Lack of foster placements mean vulnerable children cannot access supports, report finds
'We need to make sure we are doing whatever is needed to make sure we have enough foster parents. There has to be an acknowledgement that they are the backbone of the care system.' Picture iStock
The next time you’re driving past your local courthouse, just remember it’s not all public order offences, petty thefts or road traffic incidents.
In some cases, the lives of some of the most vulnerable children in the State are being discussed and directed, often without them being present to hear for themselves.
The lack of input from children in care is one of the observations in the new report by the Child Law Project (CLP), which looks back at a decade of covering those courts — a period during which the curtain has been drawn back on these proceedings.
Over 26 volumes, those reports have shown some improvements, while other things remain the same, among them the recurring themes of parental addiction, mental health difficulties and in some cases, domestic violence.
According to chief executive of the CLP Dr Maria Corbett: "That pattern of parent [difficulty] has been there since day one of court reporting and the other layer is seeing a disproportionate number of parents from ethnic minorities, including Traveller parents."
Other agencies, including the Ombudsman for Children, have illustrated how some young people fall between multiple services, particularly around the areas of disability and mental health. If all the support services are not working in tandem, it can create further difficulties for families.
And yet other trends have emerged in recent years. According to Dr Corbett, one is parents who may have issues over their intellectual capacity. Also, there appear to be more young people entering care at a later stage and at older ages than was previously the case.
Given the acknowledgement of a greater complexity in many care cases, it can mean a more challenging environment for care providers, typically foster families.
"Our reports evidence that. We can see that because we are watching cases over a long time and can see that a child in a placement can have mental health issue or difficulty or are responding to an earlier trauma," Dr Corbett said.
"Their level of need is high and they need more support and we see where they cannot come in [to care] in a timely way, you hear the placement has come under pressure. You can see people’s eyes widen when people say that.
"The level of intervention rises then and the child effectively has no stability. One thing that is particularly upsetting when you zoom right out is when a child is in a stable placement they can access therapeutic supports. Otherwise, you can hear it is not possible to start a therapeutic process until they are in a stable placement.”
It has meant greater pressure on placements, particularly when you consider the additional responsibilities placed on Tusla since the beginning of the war in Ukraine and the huge number of young people who have come to Ireland for refuge.
Renowned childcare lawyer Gareth Noble said he had experienced a few situations recently that he describes as “unprecedented”. In more than one case, he said: "We asked the judge to lift in-camera rule so the issues of concern in those cases can be brought to the attention of relevant Government departments.”
The relevant departments were Education, Public Expenditure, and Children, and what it actually means was that in effect, Noble and his colleagues felt the need to push beyond the scope of the court where the cases were being heard, and also beyond the scope of Tusla, and bring it straight to those controlling the pursestrings.
“Unfairly, Tusla are on the hook for a lot of things that are not in their area of responsibility,” Noble said.
He believes it is time to stop thinking that children in care are only the responsibility of Tusla, and instead frame it as being in the care of the entire State.
For its part, Tusla said it was "acutely aware of and has been vocal in relation to the current challenges in providing suitable residential and foster care placements, which include the increased demand for placements, particularly in responding to young people with more complex needs who require more intensive supports and the increase in separated children seeking international protection, an overreliance on the private sector, recruitment challenges and accommodation pressures".
Tusla said it regularly spoke with those working in the sector and its Strategic Plan for Residential Care Services 2022-2025 was one way in which the current challenges would be addressed.
The CLP reports have consistently highlighted the issue of childcare cases lost amid long, unwieldy court lists, particularly in the district court — one recent example was a list with 160 cases on it.
Dr Corbett speaks about people arriving in and out of courts in handcuffs while anxious parents await their turn for their non-criminal case to be called.
She believes some procedural elements of cases — such as the renewing of orders every 28 days — could be approached differently, requiring fewer court appearances and longer periods within which real progress can be charted, particularly as some judges take a very close role in monitoring how the agencies are discharging their duties when it comes to a child in care.
And this is the crux of it: there is a lack of available placements and there has been for a while. Dr Corbett describes it as “a lack of placements leading to in some cases to use of inappropriate placements, detention in special care longer than necessary and very late aftercare planning”.
For Gareth Noble, it is part of a cycle — at a time of difficulty in recruiting and retaining foster carers, the government has still not increased the Foster Carers Allowance.
Indeed, he believes there should be a premium for specialist foster carers. Instead, placements come under pressure, sometimes with the lack of an allocated social worker or foster link worker as a contributory factor.
Any collapse of a placement can mean the child not accessing the services they need, and then ending up in a residential care placement, at a time when Tulsa is actively trying to reduce the reliance on for-profit care providers.
And some children may end up without such a placement, and instead arrive at what Dr Corbett says are “emergency responses” — the use of hotel or holiday accommodation.
“They are not being left out on the street, they are being cared for, but it is effectively Tulsa so under pressure they are effectively operating two care systems.
“It is keeping the child alive, but they [the placements] are not a home.”
In its recent response to the TASC [Think-tank for Action on Social Change] report on The Future of Public Service Delivery by the Community and Voluntary Sector, the Children’s Residential and Aftercare Voluntary Association (CRAVA) has claimed "decades of under-investment has left a large number of voluntary care providers on the verge of collapse and the care system itself in crisis.
"This long-term under-investment has left the voluntary providers unable to respond to the increasing number of children and young people requiring care, and has opened the market for private for-profit companies to respond instead,” it said.
"This has led to an exponential increase in the number of private companies providing care in the past decade, to the extent that almost 70% of all children in care in Ireland are now in centres run by private for-profit companies, at significant cost to the State.”
It says this has to be addressed as a matter of urgency.
According to Dr Maria Corbett: "We need to plan for the future, demographics have shifted, age profile of people who would foster,”
“We need to make sure we are doing whatever is needed to make sure we have enough foster parents. There has to be an acknowledgement that they are the backbone of the care system — we need to be actively planning to encourage them to stay in and come in and understand what the barriers are."
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