Mr. Pat Smyth:

The other piece is that our staffing is about 87% or 88% female. Since it is a new agency and we have recruited quite a number of people, we have between 150 and 175 people on maternity leave at any point in time. That creates the other demand. They are not leavers but vacancies are created in the system for up to a year. That is a constant churn. We have developed a workforce strategy which includes the recruitment campaign and getting much more vocal about how a career in child protection and welfare is quite rewarding. Despite the bad press that our business inevitably gets when something goes wrong, and that is quite serious, the overwhelming story from social workers is that it is a very rewarding workplace and a very rewarding career. I see all the time that the effort and enthusiasm people put in goes way beyond what one would expect in a public sector organisation. That has to be acknowledged in respect of staff who work in very difficult circumstances in some cases.

We have introduced a lot of change. We have talked about this before in terms of services. We have been training and developing people on a piece called Signs of Safety, a very good system that is trying to establish links for the child who is at risk with their family and local area. It aims to maintain kids in their own environment, protect them, work with them and their family but also to draw others into that network so that the child is protected and remains in a family environment. Social workers have made very strong statements about the usefulness of that and we have developed it around the country. Those kind of initiatives are about changing the culture and the way we do business. That has had an impact in terms of social workers looking at the business and saying it is a better way to do things.

We have a lot of initiatives looking at why people leave the organisation, better ways of recruiting and retaining staff. It is not a secret that we have some areas that are very difficult to work in. They are the areas where we struggle to retain and get people into. Sometimes it is a circle that reinforces the vacancy problem, in that young newer graduates end up in those areas. Their managers can often be relatively inexperienced so there is quite a high need to support them. That is a challenge because it is probably the last place where new graduates should be. We have tried to address how we support them, and how we can better train them and find better ways. It has been a challenge in the public sector. The rules around recruitment are there for very good reasons but we find it difficult sometimes to get the right people to the right place as quickly as we need to within the rules. We have had to look at ways of trying to create pools of staff that we can use when we run into problems with staffing in particular areas.