Councils must invest in skills to beat social worker shortage
Derren Hayes
Tuesday, January 31, 2017
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.
Boosting social workers' income will only be a sticking plaster for the problem if done in isolation. Groups of authorities have tried regional approaches to recruitment to overcome the problem, but to limited effect. Meanwhile, the DfE and councils have developed a range of initiatives to train more social workers and entice back those who have left the profession.
However, less consideration has been given to finding ways to retain existing staff. This is where Essex Council has stolen a march on many other authorities. In 2012, it set up its children's social care academy to offer social workers access to training and skills development on many facets of their jobs (see feature). It was the idea of Dave Hill, Essex director of children's services (DCS), who had set up a social work academy when DCS in Croydon. Since establishing the academy, children's social worker vacancy rates in Essex have plummeted and the use of agency staff has dropped from 11 per cent to 0.4 per cent. The academy has enabled staff to develop their knowledge and skills, and - along with driving down caseloads - has improved social worker retention and the quality of practice.
Hill believes many authorities could learn from Essex's approach, and is assessing whether to set up academies for others. One council that could benefit from this is Birmingham, which over the coming year will transfer children's social care services to an independent trust (see analysis). Birmingham's children's services department has been rated inadequate since 2009 and, like Worcestershire, has suffered workforce problems - in March 2015, a third of children's social worker posts were vacant. The situation has improved recently, according to last October's Ofsted inspection. It found vacancy rates and staff turnover have reduced, and the percentage of permanent staff has increased thanks to more manageable caseloads. Training has also improved, although Ofsted says this has not been "well aligned" with the areas of performance most in need of attention.
Creating and embedding a learning culture into an organisation takes strong strategic leadership. Hill should be able to help Birmingham develop this work further, as last October he was appointed children's commissioner to the authority. Only by having a stable workforce will outcomes for children in Birmingham, Worcestershire and elsewhere improve.
