on the teams. I mentioned the demographic issue. A total of 100 of the 1,500 social workers are on maternity leave at any time because of the demographic profile of employees. Delays in the registration of new social workers are something that we have been trying to work through so that new social workers are available and registered faster but there are delays in those at present. There is also limited access to overseas social workers due to restrictions on visas-work permits for the non-EEA candidate pool.

A number of issues require further development on our part. We have put them down because we will require support as we move through them. An important one is access to training pathways for social care workers who wish to train and work as social workers. That is the idea of having those who work with us on the social care side of the house having some kind of employment-educational model that allows them to train as social workers. Additional graduate social work training places should be made available. We have mentioned the idea of a revised pay structure or some type of salary banding which can recognise the particular challenges associated with social workers within the child protection and welfare side. We have mentioned the need to strengthen the legislative framework on a number of fronts, specifically, section 3 on the retrospective allegations of abuse, which causes significant concern and angst within our services in terms of how to effectively deal with those cases. Finally, there is communicating and improving a civic understanding and the need for shared responsibility for the care of children in society.

In conclusion, the Tusla story is positive. We have made significant progress and undertaken much reform since establishment, despite the challenges faced by the agency. As I have demonstrated, where those challenges fall within our control, we have been proactive and creative in addressing them and we will continue with greater clarity in the context of the workforce plan. However, continued support is required from the wider civic, political, regulatory and media arena to ensure we can meet the significant challenges ahead. In particular, I ask members of the committee to support Tusla in the following areas: additional graduate places from third level institutions; the need to establish, provide and support the development of pathways for social care workers continue to work as social care workers but train as social workers within that environment; a revised remuneration scheme; and in terms of the workforce plan, the need to support and funding for technical administrative roles that will support social workers on the front line in the delivery of their duty.

My colleagues and I are happy to answer any questions from the committee.