Ms Catherine Bond:

The kinship care question is very important. The more we can keep children within their wider family circle the better. It keeps coming back to supports. What kinds of supports do these families need? If they have a child placement they need to have continuous contact with the link social worker. They need those support structures and when they ask for help they need to get help in the here and now and not, as Mr. Nolan said, get an assessment for a child in two years' time. Some of the asks for the Minister are very solution focused in that sense.

The Signs of Safety programme has been very positive. It has been there for a long time now - I believe for four or five years. I am not sure if there are plans to evaluate that but it would be useful to have an evaluation to see how many children the programme has prevented coming into the care system and the percentage of children coming into the care system as a result of doing an analysis or an assessment within families.

With private fostering arrangements, we really need to get beyond that anomaly. We have numbers of people contacting IFCA. There are grandparents caring for teenage children. These carers are neither fish nor fowl. They are not foster carers and they are not recognised as family. There are no financial supports for those grandparents to look after children. We all know the cost of raising teenagers. It is quite expensive.

As Dr. O'Brien said, the exit interview is very appropriate. The one thing we are missing is that we are not, to my knowledge, gathering data on placement endings. IFCA advocates only has four part-time advocates. In 2021, we supported 30 families who had placement breakdowns. To date in 2022, we have supported 27 families where there is imminent or actual placement endings.

We are not capturing the data on the contributing factors to those placement endings. If we used a triage system, that way, for the emergency, we might be able to put the supports in place for foster carers who are shouting from the rooftops for supports for their foster children, not for themselves. We also need to look at the broader family support systems that are offered within Tusla and beyond through the prevention, partnership and family support, PPFS, system. We should be linking foster carers on the ground with organisations, whether they are parent and toddler groups or afterschool clubs in the locality. We should be thinking more broadly about alternative carer family supports. We should be thinking across lines more. Foster carers need to be seen as part of the team. There needs to be a partnership with them and they need to be respected. Their views and opinions need to count. That is not the case at the moment.