Our recent overview of children’s services found that 4,239 children with cases open with the child protection and welfare service were waiting to be allocated a social worker at the end of 2020.
The report is an annual overview of the inspection and regulation of children’s services in 2020. It provides an insight into the quality and safety of services for children, including foster care, child protection and welfare, children’s residential centres, Oberstown Children’s Detention Campus, and special care units.
Overall, 44 inspections were conducted during 2020 across these range of services. Our inspectors met with 141 children, foster carers and parents and received over 800 questionnaires from children in foster care. In total, we engaged with 1,041 children during the inspections. The majority of children who were consulted with were positive about the service that they received and felt well cared for.
HIQA’s Head of Children’s Services, Eva Boyle said: “2020 was an exceptional year due to COVID-19. Services endeavoured to facilitate children’s visits, and visiting arrangements were put in place in line with public health guidance, whenever possible. Our inspections found that governance and management improved in many of the services we inspected. Notwithstanding these improvements, variations remained in the quality of services provided to children, and there are opportunities to improve inconsistencies in the quality of services provided.”
While it was found that while there were noticeable improvements across children’s services, the quality of key systems such as risk management, monitoring and quality assurance required improvement.
Progress was also required in improving the timeliness of children’s access to services including the completion of assessment of children. We found that when a child was allocated a social worker, they generally received a good quality service. Staffing shortages in some areas impacted on service provision to children and filling these vacancies would increase service’s capacity and reduce the number of children on waiting lists.
Read the full report at www.hiqa.ie.