The Minister for Children has said her department is working to recruit more social workers to support children in care.

A new report, from the Health Information and Quality Authority, shows over 7% of children in foster care had no social worker assigned to support them.

The watchdog found that more than one in seven of the cases had been classified as high priority by the agency.

The report found that young people continue to experience an inconsistency in the quality of children’s services from different providers across the country.

The Minister for Children is Katherine Zappone: “They are currently working very hard to recruit more social workers in order to be placed with children who are preparing to go into care, or who are in care.

“There is a deficit there, there had been a challenge for the last number of years, but I am happy to say that I think that there is a really determined focused effort to fill those vacancies, the money is there.”