Social workers to be surveyed on taskforce reforms

BASW agreed to conduct the survey at the first meeting of the Social Work Reform Board this week, which has been tasked with overseeing the reforms proposed by the taskforce.

The survey will ask whether employers and their teams are using the framework developed by the taskforce to assess the "workload health" of organisations.

Addressing the meeting, BASW chief executive Hilton Dawson said: "We will continue to hear about terrible cases of agency failings if we don’t act now.

"Positive or negative, we need confidential evidence from members in a wide variety of employment situations so that we can understand how big the social work crisis is and start to reform the profession rather than just talking about what isn’t working."

The reform board is chaired by Moira Gibb and is made up of working groups focusing on education, career structure and employer standards.