Worcestershire Council is the latest authority to be judged "inadequate" by Ofsted for children's services. The inspectorate found its problems centred largely around the failure to recruit "good quality, permanent social workers and managers". Workforce issues have been a common theme in authorities judged inadequate by Ofsted, but recruitment and retention of children's social workers is a sector-wide problem.
Latest Department for Education data on children's social worker vacancies shows there were 5,470 local authority posts unfilled at 30 September 2015. This represented a 27 per cent rise on the number of vacancies 12 months earlier. Over the same period, there was also a 14 per cent rise in the number of agency workers employed by English councils to plug the gaps in the workforce.
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