Professor Michelle Norris:

The best way to clarify the situation with social work placements is to compare us to the other social and health professions. For instance, UCD provides degrees in nursing, medicine and social work. St. Vincent's University Hospital is part of the university and the placement part of the degree is automatically provided for nursing colleagues. However many hundreds of placements they require are automatically provided. They can be guaranteed. We start from a position of zero placements every year in the social work school. We have 50 students on our two-year programme each year, 100 students in total. This year we had to make arrangements with 141 individual social workers to place those 100 students. We contact individual social workers and conclude agreements with them to take a student on placement. Placements are not provided to us centrally by the employers. Tusla has a total of three liaison people who will help us in various parts of the country, but there are no guaranteed placements.

Some of those arrangements break down. We find that the breakdown rate of arrangements is particularly high in areas such as child protection in Tusla because of the turnover of staff and the degree of pressure. We then have to secure more placements. We have a couple of concerns about this. If we register a student on our social work degree we are contractually obliged to deliver that programme, including the two placements. Unless we can be sure of placements we have concerns about taking in students. Our experience in the Dublin region in recent years shows that delivering more placements is very challenging. We find it particularly difficult for students who need to repeat a placement. On occasions in recent years we have had to approach more than 100 social workers to place a repeat student.

Moreover, we do not have a formal relationship with the employer organisation. This has raised concerns around the general data protection regulation, GDPR, because we may need to share sensitive information about the student that is relevant to their performance on the placement. That is anomalous within these professions. The HSE has moved to address this for radiographers. If this was done in social work, it would have a transformative impact on the sector.