Katherine Zappone (Dublin South West, Independent) | Oireachtas source

I strongly support Tusla's Survival to Sustainability plan. This is a three-year plan that includes provision of extra staffing to meet critical service concerns. This includes addressing children with no allocated social worker. The plan involves increasing overall staffing levels in Tusla by 323 whole-time equivalents, with an investment of €19.4 million over the period 2016 to 2018. We allocated €6.1 million for this purpose in 2016 for unallocated cases. This will fund a net increase of 168 social workers by the end of this year. It will be important to recruit other grades also to ensure an efficient service with the right mix of staffing, including family support staff and administrative support. At the time of devising the plan in September 2015, this meant Tusla needed to recruit more than 500 social workers by end 2016 when account is taken of the fact that it was carrying approximately 200 vacancies and that an average of 12 people leave each month due to retirement and other reasons.

Tusla has been proactive in its efforts to meet its recruitment targets in a competitive environment. At the end of May 2016, there were 1,512 social work whole-time equivalents in place. Approximately 100 of these relate to the strategic decision by Tusla to convert temporary agency posts into three-year fixed-term contracts to improve stability and work force allocation. Therefore, Tusla still needs to recruit 300 social workers between now and the end of 2016 to reach its very challenging target. In this regard, Tusla ran a recent graduate campaign to attract new graduates and this resulted in over 300 graduate applications. Interviews are currently under way.

I have spoken about the need for Tusla to invest in information and communications technology, ICT, infrastructure in order to support staff in their work. I am committed to the roll-out of a national child care information system.

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