Our role is to inspect and monitor residential care, special care, foster care and child protection and welfare services and, earlier this week, we published a report on our monitoring and regulation of these services over the past 10 years. The report covers the decade between 2014, when Tusla was established, and the end of 2023.
The report found that since 2014, many aspects of children’s services are working well and have improved, such as a stronger focus on children’s rights, improved assessment of needs and improving the physical environment of accommodation, while children assessed at immediate and serious risk received were responded to appropriately. Many positive initiatives have been implemented by Tusla over this decade, ranging from the expansion of family support services to implementing national models of practice in child protection and welfare and residential services, which has provided for more standardised work completed with children and their families.
We found that difficulties remain in a number of areas, however, such as in the recruitment and retention of staff across many services, a pattern that is also occurring in many similar services across Europe. This means that many children did not have an allocated social worker or have experienced multiple changes in social workers over short periods of time, which impacts the service provided to them and their families.
Speaking at the launch of the report, Eva Boyle, HIQA’s Head of Programme for Children’s Services, said: “It is crucial to ensure that children have access to the right service and for children to be able to build trusting relationships with the staff they interact with. Children, parents and foster carers have consistently told us that they receive a good service when they have a consistent staff member working with them.”
We continue to advocate for children and young people to improve services and influence change, including through the implementation of new national standards.
The full report is available on our website here.
(Pictured at the beginning of this article: Eva Boyle, Head of Programme for Children’s Services, Angela Fitzgerald HIQA CEO and Finbarr Colfer, Chief Inspector of Social Services.)