‘High caseloads inhibit social workers’ ability to meet practice expectations’

Social workers may be unable to meet the recommendations made in various child abuse inquiry reports because of the high number of children assigned to them, claim academics in University College Cork.

The latest edition of the Irish Journal of Applied Social Sciences, dedicated to child abuse reports including the Ryan and Roscommon reports, includes the claim.

Kenneth Burns and Joe MacCarthy of the School of Applied Social Studies, state “current practices... indicate that the ‘apparently’ high caseloads carried by these [social work] teams inhibit their ability to meet the practice expectations resulting from the recommendations of child abuse inquiry reports”.

Referring to caseload “saturation”, they said that the increasing complexity of referrals mean “the abilities of these teams to address the needs of children and young people and to fulfil their statutory functions are seriously jeopardised”.

The special edition of the journal coincides with the annual Social Care Ireland conference which got under way in Limerick yesterday.

One concern voiced by Social Care Ireland is that a “disproportionate amount of time is spent compiling and duplicating statistical data and reporting rather than giving those they care for the quality of life and opportunities... which their vulnerability and marginalisation demands”.

However, another article in the journal, written by Professor Bríd Featherstone of the Open University and others, states the HSE’s planned Business Process Standardisation Project for recording data would not necessarily have made a difference in the Roscommon case, for example.

In another article by Dr Helen Buckley of Trinity College Dublin, the “very low rate” of substantiated reports to the child protection services are cited.

“What we have, apparently, is a system that invests considerable resources in screening and filtering out the majority of reports that come to it” — meaning access to services “seems to be a matter of serendipity”.