Official Report: Minutes of Evidence

The Chairperson (Ms Kimmins): You are all welcome. I sincerely apologise for the delay. We appreciate your patience.

I welcome Professor David Hayes, the chairperson of the association; Elaine Craig, the vice chairperson; Carolyn Ewart, the national director; and Andy McClenaghan, the public affairs, policy and communication lead. I remind members and witnesses that we now have a shorter time frame, so apologies for that. The session will be covered by Hansard.

I invite you to make some brief opening remarks, and then we will open up to members for questions.

Professor David Hayes (British Association of Social Workers (Northern Ireland)): Good afternoon, Chair, and thanks for the opportunity to present to the Committee on the independent review of children's social care. My colleagues and I will represent the views of the British Association of Social Workers (BASW) members in Northern Ireland. BASW Northern Ireland is part of the British Association of Social Workers, which is the largest professional body for social workers in the UK. We have 22,000 members, who are employed in front-line management, academic and research positions in all care settings.

The provision of high-quality children's social care services is fundamental to the functioning of a healthy society. Social workers who work in children's services support individuals and families to overcome disadvantage that is rooted in social, economic, environmental and physical factors. It should be recognised that the children and young people who use social work services are some of the most vulnerable. Many of them, because of their age, their stage in life or their lack of influence, do not enjoy the same agency, which other members of our community take for granted, to speak out and highlight the shortcomings in the services that they receive.

The review, which Professor Ray Jones led, was inclusive in its scope and forensic in its detail. It is no exaggeration to say that it represents a once-in-a-generation opportunity to refocus the way that services are delivered to improve outcomes for the children and families who use them and to address the ever-increasing pressures on the social workers who deliver them. BASW Northern Ireland fully endorses the aim of the review, which is to shift children's services away from a narrow approach focused primarily on child protection to one that is focused on early intervention to improve support for children and families. Early intervention and preventative work, when adequately resourced and prioritised, is key in many instances to stopping problems becoming crises. Supporting parents to care well for their children often leads to better outcomes for children and is less costly, particularly when it prevents children becoming looked after by social work services.

If they are to move away from the current child protection-focused model, services must be resourced, structured and staffed in a manner that enables social workers to spend more time in direct engagement with children, parents and families while understanding their needs and providing support that addresses the challenges that they face. We need to see improved funding for services in the statutory and voluntary sectors as well as regional consistency in how services are delivered across Northern Ireland. Furthermore, it is essential that we follow a human rights-informed approach when pursuing a reset and refocus in children's services.

BASW Northern Ireland fully supports Professor Jones's recommendation that:

Additional support staff are badly needed in order to free social workers up to perform the highly skilled role that they are trained to deliver. However, while the diversification of skills would be beneficial to support the delivery of social services, it must not be regarded as a cost-saving way to replace social work staff.

In addition, it is essential that bureaucratic processes are streamlined to free up social workers to spend the majority of their time in direct contact with the children and families whom they support. High-quality record-keeping is vital to good social work practice, but, all too often, paperwork constrains rather than supports social workers in their practice. It is vital that the Department of Health, in implementing the independent review, delivers meaningful change to reduce the bureaucratic burden that is on social workers and children's services.

Review recommendations 3 states:

More than a year and a half after the publication of the review report, unfortunately, the workforce crisis has not abated at all. There is a need for investment in social work recruitment, social work education, professional development and retention initiatives. The social work workforce, which is predominantly female, also requires a more family-friendly approach, with provisions for greater flexibility for childcare, other caring considerations and part-time opportunities. There is an urgent need to tackle poor working conditions and social workers' unfeasibly high workloads, along with providing improved training for social work managers in order to ensure that staff are supported.

As with many areas of social work, the demand is growing across children's services, and it is of paramount importance that safe staffing standards are implemented for the profession. That is needed to ensure that services are provided in a manner that upholds the best interests of the individuals and families who use them and those of the social workers who deliver them. For a number of years, the high rate of vacancies has led to huge pressures on social work staff, and while the recently reported reduction in the social work vacancy rate to 3·3% is welcome, it does not represent the situation in some social work teams, particularly in child protection. The reported vacancy rate is at odds with the figures that were shared with BASW Northern Ireland by the directors of children's services, who explained that gateway, family intervention and looked-after children teams continue to experience stubbornly high vacancy levels of up to 40%. The figures that the Department of Health published do not convey the whole picture. They cover only vacant posts, which are actively being recruited, and fail to take into account posts that are understaffed due to long-term sick and maternity leave.

It must be recognised, however, that, in addition to the requirement for safe staffing models to address the current pressures that face the profession, BASW Northern Ireland anticipates the need for hundreds of additional social workers to provide services that are associated with the implementation of the Adoption and Children Act (Northern Ireland) 2022, the roll-out of the forthcoming adult protection Bill and the continued expansion of the primary care multidisciplinary teams (MDTs). To draw into focus the mismatch between the demand for services and provision for social work training, while there has been an 8% increase in social work training places since 2011, there has been a 67% increase in the number of children in care over the same period. As of December 2024, we have 4,185 in care, which is the highest ever number on record.

In order to ensure that transformation is delivered, children's services must receive a much greater focus on policymaking and service delivery. While it is not a surprise, it is deeply concerning that the review found that directors of children's services spend approximately only 30% of their time focused on their children's social care services. A combination of factors, including the pressures on the health service, the ever-increasing demand for children's social care, the ongoing social work workforce crisis and factors undermining focused and effective strategic leadership for social care services, led BASW Northern Ireland to fully endorse Professor Jones's view that statutory children and family social care services need to be located in an organisation where it is its primary focus.

The association agrees with recommendation 38, which called for the introduction of:

That is the model that was referred to in the review as "option 5" or the "arm's-length body-plus" (ALB+). Alongside children's social care services, the ALB+ model includes the Education Welfare Service (EWS), the Youth Justice Agency (YJA) and the Youth Service.

Finally, I stress the support of BASW (Northern Ireland) for review recommendation 29:

Children who are in the care of the state deserve the best standard of support that is available. Privatisation and profit maximisation have been shown to drive down standards, not raise them, as has unfortunately been demonstrated by the scenario in England, where privatisation has led to:

That is a "wholly unacceptable" scenario, which must be avoided via:

in Northern Ireland.

Thank you for your attention. My colleagues and I would now welcome your questions.

The Deputy Chairperson (Mr Donnelly): Thanks for the presentation. Nuala, you have the first question.

Miss McAllister: Thank you very much for coming today. This is one of the priority areas for the Committee. We have taken to getting quarterly reports from the Department on the implementation of Ray Jones's review in particular. It is really important that children's social services across Northern Ireland are now getting highlighted. It is long overdue. We recognise the impact that the situation has on social workers, so we reiterate from the start that this is about our working with the workforce in order to ensure that we have the right practice and the right safe staffing for better outcomes for children so that we can do that work together and hold the Department to account where we need to.

My first question is about workforce. The Minister answered a question in the Chamber just this week about placements and training. All the new students took up placements. The majority of them were in children's services. One of the issues that we hear about is vacancies and how they take all the vacancies, but that is not actually all that is needed.

You said that there are unfilled posts. My understanding is that you have unfilled posts and vacancies but that you also have what is needed. Can you differentiate between those, and can we hear a bit more about BASW's position on what is actually needed in social services, particularly for children and young people?

Professor Hayes: Do you mean in staffing levels?

Miss McAllister: Yes, staffing levels.

Professor Hayes: That is a good question.

Miss McAllister: What do safe staffing levels look like?

Mr Andy McClenaghan (British Association of Social Workers (Northern Ireland)): It is hard to determine what safe staffing levels look like at the moment, because we do not know what the vacancy rate really is. I will take you through it. The current vacancy rate, as reported by the Department of Health, is 3·3%. That was from September 2024. It peaked at 11·2% in December 2022, so you would say that any reduction in vacancy rate is to be welcomed. If you are hearing that there is a vacancy rate of 3·3%, you would probably say that that is quite healthy. However, that does not represent the picture on the ground. As David said in the introduction, we are hearing about vacancy rates of up to 40% in various children's services teams.

We have a social work workforce across Northern Ireland of 6,776 registered social workers at present. According to the workforce census of last March, the bulk of them — 4,824 — work in Health and Social Care (HSC). Across the whole profession, 85% are female. You have a large number of posts that will be unstaffed due to maternity leave. As with any workforce, there will be unstaffed posts because of long-term sickness.

BASW's understanding is that none of those unfilled posts are represented in headline vacancy rates. It is very hard for the Department to do workforce planning if it does not know the number of posts that are unfilled. We met the Minister on Tuesday and raised that with him. I told him that it does not make any difference to a child who is not receiving the support that they need whether the social worker is not there because the post is vacant, as the Department would regard it, which would be the case if it had been recruited to under active recruitment. It makes no difference to the child if that post is vacant and the Department is recruiting to it or if it is vacant because there is a social worker who is off on long-term sick or it has not been filled because of maternity leave. That child is not receiving the service that they need.

We need a clear picture. I would love to be able to tell you what that is. We do not know. We believe that the strategic planning and performance group (SPPG) holds statistics on what we would call "unstaffed" or unfilled posts.

We really need a composite picture that is based on what the Department knows about the vacant posts as it reports them, and what an "unstaffed" post is. We cannot workforce plan without knowing that.

Another thing about workforce planning is that it is very hard to determine the number of social workers that we need until we have also addressed issues such as bureaucracy, which we might want to talk about later. Social workers report spending an awful lot of time filling out paperwork rather than spending time face to face with service users. Until those bureaucracy issues have been addressed, again, it is very hard to say how many social workers we need.

Professor Hayes: We can talk about statistics and whether the vacancy rate is 40%, but that is not what is really striking. Last year, I spent time with social workers in one trust, doing a piece of work about their daily experiences in practice. The situation that I encountered in some offices, having been given the list of teams, team leaders and contacts, was this: two teams had been amalgamated, and those people were covering the work of two teams, because each team had three vacancies. One vacancy might have been recognised as such, with another represented by somebody being on maternity leave and a couple of people being out on long-term sick leave. Those people are trying to cover double the work. If you asked them what would improve their situation, they would say, "A full workforce plus two in every team". Whilst it is difficult to say how many social workers we need, we need to start by thinking about the number of vacancies that we have and what work that is leaving behind.

Miss McAllister: It is very important to highlight that, because how can the Department make a workforce plan or create conditions for safe staffing if it is not open about what is not there? We, as a Committee, will certainly follow that up.

A stark statistic in your briefing and in answers to questions for written answer that I submitted to the Minister is the number of unallocated cases. I am particularly thinking about the gateway team. It frightened me to think about that, because the gateway team is the first point of contact in an emergency when we need to interact with social services. What does it mean for a case to be unallocated? Those numbers are quite high.

Ms Carolyn Ewart (British Association of Social Workers (Northern Ireland)): They are quite high, Nuala, and they vary across the region. Some trusts have very high numbers of unallocated cases. The team leader screens all the referrals and assesses levels of risk. If information indicates that a case is very high risk, it will be allocated. Cases that do not yet meet that threshold are placed on an unallocated list. That means, essentially, that the team leader holds responsibility for each case that is on the list. In some areas, there might be only 30 or 40, but, in others, there might be 200 cases that a team leader has to spend time managing. To say that those cases are not allocated is a bit of a misnomer. They do not have a dedicated worker — they are not given to a social worker who will go out and do an assessment and provide a service — but the team leader has to keep an eye on all those cases. As the situation changes — a crisis might develop, for example — what tends to happen is that they might be allocated or the duty social worker might be allocated to a case for a day. It is about managing the level of risk on an ongoing basis. It is a huge added pressure for teams and team leaders to have to carry that burden and to try to manage that risk.

One reason why we are so supportive of the shift in focus is that we have become a child protection-focused service. You talked about it, David, in your opening brief. One of the principles that the Children Order 1995 was based on and one of the "P"s that we all learned about as social workers is prevention. We should be providing preventative services at the point at which children need them, which means meeting families in their community and providing the support and care that people need to prevent them slipping further into crisis. Our social workers are delivering an excellent service out there, and our teams are working really hard to deliver it. Unfortunately, they are able to deliver only to people who are in the utmost need. We are seeing a funnelling of risk, with high-risk situations getting through because they have to get through, with everyone else simply not getting a service.

Professor Hayes: I do not think that we are supposed to use the term "unallocated cases" any more. It is called a waiting list.

Ms Ewart: There is much debate about that.

Professor Hayes: Yes, there is much debate.

Miss McAllister: Having another waiting list does not necessarily make it better. [Laughter.]

Professor Hayes: It sounds slightly better. The issue is that the staff who we have can deal with only so much, and it is about the prioritisation of high-risk cases. Unfortunately, if you have cases that are on a waiting list, what tends to get them off a waiting list is that something happens to the child in that family. We are dealing with children where harm has already occurred and trying to prevent it, not trying to prevent it happening in the first place. It is a real indictment of our society that we cannot provide a preventative service.

Miss McAllister: That is not shocking to hear at all. We hear about it in other areas of healthcare, where we cannot put the focus on preventative measures and people end up in hospital when they do not need to.

I could ask loads of questions, but I can engage with you offline. My last question is about the work streams. Do you have any feedback on engagement with the work streams? When departmental officials are before the Committee, we hear a lot about ongoing work in work streams. What is BASW's engagement like? How effective are they in seeing the change with the implementation of the recommendations?

Ms Ewart: We are engaged with two work streams. Eight work streams are happening. We are about to get involved with another on the social care workforce. I have to be honest and say that one of the work streams is on legislation, and that is progressing with no particular issues. The other work stream that we are involved in is on reducing bureaucracy. I was very keen to be involved in that because we have been campaigning on reducing unnecessary bureaucracy, and it is unnecessary. We are not saying that you can strip all bureaucracy out of social work — far from it. It is a cornerstone of good, professional practice to have good, competent records. I have been to only one meeting, and I think that there was a bit of a slip-up. I was meant to be invited to that meeting a year ago, and I was emailing, asking, "What's happening? Is this group not meeting?", and I got the invite through only a month ago. That was source of disappointment.

Miss McAllister: That is a lot of bureaucracy to get through.

Ms Ewart: Yes, it was a lot of bureaucracy to get on to the bureaucracy work stream. Having gone to one meeting, I think that there is a real interest in taking forward the aim of reducing unnecessary bureaucracy, and I am keen to work with that group. Our sense of the groups overall is that they have a huge agenda, and I am not particularly clear about what new stuff is coming forward. A lot of work that is being presented in those forums has been around for a while.

Miss McAllister: That was our worry from the feedback when we had the officials before the Committee. It is frustrating to have you confirm that for us. Thank you very much.

The Chairperson (Ms Kimmins): Thank you. Apologies, I had to step out just then; it was unavoidable. I have just a couple of questions. I spoke with some of you before anyway, so I do not want to go over old ground. I apologise if this was covered when I was out. The workforce issue is the biggest factor, and that applies across the health service, particularly in my area of interest, which is social care and social work. When we raise that with the Department, we are told about all the work that is happening to address it. Are you seeing the impact of that work? Can you say, "Yes, although it is maybe a bit slow, things are improving and are happening that we think will make a change"? I hope that I am not putting anybody in a position, but it is important for us to hear about that.

Professor Hayes: In our view, the workforce crisis has not abated. It is still ongoing. I am not saying that people are not doing things to try to address it, but I am not seeing an immediate impact.

The Chairperson (Ms Kimmins): That is the point that I have picked up. From the work that you have seen, even though some of it has maybe not landed yet, does it give hope that things will change for the better? If I had the Royal College of Nursing (RCN) or whoever before the Committee, I would say, "You have the solutions. You know, because you are at the coalface."

Nuala outlined the work streams and your engagement with them. Could more be done that has not been done? I do not want to say that you are not being listened to; I just mean that there are things that maybe you put forward that have not been picked up but that, you still think, should be looked at.

Ms Ewart: We want to give credit where it is due. The Department is working very hard on the safe staffing legislation that is going through, and we encourage the Committee to support that. We hope that it addresses some of the key issues.

A lot of work is happening, and we are hopeful that that will lead to a change. We do not see it yet, but the Department is leading on work that looks at caseload sizes. It plans to publish a guidance paper by March of this year. BASW has been very involved in that, and we are very pleased to be part of that work. Anything that helps to quantify our work helps. We know that social workers are far too busy and deal with too much work.

The Department is trying to get to a place where we can have a range of cases. For example, in the 'Setting the Bar' report, published in 2022 in Scotland, lots of work was done on what a social worker's caseload should look like and what was deemed as safe and unsafe. It produced the figure, which was based on lots of analysis, that 15 children is a safe caseload for a social worker to carry. Social workers in Northern Ireland are working way above that. At the moment, we do not count children; we count cases. Social workers here work above and beyond 15 cases, each of which may involve up to seven children.

In fairness to the Department, it commissioned a piece of work from Professor Paula McFadden and Professor Mary McColgan from Ulster University. They tried to take an evidence-informed approach to determine what our combined knowledge tells us is a safe and effective caseload for a social worker. There has been a constant debate between us and the groups that we work with. We think that they need to come up with a number, and there is some debate around whether they will be able to do that. There are lots of issues with that. You need to have a number that is flexible. We all have examples in our practice where one case took over our entire week. You need to be able to factor that in. Until we have that sense of what a safe and acceptable caseload is, we cannot know how many social workers we need to have in the system to make it work.

Professor Hayes: In our conversation with the Minister on Tuesday, if we come up with a figure, it will be great. It will be great to reach some sort of idea of what is a safe number. However, if we do not have enough social workers, we may not be able to implement it. For example, we have two teams that are being amalgamated.

The Chairperson (Ms Kimmins): I appreciate that. I was not trying to be critical of the Department from the outset. I just want to get an understanding. We speak with trade unions and others. We are just trying to get a picture of what is happening and whether it is making an impact. It is good to hear that there is hope, essentially.

My last point is around the social care review. We are almost two years on from when Professor Ray Jones published his review. For the Committee, that is a priority, as, I am sure, you have heard. We get regular updates and briefings on it to ensure that it is moving at pace.

For me, the biggest thing, as you said in your opening remarks, is that these are children. The longer it takes us to implement, the longer these kids and families are still waiting. Prevention is always better than cure. While we wait for things to be implemented, everything else is getting worse, essentially. As you said, David, children are at risk of harm.

We are all well aware of the very high profile cases that have happened over the years where things have gone very badly wrong. At the minute, do you feel that there is the potential for that, given the circumstances that social workers operate in? Families cannot get access to support when they need it. In the vast majority of cases, family intervention at the right time would mean children never going on to a child protection register. Do we need to move more quickly?

Professor Hayes: Unfortunately, the chance of that type of tragedy happening is always there. In a situation where you have cases sitting on waiting lists and are not able to provide preventative services, that chance is heightened, and we just pray that that does not happen. However, it is a very real possibility.

The Chairperson (Ms Kimmins): We had GPs at our previous session, and we talked a lot about moral injury. That also very much relates to social workers. As you said, they just hope that things do not go badly wrong before they get to that child or family. Thank you for that.

Mr Donnelly: Chair, I know that we are pushed for time, so I will try to be brief. We have been well briefed about the pressures in the system. The Minister announced £13 million for children's respite services. We all, I imagine, get contacted about respite services quite regularly. Certainly, I am aware of quite desperate shortages in my area. Has BASW noticed an impact from that inability to access respite care? Have we seen any difference from the £13 million that was announced?

Ms Ewart: We have not had much contact about the money that was announced. We are not really aware of what the impact of that has been. I wonder whether it was additional/new money or —.

Mrs Dodds: Yes.

Ms Ewart: It was new money. We have not been contacted about that. There are issues in the children's system to do with looked-after children and children who are disabled. This does not really answer your question, unfortunately, but we have campaigned on the issue of looking at children who use respite services as looked-after children. A child should not be considered as a looked-after child because they access one night of respite a year. We have had a lot of support on that issue. That might not answer your question. Sorry, Danny.

Mr Donnelly: You are fine. I will go back to look at that issue myself. Thank you. It might not be very relevant to this session.

I have one more question. We heard a lot about the arm's-length body. What difference would it make on the ground? What big changes can we expect to see?

Ms Ewart: We have been very open in our support for it and the reasons for that. Having all of children's services alongside Justice and Education would be transformative. At the moment, we are all integrated with the health and social care trusts. We are all quite wedded to that notion, and people are reluctant to consider what changing that might mean. Currently, children's social care is housed in a health system that is not really set up to look at what their needs are. Most children do not interact with social work services because of their health needs. Some might, but that is not the primary reason. It is because of issues such as poverty and housing. There is a wide variety. We have supported the argument to remove that health focus. As we know and as you heard from the GPs and the BMA today, the health system is massive, and it needs lots of resource and support. I do not mean to be critical, but we often find that social work, social care and adult social care come second in that world. It would be truly transformative for children's social care to have a body that is focused on children and on delivering really good family prevention-type services, rather than the system that we have, which has to fight in the health system to get access.

Professor Hayes: I will give an example, if that is OK.

Mr Donnelly: Yes, please.

Professor Hayes: A long time ago, I was a social worker. It is a long-standing issue. I remember making a case for a child who needed a very specialist placement. They would have had to go to England to get that service. Basically, I was told that the cost of that would pay for five kidney transplants every year, so I could not have it. We should not have a system in which children are in competition with acute healthcare and their needs are not met as a result. Having an organisation that is focused on children's services, resourced and not in competition with acute healthcare would make a huge difference.

Ms Elaine Craig (British Association of Social Workers (Northern Ireland)): Arguably, if we did that right, there would be less pressure on Health.

The Chairperson (Ms Kimmins): Absolutely.

Miss McAllister: And less pressure on Education and Communities.

Mr Donnelly: Thank you very much for that. I am finished, Chair.

Mrs Dodds: I have a couple of very quick questions. The Minister rolls out the numbers of additional social workers who have been in post for the past number of years. I cannot remember them off the top of my head, but they are quite significant. When I talk to people who are in social work, they indicate to me that many social workers who are very young and just newly trained are left with incredibly difficult and complex cases. What is your view on that? How can we help the social work workforce in that situation? What is there to help those young social workers? Some of the stories that I have heard are very complex and difficult. I think that, sometimes, young people in social work are left to deal with very difficult situations.

Professor Hayes: Yes, they are. All of those things are interlinked. It is about the workforce crisis. People qualify from university and go into teams. I have heard of some teams in which the entire team is made up of newly qualified social workers and an experienced team leader who. They are supposed to do an assessed and supported year in employment. They are supposed to have a reduced caseload, increased supervision and mentoring. In many cases, that is not possible; they are sucked into dealing with the day-to-day crisis. It is about stabilising the workforce and making sure that we retain people in it. We need to bring new people in and support them properly. My daughter is doing the social work training programme. I am a bit nervous when I think about what she will encounter when she goes into practice. It is all interrelated. We need to stabilise the workforce and retain people in practice so that we can bring new people in.

We need more training places. I have been teaching at Queen's since the degree was introduced in 2004. Queen's used to take 130 students a year. In 2011, that number was cut to 112. Over the past 14 years, the number of training places has increased by only 8%. Most of that increase has been in the past couple of years. The Open University was brought on stream. Last year, I think that there were 40 additional places altogether, 15 of which were at Queen's, which the Department of Health came forward with at the very last minute. We are very grateful that there were additional places, but there is no guarantee that that will be on an ongoing basis. We really need to think about how many social workers we need to train and start increasing the number of those places so that we can meet the need out in the workforce.

Mrs Dodds: I also get contacted by parents who are very worried that they have no allocated social worker for their young adult with a disability. What is the advice to those people?

Ms Ewart: The advice is to speak to the team leader to try to make sure that they are aware of the issues. We know that, unfortunately, because of the crisis in social work, a number of young adults and children do not have access to a social worker. A list is kept, and I think that we had about 400 children who did not have access to a social worker. There simply was not anyone to allocate to their case. That is unacceptable. It should not be happening. Those were children in care — looked-after children who were brought into the care system — who should have had access to a social worker as their basic, minimum level of right.

Those parents need to flag that and speak to the team leader. If that does not sort the issue for them, they need to raise a complaint further. Their child will probably end up on a list of those who do not have access to a social worker, but at least a record of that will be kept. As soon as someone becomes available, they will, hopefully, be able to allocate the child to that person. Use your power and authority to say, "It's not OK". It should not be the case, and we should not accept that that is how things happen.

Mrs Dodds: I make representations all the time about individual families who come to me. It is a bit like making representation for a person who needs a new hip or knee: it is back to the list. It is really difficult, but you know that, sometimes, it is a crisis that could become even more difficult if it is not sorted out.

This is my last question. You said that, in Scotland, 15 children per social worker is considered to be a safe workload. Do we have any sense of what the average workload is in Northern Ireland?

Ms Ewart: Anecdotally, we know, and the Department is working on that. A lot of groups are trying to analyse what would be considered a complex case, a moderate case and a low-level case in order to get some sense of that. However, we know that, in children's services, caseloads of in and around 20 families — families, so they may have multiple children — would not be unusual. Some social workers will have more than that. Certainly, those who are a little more experienced will be carrying heavier caseloads than that.

Professor Hayes: The social workers whom I worked with last year were dealing with between 15 and 20 "cases", as they called them. Those cases were families, not individual children. I remember that, when I was a social worker, I worked with a family who had 12 children, so, if you think about it —.

Ms Ewart: We all remember situations back when we worked as social workers. One thing that we talk about is the skills mix and trying to bring in other staff who can help to support social workers. Earlier, we were sharing experiences, and I remembered a situation where a baby was removed into care shortly after birth and placed in a foster placement around 40 miles away from where the mother lived. As the social worker, I was directed to provide daily transport to the child, so I had to drive —.

Mrs Dodds: That still happens.

Ms Ewart: It still happens. It should not happen. If the social worker needs to be involved in supervising contact, that is one thing, but, if they are just having to drive the child from one place to another, we should be able to employ contact workers, family support workers, social work assistants — call them what you will — to do that. We should be able to provide —.

Mrs Dodds: Do the family hubs not give you any relief with that?

Ms Ewart: They do in some places, but one of the issues is that they are not —.

Mrs Dodds: They are not universal, I know.

Ms Ewart: They are not universal. Some trusts have contact workers. Where they have contact workers, that works well. Other trusts do not have access to that. One of the other issues in Ray Jones's review is trying to tease out that — what am I trying to say? — postcode lottery. "Postcode lottery" is the term that I was after, sorry.

Mrs Dodds: We talk a lot about that.

Ms Ewart: Yes.

Professor Hayes: It is also about trying to determine what is a social work task and what is not. Social workers are doing things such as making payments to carers and all sorts of administrative tasks. We really need to think about that. There should be a team clerk, family support worker or somebody else who does that sort of stuff. Social workers should be out with families and children.

Mr McClenaghan: We have evidence for that. During the Jones review, we worked with the Northern Ireland Social Care Council to survey social workers about the skills and tasks that they considered central to social work. We asked them which single or multiple tasks they spent most of their time on and which tasks they thought could be undertaken by a non-social worker. A total of 24% of social workers said that facilitating family contact was one of the tasks that they spent most of their time on, and 70% of those social workers felt that that task could be undertaken by a non-social worker. A total of 64% considered bureaucracy to be the task, or one of many tasks, that they spent most of their time on, and 49% felt that it could be undertaken by a non-social worker.

There is huge potential to diversify the skills mix. Again, though, it is about having the right people in place to provide that support. It is always about training and having the right staff. That needs to be taken into consideration in workforce planning: it is about the support staff, not just the social workers, that the social work workforce needs. I reiterate what David said in the introduction: that cannot be seen as a way in which to do social work on the cheap. It has to be done by listening to social workers and asking them what support they need, rather than by determining that they need x, y and z in order to have fewer social workers. It cannot be like that. It needs to done through looking at what social workers need to do their jobs properly.

Ms Ewart: Lots of legislation is coming down the line that we are acutely aware will put even more pressure on the system. There is the adult protection Bill and ongoing mental capacity legislation. What are the other ones that we have, Andy?

Mr McClenaghan: There are MDTs.

Ms Ewart: There are the multidisciplinary teams. We know that they are a really good model and that GPs who have them feel real benefit from their support. However, they are really crippling social work teams and childcare teams. Over the past number of years, we have seen that the people who tend to apply for those posts are children's social workers, so they are leaving one area and moving into an area that is much more supported, where the bureaucracy is much more streamlined and where they are able to do the role that they came into the job to do. They see that as a very fulfilling opportunity, but it further depletes the workforce that we have in children's social work.

Mr McClenaghan: I think that there are 312 GP practices in Northern Ireland. If you had one social worker per practice, that would be roughly 5% of the workforce. You also have to bear in mind that many of the mental health practitioner roles in the MDTs can be filled by mental health social workers. That is a big drain, and that needs to be factored in.

Mr McGrath: I have a quick point on that. Currently, there are 325 commissioned places a year from the Department. I am sure that analysis was done somewhere that that is the number that is required, and I am sure that it is way short of what it needs to be. Yet, when the Minister answered a question about this in the House the other day, he got really excited about 221 newly qualified social workers in one year and 225 in another year. When you add those figures together over two years, it leaves us 225 social workers short. Is that figure correct? If it is, I do not share his excitement. He got into quite a fluster of excitement. He was so excited about how many social workers were qualifying that he actually repeated himself at one stage. The figure of 325 is the number expected to qualify, but 100 fewer are taking up posts every year.

Professor Hayes: The figure of 325 probably applies only to this year. That will take into account the 40 additional places that we were given and those from the OU. Before that, it has been more like 275. At Queen's, we lost 18 places a year back in 2011, so that is another 250-odd social work staff who could have qualified if those places had been retained. I am not sure that the 325 figure is what the Department thinks is necessary to keep up. It just happened that way that we were offered additional places. I think that a notional 60 places a year were needed just to keep —.

Ms Ewart: To keep up with current demand.

Professor Hayes: Even then, I have heard people say that they believe that that was an underestimate. I am not sure that we are there yet, because the issue of training places has not been addressed satisfactorily. We got additional places this year but no guarantee that that would happen again next year.

Mr McGrath: Given the confusion around it, it might be good to seek clarity. Maybe we could write to the Department and ask it for its formula, how it worked that out and how it sees it going forward. We can ask the Department to tell us what that formula will deliver in the next 10 years, because, if we are going to do workforce planning, we have to start looking a bit further ahead than this year and, at a guess, next year. We need to know for longer than that. I take your point about the adult protection Bill. There are suggestions that it could take 60 or 70 social workers just to fulfil the obligations arising from that Bill.

Whilst I will not say that MDT work is easy, and I do not mean that, being in a nice health centre and working 9 to 5 Monday to Friday, getting your holidays —.

Ms Ewart: Getting a lunch break.

Mr McGrath: Getting a lunch break. That work compares favourably with what some are facing in the childcare teams, where it seems to be crisis after crisis. We need to get a heads-up on that.

Mrs Dodds: May I ask one thing? Will the 40 additional places that you talked about for last year recur every year?

Professor Hayes: No, there was no guarantee.

Mrs Dodds: So, it was just a one-off.

Professor Hayes: It is a one-off. It may be recurring.

On another point about additional places, 30 of those 40 places were in the two universities. We have a two-year route for people who have a relevant degree, and they were restricted to that route. The thinking seemed to be that they would qualify more quickly. They will qualify in two years rather than three years. Personally, I find that a bit abhorrent. Access to social work education needs to be fair and equitable, and we need a range of different people, including those who do not have a degree but who may have lots of practical experience in social care. We need to be careful that additional places are not driven down a particular route because we think that that is a quick and easy fix.

Mr McClenaghan: Colin, you have probably factored this into your thinking, but it is not a net gain of 325; you have to factor in the retirement rate.

Mr McGrath: It is to plug a hole every year.

Mr McClenaghan: Yes.

Ms Ewart: We were told that those 40 additional places were predicated on their being delivered to the multidisciplinary teams. I do not know whether there is any way that they can force those people to go there, but the reason why we got the additional 40 places was to support the roll-out of the multidisciplinary teams.

The Chairperson (Ms Kimmins): Thank you. On the point about training opportunities, I have spoken to the Open University. There are lots of things that we can do. You talked about social work assistants, and we could give them a pathway. They might be working parents who cannot afford to give up their jobs to study. As someone who did the two-year course — David, I think that you taught me, which I realised halfway through the meeting — I am a huge advocate of it.

Professor Hayes: I am sorry. [Laughter.]

The Chairperson (Ms Kimmins): I have ended up here, so I do not know.

I got an opportunity at the last minute. Initially, I had not got on to a course because of the limited places. I completely agree with your point about giving opportunities to people who do not have a degree, because I was one of those people who did not get in the first time. I went away to Liverpool and did another degree, worked in a care home and then went back. I was delighted to be able to do it. It is about recognising the changing nature of our society and that people are at different stages. It is not just someone at the age of 18 coming out of school who wants to do a degree in social work; it may be someone who has had their family and now feels that they are in a position to do that. That will lead to a more diverse and more experienced workforce, and that will help to tackle the issues that we have outlined.

Thank you, all. Again, I apologise for the delay. We really appreciate your input. This conversation will remain ongoing, particularly given that we have prioritised the review. Thank you very much.