Speaking in his capacity as executive director of Social Work, Colm McCafferty explained at last Thursday’s (January 30) board meeting of the Southern HSC Trust that there are no longer enough social workers to monitor all looked-after children at all times.
And while the Trust is doing its best to meet its statutory obligations in relation to looked-after children, Mr McCafferty, who is also the acting chief executive of the statutory body, admitted that he was “not comfortable” with the current arrangements.
He stated: “We are in a position where we are very challenged in relation to the availability of sufficient numbers of social workers in both the Child Protection teams and our Looked-After Children’s Services.
“On the whole, we are complying with the vast majority of procedural requirements and statutory requirements, albeit I would draw the board’s attention to the fact that for the past year, we now have tipped over into having a small number of looked-after children who do not have an allocated social worker on an ongoing basis.
“We do risk-mitigate. Those children are not consistently without a social worker. If a child is unallocated for a period of time, we will seek to reallocate, and then somebody else moves on to the unallocated list.
Trust acting chief executive, and executive director of Social Work, Colm McCafferty
“We target it in the sense that each one of these children are in very long-term, settled placements, are having their needs consistently met through foster care, and indeed input by other professional sources.
“Having said that, the bottom line is we are breaching our statutory responsibilities to those children, namely that they [should] have an aligned social worker overseeing and progressing their care plans and so forth.
“So that is an area that I’m not comfortable with, but is inextricably linked to our staffing shortages.
“The Trust has a significant responsibility in terms of its parenting responsibility.
“When a decision is made to remove a child from his birth family into public care, we have to, at the very least, provide the most stable placement, and it’s a risk for us, as numbers increase, around our placement sustainability.
“Ninety-odd per cent of our adopted children are in foster care. So we really do focus on the promotion of fostering and inviting members of the public to come forward in relation to providing care placements.
“We’re very lucky in the Southern Trust in the sense that we get really good support from the community, albeit there continues to be forever deficits with regards to the range of placements available.
“[There are] additional pressures around unaccompanied minors and the overall increase in numbers.
“In comparison to 10 or 15 years ago, children coming into the care system now have multiple complexities in relation to challenges and difficulties that result in care admission.”
On a more positive note, Mr McCafferty added:
“There are areas where we’ve continued to make good progress. Our residential care is relatively settled. We do not send children out of the jurisdiction, we keep them within their own care placements.
“[With regard to] short-breaks provision for children with disabilities and their families, this Trust has always maintained good provision.
“In 2024/25, we provided almost 2,300 overnight short breaks to a cohort of approximately 55/60 children with severe learning and intellectual disability.
“This is an area of service that has attracted new investments, so we’re in fairly advanced stages of upscaling services for children with disability, which will result in us being able to offer services to other families.”