Today, the Health Information and Quality Authority (HIQA) has published a report on its monitoring and regulation of children’s services over the past 10 years.

HIQA inspects and monitors residential care, special care, foster care and child protection and welfare services provided by the Child and Family Agency (Tusla) and providers of non-statutory foster care services to drive improvement.

Since 2014 when Tusla was established, HIQA has found that many aspects of the 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. Children assessed at immediate and serious risk received were responded to appropriately. While governance and management of children’s services have improved, this has been inconsistent across all services.

Despite Tusla’s significant efforts in recruitment and also working with government departments and third level institutions to achieve an increase in the number of social work training places, difficulties remain in the recruitment and retaining of staff across many services. This means many children did not have an allocated social worker or experienced multiple changes in social workers over short periods of time. There was also a lack of suitable foster care and residential care placements for children requiring admission to care. This lack of placements has also led to children being unable to move on from some services when they are ready to do so. While Tusla has used social care staff to mitigate the risk associated with social work vacancies, vacancies persisted in many services. 

Last year, HIQA commenced a risk-based programme of inspections across Tusla’s child protection and welfare services and foster care services where 25% or more children were without an allocated social worker. An overview report outlining the findings from this risk-based inspection programme will be published in 2025.

Eva Boyle, HIQA’s Head of Programme for Children’s Services, said: “While there is an ongoing commitment to delivering good quality and safe services to children, Tusla faces a number of consistent challenges, particularly around adequate resources for its services.”

“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 found that there is a significant shortage of appropriate residential and foster care placements for children. This has resulted in some children in care being accommodated in inappropriate and unregulated special emergency arrangements which is of significant concern. Despite children living in unregulated care arrangements, the regulation of children’s residential centres has not been commenced.”

The report sets out how HIQA will continue to advocate for children and young people to improve services and influence change.

ENDS

For further information, contact:

Marty Whelan
Head of Communications and Stakeholder Engagement
085 805 5202
mwhelan@hiqa.ie

Notes for the editor:

• Under the Health Act 2007 (as amended), HIQA is responsible for regulating and monitoring the safety and quality of children’s social services in Ireland to ensure they meet national standards and relevant regulations.
• From 2014 to the end of 2023, HIQA conducted 629 inspections of children’s services.
• As of 1 January 2018, the Chief Inspector of Social Services within HIQA is legally responsible for the monitoring, inspection and registration of all special care units for children in Ireland. 
• Other than special care units, HIQA does not have any powers of enforcement to help bring about required improvements, and instead must rely on reporting inspections findings and escalating any concerns to the appropriate government department or Minister for Children, Equality, Disability, Integration and Youth.
• This year, HIQA held an art competition where children and young people designed a poster on the theme of ‘Hear my voice’, and the care and support they receive from social services. The winner’s artwork is the cover of the reports published today. A video of the artwork entries received during the competition is available on our website.