How has Tusla found itself at crisis point in its care of vulnerable children?

Set up nearly a decade ago as a stand-alone agency to respond to the most vulnerable children in the State, Tusla, it was envisaged, would transform child protective services in the country.

More than 9½ years later the child and family agency finds itself at a self-professed “crisis” point, with its services under major strain.

Due to a lack of space in group care homes and a shortage of foster carers, more and more young people in State care find themselves sleeping in hotel rooms and bed and breakfasts, as there is nowhere else to put them.

This month there were 155 young people in “special emergency arrangements”, which also include properties rented out on the Airbnb online platform, rented housing and other tourist accommodation.

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Sixty of these young people had been taken into State care, while 95 were unaccompanied minors who arrived in the country seeking asylum, many from Ukraine.

So how has Tusla reached this point and what are the factors driving the crisis in the care system?

The first cracks began to show in Tusla’s out-of-hours service, which responds to emergency cases outside of normal working hours.

This could be where gardaí remove a child from a family home over urgent safety concerns, if an unaccompanied minor seeking asylum arrives in the country, or a child’s existing care placement breaks down.

Social workers try to find a place for the young person in a group care home or with a foster carer, or, failing that, in a special emergency arrangement.

A draft internal Tusla report, obtained by The Irish Times, detailed how the out-of-hours service had seen a “significant increase” in pressure in recent years.

The number of cases dealt with has nearly doubled in the last four years, leading to the creation and growing reliance on special emergency arrangements, it said.

The internal report, dated March 10th, said a big rise in unaccompanied minors arriving in the Republic had placed further strain on the out-of-hours service.

The report said the current lack of appropriate care placements was a “significant” challenge.

This sometimes led to children taken into care sleeping in Garda stations and hospitals, as an overnight place of safety, which staff stressed was “inappropriate and not child-centred”.

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The report was carried out by Tusla’s interim director of services Clare Murphy and released following a Freedom of Information Act request by The Irish Times.

It concluded the “considerable demands” on the out-of-hours service meant it was “challenged in meeting the needs of children”.

A spokeswoman for Tusla said a number of options for reform of the out-of-hours service were being examined, which were still under consideration.

While about nine in every 10 of the 5,597 children in State care are living with foster carers, 386 children are in residential care homes.

These are group homes that typically house up to six young people and are run by Tusla or contracted to private and voluntary providers.

A lack of free beds in group homes, and a shortage of foster carers, has meant Tusla has had to rely increasingly on special emergency arrangements.

The arrangements came under scrutiny recently following the publication of a letter dated May 17th last from retired District Court judge Dermot Simms.

The former judge criticised the “unprecedented crisis”, which had left vulnerable young people in these “unsuitable” and “unapproved” placements.

Marissa Ryan, chief executive of Epic, which advocates for children in care, said the placements were isolating and could be detrimental to already vulnerable children.

“These children should be in foster homes or residential care, and Tusla should be supported to enable this,” she said.

The emergency arrangements are also more expensive as they require a minimum of two staff on site, 24 hours a day, seven days a week, for every young person.

The placements are costing Tusla tens of millions of euro a year, at a current overall rate of €1.4 million a week.

Terry Dignan, interim chief executive of Don Bosco Care, a voluntary provider running six group care homes, said the current crisis wasdown to a lack of investment “over the last two decades”.

Despite Tusla seeking to add an additional 110 group home beds to the system by the end of 2025, capacity had grown tighter, he said.

“We have less beds now than we had last January ... It’s not going to change and it may get worse,” he told The Irish Times.

Mr Dignan said there was a need for up to 200 more beds, between group homes and single-bed units for young people with complex needs, who could not live with others.

Foster carers

For Gareth Noble, a child law solicitor with KOD Lyons, the reason behind the current crisis was a shortage of foster carers.

The foster carer allowance of between €325 and €352 a week has not been increased since 2009, despite repeated complaints of carers quitting as a result of financial pressures.

“Now we are seeing children who should be in foster care ... they are now going to be in residential placements,” Mr Noble said.

This meant there was increasingly “no room at the inn” in group homes for young people with more complex needs, he said.

Minister for Children Roderic O’Gorman plans to push for an increase in the foster care allowance in the coming budget.

One of the biggest problems Tusla faces is that it does not have enough social workers.

At the end of 2014, the year the agency was set up, it had about 1,400 social workers and 1,160 social care workers.

Last year, despite years of budget increases, that had increased to only 1,600 social workers and 1,220 social care staff.

The agency cannot open additional group care homes if it does not have staff to run them, according to sources in the sector.

Social workers, who are often dealing with large caseloads, frequently speak of working in Tusla as constantly fighting fires, leading to burnout and staff leaving.

Tusla has said it needs an additional 200 social workers to meet the current demand it is facing.

At a board meeting on February 3rd, 2023, in the Brunel Building, the agency’s head office near Heuston station in Dublin, Tusla warned it would not reach its targets for recruiting additional staff this year.

“Giving the rise in referrals this presents a significant risk across the services,” the minutes stated.

The agency has complained that only about 220 social work graduates qualify each year, which it said needs to be increased.

In recent years it has started offering final-year students contracts to start with Tusla when they qualify.

However, many opt for careers elsewhere, either working for private agencies, mental health or probation services, or as social workers in hospitals.

In one graduating class of 20 social workers this year, about six took up employment with Tusla, according to one student on the course.

A Tusla spokeswoman said 138 graduates qualifying this year had accepted contracts it offered them.

Dr Joseph Mooney, who lectures on social work in University College Dublin, said staffing was “the number one issue facing the agency”.

The first three years of working for Tusla saw “peak burnout” among new social workers, leading many to leave the agency, he said.

While Tusla is struggling for more staff, the number of referrals about child abuse, neglect or welfare concerns has risen consistently.

It received more than 82,000 reports about children last year, a 13 per cent rise on the previous year.

Against this backdrop the number of cases without an allocated social worker has grown, surpassing 6,000 for the first time in four years at the end of 2022.

Figures from this May show Tusla was dealing with 22,745 open cases, some 5,820 of which were unallocated.

Tusla has stressed that when a case is unallocated it is still receiving a social work response and being monitored, ahead of the child being allocated a designated social worker.

Large backlogs of unallocated cases were a big challenge for the agency when it was initially formed, reaching as high as 9,000 in 2014. Controversies during those early years, many related to waiting lists, damaged public trust in the fledgling agency.

One former social worker in Tusla during that time said the agency “wasn’t fully resourced to begin with” after it was split from the Health Service Executive.

A former senior Tusla manager from the period said amid the austerity conditions there had been no room for the agency to “find its feet”.

‘Broken’ system

Lauren O’Toole (22) from Rathfarnham in south Dublin, who was taken into foster care at the age of two, said the care system was “broken” at present.

She still lives with the same foster parents who are now her family, but had more than 11 social workers growing up. “Some were students, some came and worked with us for a month and then left,” she said.

Ms O’Toole said Tusla needed to do better to make sure no young person in care was forgotten about, or abandoned after leaving the system at 18 or in their early 20s.

“In general more supports are needed,” she said. “The State is your parent, they need to start acting like it.”