Tusla to look overseas to find social workers

Social workers may be recruited from Canada and Britain as part of an effort by Tusla, the Child and Family Agency, to address a backlog of child protection cases in the State.

The latest figures show 5,987 children were awaiting the allocation of a social worker in January (down from 6,718 at the end of last year) with 956 of the cases classified as “high priority”.

Tusla is seeking to fill 102 social worker posts in the coming months to try to address the problem.

Of the 6,371 children in care in January, 426 (7 per cent) had no social worker, while 602 (9 per cent) had no written care plan.

The only category of children under Tusla’s care where 100 per cent have an allocated social worker are the 14 in residential special care.

A number of cases in recent weeks have highlighted apparent lapses in the oversight provided to children at risk by the agency, with many pointing to inadequate number of social workers and work-overloads for social workers.

Graduates

Fred McBride, chief executive of the agency, told The Irish Times that Tusla was seeking graduates from Irish third-level institutions but had also visited universities in Northern Ireland and hoped to attract back social workers who have emigrated in recent years.

A spokeswoman for the agency said a national recruitment campaign was about to begin “with a specific focus on recruiting from the current graduate pool north and south of the Border who will graduate in 2016”.

“Following on from this programme, feasibility studies are under way with universities in the UK and Canada to assess potential graduate candidate pools.”

Funding cuts

Dr Helen Buckley, associate professor at the school of social work and policy at Trinity College, said Irish universities were not producing enough social workers. This was, in part, due to deep funding cuts to third-level institutions over the past eight years, she said. Trinity would graduate about 75 social workers this year, and UCD about 50.

"Some of these won't go into social work and others will travel abroad. Australia for instance is actively trying to recruit Irish social work graduates as they are trained so well."

Pay and conditions for social workers in Britain was “probably not all that much better” but graduates were attracted nonetheless.

There was a danger, in simply recruiting more and more social workers, that Tusla could become diverted from other strategies to protect children – such as working in communities, schools and other areas – to build resilience within families and so prevent children becoming endangered in the first place.

Tusla employs 1,413 whole- time social workers, and increase of 12 since the end of last year, and of about 50 since the end of September last year.