Council considers recruiting social workers from overseas
Neil Puffett
Monday, January 20, 2020
A London council where standards jumped from "inadequate" to "good" in the space of just two years is considering recruiting social workers from overseas to fill vacant roles.
Barnet Council said it is looking into the idea due to rising vacancy rates – it currently has 62 vacant children's social work positions, and is experiencing difficulty attracting candidates from the UK.
Referencing the council’s efforts to fill social worker vacancies, a quarterly update on family services at Barnet says it has “launched a new recruitment campaign” and is “looking at the potential of recruiting from overseas”.
Discussing the issue at a council meeting, director of children's services Chris Munday said that attracting social workers can be easier for struggling local authorities.
An Ofsted inspection in 2017 warned of "widespread and serious failures" including poor assessment of risk, with provision rated "inadequate". But a fresh inspection, published in July 2019, found that leaders and managers have made purposeful progress, at pace, to establish a child-focused service that is delivering good outcomes.
"We are trying lots of different things to attract children's social workers," Munday said.
"We have been at a large recruitment fair recently. We have done very well on recruiting team managers - those sorts of roles are almost all fully staffed by permanent staff, as are our heads of service.
"The challenge we have is for social workers, and that is a challenge across the whole of London, and there is a whole range of reasons behind that.
"One is that you can move from one authority to another fairly easily in London and when there's a shortage, you can follow resource around. When an authority hasn't done so well, they may be paying better than other authorities”.
Munday said research suggests that the biggest issue the council is facing is that many staff leave social work after as little as three years "because of the job itself".
"I was at the cinema a couple of days ago and there's a fantastic advert about becoming a teacher," he said. "I've not yet seen an advert about becoming a social worker.
"If we greatly value the role that social workers have, rather than only seeing social work when something has gone wrong, that would be really helpful.
"But there hasn't been the same approach as there has been to teaching or nursing. I would love to see greater national campaigns, but we also need to understand why after three years people move out of frontline social work and move into what are seen as the 'softer sides' of the service.
"There are many reasons – one is managing risk and your own wellbeing, and those are things we need to think about as we continue."
A number of other councils have previously conducted overseas recruitment campaigns. In 2015, Northamptonshire County Council moved to recruit staff from India, while Buckinghamshire County Council launched recruitment campaigns in Romania and Northern Ireland.
Devon County Council is trying to recruit children's social workers from Africa.
The most recent workforce statistics, published by the Department for Education, show that the number of full-time equivalent (FTE) children and family social workers at 30 September 2018 was 29,470, an increase of more than three per cent from the same point in 2017.
However, the number of vacancies in 2018 was 5,810, similar to the previous year.
Meanwhile, the turnover rate had risen to 16 per cent compared with 15 per cent the previous year.
Maris Stratulis, national director England at the British Association of Social Work (BASW), said: “Working conditions for social workers across the country are not where they need to be. We’ve been saying it for a while but it remains a fact, there are too many caseloads and not enough resources and support to deal with increasing demand for services.
“Social work is a global profession and there are quality professionals overseas who can enrich a workforce with skills and diversity, so it is important that there are no restrictions or barriers to mobility of social workers in the UK or overseas, especially in the midst of Brexit.”
