'Wilful neglect' laws won't help recruit social workers
Derren Hayes
Tuesday, March 17, 2015
A number of reports over the past few weeks have highlighted the extent of the problem facing children's services departments in recruiting experienced social workers. Latest Department for Education figures show that over the past year, children's social worker vacancies have risen nearly 20 per cent so that on average, each English authority now has almost 30 full-time posts unfilled.
Of course, there are regional and local hotspots where the problem is most acute. Last year, Lord Warner, the government-appointed troubleshooter charged with turning around Birmingham's children's services, concluded that staffing problems in the department were a major factor in its failure to adequately protect children. However, a new report from the authority suggests the social worker shortage has, if anything, got worse over the past year.
But Birmingham is not alone. Faced with high social worker vacancies and an over-reliance on expensive agency staff, Buckinghamshire and Northamptonshire councils have decided to recruit from Romania and India respectively. The fact that authorities feel they have exhausted UK recruitment avenues and so need to look overseas to find staff with sufficient qualifications, experience and staying power has worrying portents for all councils.
With such concerning employment trends, particularly in light of the increased scrutiny on the child protection system, you would expect the government to have an action plan for tackling the recruitment crisis. Perhaps a major advertising campaign highlighting the vital role social workers play in protecting children from harm? Or a high-level taskforce looking at what practices work best in retaining experienced staff and ensuring this is applied by all councils? If it is doing such things, it has kept them well hidden - the DfE's most recent work has focused on ensuring the quality of undergraduate training is sufficiently good. Important work it may be, but the fruits of it will not be seen for many years. Instead, the DfE has left councils to come up with their own solutions. Such a hands-off approach adds further fuel to concerns raised by parliament's public accounts committee last week that the department has not been proactive enough in tackling some of the big issues affecting the sector.
One area on which the government has grasped the nettle is in combating child sexual exploitation. Its recently launched 50-point action plan leaves few stones unturned. A key proposal is to extend "wilful neglect" laws to children's professionals including those in social work and education. The laws, which already apply to adult health and social care workers, create a mechanism for professionals to be prosecuted, and jailed for up to five years, for negligent practice.
The possibility that this sanction could be applied to children's practitioners has understandably concerned children's services leaders. They are worried such a law, if eventually pursued, could be seriously damaging for social work recruitment, despite the assertions of chief children's social worker Isabelle Trowler that it would be very difficult to secure a conviction. Whether it is used is irrelevant: the effect of it being there at all could see experienced social workers and those considering entering the profession come to the conclusion that the threat of being jailed for making a mistake could be too big a risk.
