I thank the Chairman and other members of the committee for welcoming us here. I am the designated chairperson for the Family Support Agency and am delighted to have been considered for such a position. As I am new in the post, I may defer technical questions to the acting CEO, Mr. Bill O'Dea, who is accompanying me. I have provided the joint committee with copies of my presentation, so I do not intend to read all of it. I did, however, want to give members of the committee information that they can take away with them.
Members of the committee will be aware that the Family Support Agency was established in 2003. Late last year, it was decided that the Family Support Agency would be subsumed into the new Children and Family agency which will come from the Department of Children and Youth Affairs.
The agency currently has responsibility for the family resource programme, the counselling grants scheme, and research and information. At this point I would like to pay tribute to the former CEO, Mr. Pat Bennett. He only left the agency last Friday, so members of the committee will have to be kind to his replacement. Mr. Bennett has moved to the Adoption Authority as its CEO. He was with the Family Support Agency for nine years and was responsible for much of the great work that has been carried out there. I also commend the ex-chairperson, former Deputy Michael O'Kennedy, who steered the agency over the last nine years.
The agency's current budget is €26 million, which is down 19% since 2008. Approximately 93% of the budget relates directly to the support and development of community-based services for families and 6% is retained in-house for either governance and management or research and information. The agency currently has 12 staff, which is a decrease of 33% since 2008. While the original whole-time equivalent allocation was 18, under the Croke Park agreement and on foot of staff leaving, that now has fallen to 12. As the agency has a staffing target of 13, we are delighted to report we are ahead of target.
In coming to talk to the joint committee this morning, I note the agency faces a busy period. The plan is the agency will be subsumed into the new child and family support agency by January 2013 but realistically, it probably will be March 2013. Consequently, we have a 12-month period in which to effect this transition into the child and family support agency. One of my priorities in the next year is to give support to the acting chief executive officer and the staff as the transition takes place because it is a big movement for the agency and is a major development. However, I wish to ensure the family resource centre programme and all its work, as well as the counselling programmes are strong and well-positioned for the transfer and transition into the new child and family support agency. As members will hear later in my presentation, they form a critical part of that prevention and early family intervention I am sure they will agree is critical to support families. Obviously, we also wish to ensure we are meeting our commitments under the Croke Park agreement. There will be a number of reductions in budgets for family resource centres and counselling grants over the next three years that we intend to effect from the beginning of this year, although I acknowledge some of this started last year.
I will bring members through the main planks of the agency's programme, the first of which is the family resource centre programme, FRC. Its goal is to combat disadvantage by providing support to families and communities from locations within communities. All Deputies present will be aware of the family resource centres in their own communities and many of them will have visited them to open events or to be part of those communities. They do fantastic work. I live in County Laois and the family resource centre in Knockmay has been positioned within the community there for a number of years and has been carrying out work with those communities about which we are most concerned, namely, those which experience most social disadvantage. The services provided by family resource centres include information, advice and support for groups and families at a local level, assistance to community groups - they run a lot of training - shared use of facilities, education courses and training opportunities, child care facilities for those attending courses and after-school clubs. In most of the communities in which such centres are active, they are a hub of the community. They operate within the local community, are accessible and become part of the social fabric where people interact. They also are the starting point of much of our democracy in terms of getting representatives from such communities, many of whom have started out in such family resource centres. I spent five years working in the Blanchardstown community development project, which was one of the earlier projects launched in the early 1990s, and in the context of today being International Women's Day, many women came through it and went on into elected office themselves. Therefore, they really play a critical part in empowering local communities.
From the perspective of the Family Support Agency, it obviously provides financial assistance to assist with the staffing and equipping of centres. In 1994, the sum involved was £250,000, which had risen to €15 million by 2012. Consequently, the agency makes a significant contribution to the community sector. Direct support and advice is given by Family Support Agency staff, who also bring together the family resource centres as a national programme and support collective learning. I will speak to the centres at their annual general meeting this weekend to give them an idea of the plans.
I have listed some of the centres' strengths in my presentation and my priority is to look at the FRC programme's strengths and to bring them into the new agency. They really are about early intervention and support to families. For everyone in society, one's greatest concern is for those families that are most socially disadvantaged and the FRCs really are doing the work to support those families. They use a community development approach, not a top-down approach in which people are told what is best for them. It really is about empowering, training and building up the strengths within the community. They are highly cost-effective and are complementary to statutory forms of family support. Moreover, they are sustainable in that the volunteers who are trained through the centres often go on to become employees of the organisation or go to do other things within the community. Hence, they really are building up a legacy of long-term skills within communities that in the past have been marked by an absence of such long-term skills. They also are greatly concerned with integration and act as a community hub that can bring together services provided by local partnership companies, the Health Service Executive and the local county council. They bring about such integration because the aforementioned services often do simple things such as holding their meetings or joint planning groups or whatever within those centres, which have been a hub for the delivery of such integrated services.
My priority and that of the agency's staff over the next year is to effect the transition into the child and family support agency. We must ensure there is an emphasis on prevention and early family support within disadvantaged communities under the child and family support agency. The resources the FRCs will bring into the new agency will be their skill and expertise, as well as being an arm that reaches into those communities. It is the arm of prevention and early intervention with regard to families and the staff and I wish to ensure this is well-positioned in a new programme of the new agency. This really is about the strategic positioning of the importance of early intervention with families and I do not need to explain its importance to anyone present. Moreover, we seek the continued roll-out of the new strategic framework for family support within the FRC programme. This framework was developed by the Family Support Agency with the family resource centres and had aligned national objectives and outcomes for family support services.
The second major tranche of work carried out by the Family Support Agency concerns the scheme of grants to voluntary organisations that provide marriage, child and bereavement counselling services. This also was set up in the 1990s to provide counselling to couples to prevent marital breakdown. It later was extended to include counselling to children whose parents had separated, the provision of marriage preparation courses and bereavement counselling and support on the death of a family member. As the presentation shows, £300,000 was provided in 1993. That budget had increased to €11 million in 2010 but now has been reduced to €9.4 million. I have included a slide in the presentation to demonstrate how the counselling grant funding has been allocated in 2012. The plan is to reduce it by 12% each year from 2012 to 2014 and the figure for 2012 comprises a 12% reduction from the budget allocation for 2011. As for the composition of the allocation, approximately €5 million goes to marriage and relationship counselling, just over €600,000 goes to marriage preparation courses, €1.3 million goes to child counselling and €2 million goes to bereavement counselling and support. I wear another hat as chief executive officer of the Irish Hospice Foundation, which has been working with the Family Support Agency to set up supports for children who have been bereavement by the death of a parent or sibling. It is great to see this partnership working.
Some key achievements under the grants programme include the funding provided to 608 voluntary and community organisations which provide counselling services, of which 28 receive funding on a multi-annual basis, which allows them to plan ahead and to be able to plan their services. In addition, I refer to the national resource and network of 600 voluntary and community based services. Again, members will be aware of where such services, networks and supports are located within their own communities. They often are advertised through schools, church newsletters or whatever and constitute an essential part of the fabric of each community. There is support for the tender and roll-out of a new database for counselling groups to enhance data collection and analysis in association with the Association of Agency-Based Counselling in Ireland, AACI, which will be launched early this year. Following on from this, the agency hopes to position the counselling grants scheme in order that when it is moved under the aegis of the new agency, the annual quality reviews are further developed and further enhanced. I already have mentioned the partnership with the Irish Hospice Foundation.
As for the strengths of the counselling programme, obviously it is of direct assistance to families and their members to deal with difficult periods they may experience. The joy and beauty of the scheme is it provides direct assistance to families within their local communities, who are not obliged to travel to Dublin or wherever. Support within communities for families is essential. In respect of value for money, the Family Support Agency provides the cost of the counselling but the administration, capital and operational costs are borne by the organisations, which is a quite cost-effective way of running the scheme. As for the scheme's reach, those involved provide services to more than 70,000 people annually, with 250,000 hours of face-to-face engagement at an approximate cost of €200 per client. As for its quality, much of the counselling is accredited by the AACI and it is a unique partnership between the voluntary sector and the State. As referrals come from all aspects of the State services to these community-based services, it again is a model in which there is a synergy between both elements of our society.
The Family Support Agency's priorities in this regard over the next 12 months will be the transition into the new child and family support agency and making sure this is effected well and efficiently. Again, the emphasis will be on the value of family support via counselling within the community setting, because while much counselling may be provided in a medical setting or elsewhere, having it within the community setting is really important. It is fantastic for families who may be experiencing disadvantage to have such a service available locally. Another priority will be to be able to provide future directions to the new agency on how to improve quality. Consideration will be given to the development and provision of pre-parenting counselling as identified in the ERSI report on family trends, which is FSA funded. They are currently working with the Irish Hospice Foundation on bereavement support for children. The emphasis of that work is to try to ensure there is a quality network of supports available for families where there has been a bereavement.
There is a small amount on the information role of the agency which is provided for under the 2001 Act. It has a statutory responsibility to promote and disseminate information on marriage relationships, education, parenting, family responsibilities and related matters. The FSA would see itself as a conduit to build partnerships with others with experience in the area, including Barnardos, One Family and Treoir, which is very cost effective given that these are the organisations with the experience on the ground. The FSA has the mechanism to get that information either on its website or directly out to fund initiatives under information.
From my work over the years in health service management I know that research is key in driving change and improving practice. The FSA's research unit is a key component of the new programme in terms of prevention and early family support. We need to constantly improve our practices and deliver better services through using research. Research can really change the hearts and minds of people allowing us to bring new information to the table and change practice. I am a firm believer in the role of research and I would like to see it in the new children and family agency. Families' needs change over time and community and societal needs change over time. Given that we are in such a state of flux as a society we will need to constantly review how we find out and keep in touch with the public and keep that voice of the public alive in our work.
The research function is not a huge function in the Family Support Agency but it has been critical in changing thinking. As a practitioner I have used a considerable amount of its research. There is an online database of family research which is very beneficial because ten years ago although there was family research it was everywhere and it was very difficult to pull it together. Research coming up in 2012 includes: family relationships and family well-being; growing up in a one-parent family; and family well-being in difficult times, which will consider the factors impacting well being for families living on limited resources.
The Family Support Agency's action plan under the Croke Park agreement includes management of staff reductions in 2012, 2013 and 2014. The whole-time equivalent of 18 has been reduced to 12, which is one ahead of the plan. Absence management will form part of its PMDS system. Back-end ICT support will be provided through the parent Department and there is a service level agreement for that. It is currently reviewing the multiannual funded counselling organisations with the objective to improve accountability within the scheme, in terms of service provision and finance. It is streamlining the software-based self-evaluation system for FRC programme, which is the speak system of which members may be aware in terms of public bodies. This will ensure it is aligned with national objectives and outcomes for family support services.
I will give some information on myself and how I came to be chairperson designate of the Family Support Agency. I was the first CEO of the Crisis Pregnancy Agency and was there for a number of years. My background was as a dietician working in a community development setting and public health working in the Department of Health for a number of years and in the greater Blanchardstown development project. I would be very familiar with that community development approach. I am currently CEO of Irish Hospice Foundation. I spent more than ten years as a senior manager in health services with a health promotion background. Obviously the emphasis on prevention and early family support will be strong in my mind. Prior to coming into the Irish Hospice Foundation I worked on my own alongside many of the community and voluntary organisations facilitating, doing strategic planning, etc. I am a member of Health and Social Care Professionals Council, and up to taking up this post I chaired the audit and governance committee.
Members have a copy of my CV. I hope I bring to the table proven leadership experience and skills. I bring experience in strategic planning and development. It will be a difficult process in the next 12 months as is it for any agency to effect an amalgamation. I believe the staff are very positive and we want to keep that positivity going and ensure the transition is effected well.
We may look to this committee for ongoing support of and interest in the work of the Family Support Agency. I would be pleased to hear the members' views and experiences.