Audit agreed as social work hampered by ‘obsolete’ policies

The Child and Family Agency’s chief operations officer has conceded social workers are being bombarded by policies, some of which are “obsolete” and interfere with their capacity to make the best decisions for children in their care.

Fred McBride admitted expecting social workers to implement 60-plus policies, often delivered by email with the expectation of immediate implementation, was not sustainable and said the agency would conduct an audit “to clear the landscape”.

“I think social workers are absolutely correct. I think we need to be much clearer about what we are calling policy or a piece of professional guidance. I do think we need to reduce the number of policies that are mandatory and leave much more scope for professional judgement,” Mr McBride said. He said their director of policy and strategy was currently reviewing policies.

Mr McBride was attending the fifth National Child Protection and Welfare conference, entitled ‘Cherishing All the Children of the Nation Equally? 100 Years and Beyond’, at University College Cork yesterday.

Social workers also raised concerns about Tusla’s new caseload management system and a lack of input from anyone other than senior Tusla management when formulating new policies and procedures. One social worker, who did not wish to be identified, said the caseload management system was “good in theory” but in reality would require social workers to set aside half their cases if they were to implement it properly.

Tusla social worker Olivia O’Connell, who presented research looking at the gap between social work policy and practice, said everything came back to implementation. “You could come up with the best policy in the world and if it can’t be implemented either because of resource issues or other issues, it’s not worth the paper it’s written on,” she said. Yet at the end of the day, social workers would be held responsible for not adhering to policy so we are “setting ourselves up to fail”.

Mr McBride subsequently said they would review the new caseload system. Asked if the €38m in additional budget funding for 2016 was enough to allow Tusla to operate effectively, given that the agency requested a figure nearly double that, Mr McBride conceded there may have to be some redistribution of funds.

While they were “not anticipating service reductions in 2016” there may be services currently receiving Tusla funding that were “not properly aligned to strategic priorities, in which case some of those services may require to be recommissioned,” Mr McBride said. He was “not going to get into examples” but “some services are much more focused on adults than children and we have to examine if they are having an impact on children or not”.

Earlier this year, Tusla controversially pulled funding from Catholic marriage advisory service Accord. Mr McBride said the agency was also going to look at how to give greater protection to social workers exposed to increasingly dangerous and violent situations, often in the family home.

“We need to look at lone working,” said Mr McBride.

“Sometimes workers are going out to situations on their own and we need to look at how we can double up in these situations and to make sure proper systems are in place so people know where they are and what they are doing.”