Together for Children and Young People in Ireland

1. Recommendations to strengthen governance capacities to deliver for children and young people in Ireland

Abstract

This chapter outlines policy recommendations to strengthen inter-departmental and inter-agency coordination in the delivery of policies and services for children and young people. It also provides guidance to foster evidence-based approaches to policymaking and service delivery for children and young people, and bolster monitoring and evaluation practices and governance arrangements to ensure and promote accountability for policy outcomes. Further, recommendations in this chapter include guidance on the implementation of Young Ireland, Ireland’s National Policy Framework for Children and Young People (0-24) 2023-2028, as well as coordination with constituent strategies.

Summary of Recommendations

The following recommendations were developed with the aim to strengthen the planning and delivery of policies and services for children and young people in Ireland, and to respond to the challenges and opportunities identified in Chapters 3 to 8 of this Report. Existing OECD guidelines and Recommendations were used to inform this chapter, as were examples selected by the Government of Ireland, with support from the OECD, from Finland, New Zealand, and Spain.

Coordination

To strengthen priority-setting and the implementation of national child and youth policy, enhance cross-government coordination and interagency working, and support more effective coordination at the sub-national level, the OECD recommends that the Government of Ireland considers:

Enhancing inter-departmental and inter-agency coordination on policy planning and service delivery for children and young people by:

• Establishing mechanisms to ensure addressing child poverty and improving policy outcomes for children and young people remains high on the policy agenda and that successive governments continue to promote a whole-of-government approach to child and youth policy, for instance by:

  • legislating for a statutory obligation to set periodic child poverty reduction targets as well as and broader child and youth outcome targets – for the medium term and the long-term, considering sub-groups at greatest risk of poor outcomes, and to report on progress against set targets.

  • setting out a long-term vision, mandate and human and financial capacity needs for the Child Poverty and Well-being Programme Office that ensures policy coherence across electoral cycles to help safeguard its operations from political considerations.

• Minimising the risk of coordination fatigue, creation of new siloes and/or duplication of efforts while increasing the accountability of interdepartmental coordination mechanisms by:

  • Ensuring that the terms of reference, composition and roles and responsibilities of interdepartmental coordination bodies are clearly defined and agreed in advance;

  • Mapping and streamlining existing mechanisms in place to support interdepartmental working on child and youth policy;

  • Ensuring that the division of responsibilities within and across government departments does not create avoidable demands for interdepartmental working (e.g., by allocating closely related responsibilities to a single unit where possible).

• Ensuring that in monitoring cross-government progress in relation to child poverty and well-being, the Programme Office is also evaluated in terms of its effectiveness to co-ordinate and focus government action, to inform the future development of the Office. This evaluation could include feedback from across relevant departments.

• Reviewing and establishing a robust framework for interdepartmental and interagency cooperation to implement Young Ireland in relation to planning, provision and delivery of services and programmes as well as sharing of information by:

• Providing for a statutory ‘duty to cooperate’ through amending the Child Care Act 1991 with the Child Care (Amendment) Bill 2023), which is prescriptive rather than permissive and imposes a duty on relevant departments and agencies to work collaboratively in the planning and delivery of services and activities to children; share information and documentation to assist in the provision of services where relevant; and identify and address structural issues.

• Creating effective and accountable coordination structures at senior levels across all relevant public agencies. This includes, in particular, the Child and Family Agency and the Health Service Executive as well as agencies under the respective aegis of the Departments of Education, Social Protection, and Justice.

• Allocating funding for relevant agencies to support cooperation in relation to planning, provision and delivery of services and programmes for children, young people, and families.

• Strengthening alignment of strategic and operational priorities between DCEDIY and Tusla, the Child and Family Agency by leveraging ongoing governance reforms to, for instance, promote the Agency’s mandate and improve monitoring of performance and expenditure of resources used to deliver early intervention, prevention, and family support services.

• Enhancing the capacity of the Child and Family Agency to drive efforts addressing child and youth disadvantage and integrated service delivery by:

  • Allocating and prioritising sufficient resources for the Tusla Integrated Reform Programme, including the expansion of more integrated family support and preventative and welfare services’ in line with its mandate.

  • Requiring the agency to adopt measures to increase the effectiveness of responses, including reporting on waiting times under integrated service delivery pathways (Meitheal and Child and Family Support Networks) and on the service gaps inhibiting delivery under these pathways, to gauge unmet need for services at local level.

• Enhancing coordination at sub-national level by:

  • Reviewing and streamlining the structures for coordinating child and youth service planning and delivery at local level by defining clear mandates for the role of local government and housing, Children and Young People's Services Committees (CYPSC) and other existing structures and bodies (e.g., Education and Training Boards).

  • Strengthening the functioning of local government and CYPSC structures by reviewing the funding model to support the coordination function of CYPSC; and aligning planning, delivery, and reporting cycles across CYPSC and Local Community Development Committees (LCDC); including by ensuring that CYPSC are represented on LCDC; and that both inform each other’s strategic plans.

Evidence

To strengthen evidence-based approaches to policymaking and service delivery for children and young people, and informing policy planning and service delivery with the perspectives of children and young people, the OECD recommends that the Government of Ireland considers:

Addressing data and evidence gaps, enhancing data quality and compatibility, addressing barriers to accessing, and sharing and using data, by:

• Selecting priorities for national child and youth policy and related objectives and targets based on robust multidimensional evidence on the nature, extent, and determinants of inequalities in outcomes, across the five national outcomes across sub-groups of children and young people. This includes evidence on which subgroups are at greatest risk of poor outcomes and why, including evidence on policy gaps, as well as inequalities in access to resources and services and the factors behind them (e.g., lack of demand, availability, affordability, or discriminatory practices).

• Improving statistical measures and evidence collection to fill key evidence gaps for monitoring child poverty and child well-being. Key improvements include enriching income poverty measures with age disaggregation to capture the effect of a child’s age on poverty risk, including measures on children exposed to persistent poverty. Further, developing more extensive indicators on child living standards that include children not covered in household income surveys (e.g., children in alternative care, homeless children), as well as map financial barriers to accessing healthcare. Supporting local data collection on parenting support initiatives, aligned with national standards and common data collection instruments, would further aid policy monitoring.

• Establishing a mechanism to bring together relevant stakeholders involved in data collection and research in relation to children, young people and families to improve consultation and coordination on the selection of research and data priorities and funding allocation, in alignment with existing commitments of Young Ireland to develop a cross-government research programme.

• Ensuring that survey and administrative data gathered in Ireland can be disaggregated and linked together, as appropriate bearing in mind ethical and legal considerations on the basis of, (1) age (using smaller age bands reflecting different stages of childhood and adolescence) (2) the full range of equality indicators, including the equality grounds currently protected by law, as well as indicators of socio-economic status and (3) local geographic area.

• Ensuring timely and regular reporting on service provision for children, young people and families using indicators which highlight gaps and disparities at national and subnational levels. These indicators should identify disparities in services, unmet needs, inequalities in respect of access to and uptake of services across sub-groups of children, young people and families, particularly those at greatest risk of poor outcomes. Measures to consider include, for example:

  • Setting up robust, integrated, and consistent information systems and compiling data on unmet needs or waiting lists for services and on relevant socio-demographic and equality characteristics of those waiting for services (including, e.g., ethnicity; citizenship/residency status; socio-economic status; disability and children-in-care) to facilitate reporting across geographic/administrative areas;

  • Collecting and using relevant survey and administrative data to gauge unmet needs for healthcare and other social services across different areas and sub-groups;

  • Ensuring that indicators of the Children and Young People’s Indicator Set are informed by targeted efforts to map the needs of sub-groups at greatest risk of poor outcomes.

• Enhancing data quality and integrating data from different data sets by (1) establishing common standards and developing guidelines and templates to collect sociodemographic and equality data; (2) building capacities among relevant personnel in government departments and agencies, and in the CSO sector, with emphasis on responsibilities in relation to data protection and ethical considerations; (3) promoting the adoption of uniform definitions for variables in survey and administrative data; (4) supporting standardisation of data collection and reporting cycles.

Strengthening consultation and engagement practices, as well as mainstreaming the perspectives of children and young people in policymaking by:

• Developing public management tools to mainstream child and young people’s perspectives in policymaking. This includes the development of a regulatory impact assessment mechanism with the capacity to anticipate the impact of policy and new and amended legislation on children and young people, building upon the ongoing prototype for a Child Rights Impact Assessment under the Enabling Environment of Young Ireland.

• Build on existing work and initiatives (e.g., Hub na nÓg, the National Participation Office, the Comhairle na nÓg, and the Student Participation Unit in the Department of Education) to further strengthen capacities across government departments and agencies to deliver, and make full use of, meaningful consultation with children, young people and, when relevant, with their guardians/carers/parents (e.g., parents/foster parents of children in care, parents experiencing homelessness, parents with mental health concerns). This involves equipping policymakers with the necessary knowledge, skills, and confidence to deliver consultation activities through disseminating clear and accessible guidance material that includes steps, principles, and methods to deliver meaningful consultation and participation opportunities which reflect ethical considerations and consider the needs and capacities of children, young people, including those living in vulnerable circumstances (e.g. in care, homeless, physical, and mental health barriers). Further work can also be done to strengthen policymaker capacities to engage with seldom-heard children by setting participation benchmarks and targets in consultation plans, among others.

Accountability

To strengthen accountability for child and youth policy and outcomes, the OECD recommends that the Government of Ireland considers:

Strengthening political accountability

• Promoting a practice for the relevant Oireachtas Committee(s) to invite the Minister for Children, Equality, Disability, Integration, and Youth to report periodically (e.g., annually) on the implementation of the national policy framework for children and young people, including at the beginning and at the end of the government term of office.

• Further defining and clarifying roles, responsibilities, and mandates in the current system of independent oversight institutions and considering assessing the adequacy of capacities and resources, to prevent duplication of efforts and ensure their effectiveness and efficiency.

Reinforcing interdepartmental accountability

• Introducing annual reporting requirements for all departments involved in the implementation of the national policy framework for children and young people and relevant DCEDIY-led strategies (e.g., DCEDIY, Department of Education, Department of Health, Department of Justice, Department of Social Protection, Department of Housing, Local Government and Heritage, etc.) and providing training and guidance (e.g., standardised templates) for policymakers to report in a concise and systematic way on their outcomes and impact. This could be facilitated, for example, by investments in building data and digital infrastructure at the central government level, in line with the Public Service Data Strategy 2019-2023, to allow departments to share evidence and report efficiently on their respective contributions, e.g., using a centralised platform or database.

Supporting efforts to increase financial accountability

• Reviewing existing methodologies developed by DCEDIY to track and analyse expenditures benefitting children and young people and, in alignment with current reforms to develop an Enabling Environment, expanding child and youth-sensitive budget planning to all Government departments, with the aim of quantifying investments made for the implementation of the child and youth policy, and prioritising ‘value for money’ interventions that consider the best interest of children and young people.

Promoting public accountability

• Issuing child and youth-friendly communications on a centralised online platform and disseminating age-appropriate material on child and youth rights, government services, relevant stakeholders, legislation, strategies, and engagement opportunities available to them, with a special focus on seldom-heard children and young people. These efforts could be prioritised through the new Communications Platform developed in the context of the Young Ireland.

Young Ireland and policy coherence

Reinforcing governance capacities to support the implementation of Ireland’s national child and youth strategy, Young Ireland

To improve public governance arrangements and capacities to deliver on the commitments of Young Ireland, the OECD recommends that the Government of Ireland considers:

• Coordinating and clarifying the mandates of coordination bodies responsible for the implementation of Young Ireland to mitigate overlap in functions with other coordination bodies of relevance. Further, developing legislative and administrative incentives to secure continuous and ongoing high-level representation from the Department of the Taoiseach, DCEDIY, relevant Departments, Tusla and other relevant stakeholders driving the implementation of Young Ireland.

• Include the national-level representation of (a) local coordination structure(s) on the governance structures set up for Young Ireland with the capacity to coordinate among relevant child and youth (stakeholders) and service providers locally to consider local contexts and priorities in rolling out the strategy and ensure alignment between national priorities and local programming and operations.

• Drawing on the forthcoming Participation of Children and Young People in Decision-Making Action Plan 2024-28, enhancing policymakers’ and service providers’ abilities to engage inclusively, responsively, and meaningfully with children and young people in the planning, implementation, monitoring and evaluation of Young Ireland. This involves disseminating information about Young Ireland through child-friendly platforms and in co-operation with national and local child and youth organisations, building administrative capacities across Departments to engage with seldom heard groups throughout the policy cycle, developing age-appropriate consultation materials, and communicating on how feedback informs Young Ireland.

Promoting evidence-based policymaking by strengthening Monitoring and Evaluation (M&E) mechanisms

To enable policymakers to better understand what works and what does not to ensure policy choices are rooted in evidence-informed decisions, the OECD recommends that the Government of Ireland considers:

• Developing a formal results-based Monitoring and Evaluation (M&E) system to rigorously monitor and track the progress and performance of Young Ireland. Such M&E system would help policymakers to demonstrate the impact generated by government actions and allow to rigorously identify promising interventions, as well as challenges or weaknesses that may arise throughout the implementation of those interventions. The M&E system should be sustained on a clear and explicit articulation of the logic of change underpinning Young Ireland, detailing what the policy framework is expected to do (inputs, activities, and outputs) and what it aims to achieve (outcomes and impacts). Adequate funding, resources, and training for the development and implementation of the M&E system would be key.

Promoting policy coherence and implementation in a context of multiple strategies and frameworks

To foster policy coherence and implementation of strategies and frameworks aiming to tackle child poverty and promote better outcomes for children and young people, the OECD recommends that the Government of Ireland considers:

• Ensuring coherence of existing and future child and youth-related policy frameworks with Young Ireland, by:

  • Continue streamlining implementation structures and arrangements of Young Ireland, other strategies led by DCEDIY, including the European Child Guarantee NAP, First 5, the Action Plan for Youth Services, and the Department of the Taoiseach’s Child Poverty and Well-Being Work Programme 2023-2025.

  • Aligning, to the extent possible, strategic goals, objectives, and the definition of the stakeholders responsible for the implementation of relevant sectoral (i.e., linked to specific policy areas such as health, justice, etc.) strategies with an impact on children and young people led by relevant departments (e.g., Department of Education, Department of Health, Department of Social Protection, Department of Justice, etc.) with the goals, objectives and relevant entities identified in Young Ireland to ensure policy coherence.

  • Integrating the monitoring and accountability processes of relevant policy frameworks into the ones set up for Young Ireland. This could be facilitated, for example, by investments in data and digital infrastructure at the central government level, in line with the Public Service Data Strategy 2019-2023, that would enable standardised reporting on the implementation of the relevant child and youth-related policy frameworks through, e.g., a centralised database/platform.