Minister for Children Barry Andrews says major changes are needed in child protection services to ensure children at risk are identified much earlier. Carl O'Brienreports
NEWLY APPOINTED Government ministers tend to spend time settling into their new roles, absorbing policy details and gradually deciding what their political priorities will be during their term in office.
Not so for Barry Andrews. Barely hours after being appointed as Minister for Children and Youth Affairs, it was clear what the main issue confronting the 41-year-old former teacher would be.
A newspaper had just revealed the contents of a report in which health authorities conceded that they were not able to respond adequately to hundreds of cases of children at risk of abuse or neglect. The next day an investigative documentary programme on TV caused a national stir after documenting individual cases of abuse which had gone unchecked despite social services being alerted.
Newly compiled figures also showed frightening levels of abuse and neglect. For example, some 2,300 children were taken into care in 2005 because of neglect, the inability of their parents to cope, or because of physical, sexual or emotional abuse.
What emerged was a picture of a dysfunctional child protection service, operating against a backdrop of scarce resources, staff shortages and frightening levels of child abuse and neglect.
Andrews says tackling this issue is easily his biggest priority in office. Major changes are needed to the way child protection services operate, he says, with greater emphasis on preventing abuse in the first place rather than responding to cases on an emergency basis.
Controversially, however, he says the biggest problem is likely to be the management of the service rather than a lack of resources.
"I'm of the view from what I've seen that this isn't going to take a whole pile of resources; this is going to take a change in management structures," he says. "From what I can see there is no uniformity across the country: there are areas where they are extremely well resourced, yet they have long waiting lists of child protection referrals, and vice versa.
"It's unacceptable that that's been going on for so long. Yes, there is an issue in terms of health boards being replaced by the Health Service Executive. But it's time we got on, stopped making excuses, and tried to find solutions."
The solution, he says, is changing the way social workers operate. A key problem with management of the service is young and inexperienced social workers are too often plunged into the deep end of child protection, he says. Here they are forced to deal with complex care and welfare issues and required to make life-changing decisions for children and their families, such as whether to take a young person into care.
"Why are they being put on the front line so early in their career? No doctor is allowed to perform surgery straight out of college; no lawyer is allowed to run a murder trial straight out of college. Yet social workers are being put on the front line from day one," he says.
"It seems to me that the structure there is wrong; it seems to me that it's leading to staff retention issues . . . We need to ensure that a social worker on the ground who is making a decision about a child does not feel personally exposed; so that there is a back-up system and so the risk is shared throughout the corporate structure of the HSE."
While many of these views are shared by social workers, most of those on the front line of child protection are insistent that services are under-resourced. They point to vacant child protection posts which remain unfilled, massive caseloads and an overemphasis on emergency measures rather than preventative work.
Andrews accepts that resources may be an issue in some instances, but again insists that better management, changes in work practices and linking of existing services can provide dramatic improvements.
Ultimately, he says, he is convinced that the focus of child protection services can switch towards a greater focus on preventative work and intervene earlier in the lives of children at risk. "It requires a change of mindset. The easiest thing to do in a very heavy duty case is for a social worker to take the child into care. It's the easiest thing to do. The risk is gone, there's no problem there," he says.
"The hardest thing to do is leave the child in the family, and provide the services to go with that. The only way we can encourage more of the latter is to have better services in place.
"In terms of improving funding and family support services, there has been a dramatic increase in funding of these services. I accept it will be difficult in the current economic climate to get the kind of resources that we want, but there is also the question of linking up existing services which are out there.
"Until we have a better picture of the lack of conformity and consistency in different health board areas, it is difficult to say exactly where these gaps exist."
There is also a compelling financial argument to be made for switching the focus of child protection towards greater preventative work: such a move would yield significant cost-savings over time.
However, politics, with its annual budgets and five-year election cycles, tends to demand short-term results. It's a dilemma that Andrews is well aware of - but he's confident he can win the support of his colleagues in Government to ensure sufficient money is available to help make it happen.
"When you look at resources required in residential provision, for example, it's far greater than what's required for family support services," he says.
"Trying to persuade people that investing now will result in savings down the road: it's fairly self-evident that that will happen. But in a situation where you're budgeting from year to year, it's hard to buy into and requires a jump in thinking, not just for social workers and the HSE, but for the whole of Government.
"It will require buying into a system in which the fruits won't be seen for many years to come; but it doesn't take any insight to know that that is the best approach."