The Children's Workforce Development Council has announced the first nine areas that will pilot new ways of working in social work, in a programme launched last September.
The programme is designed to increase background support for social workers, thereby improving retention, increase contact time with children and promote early intervention in services, particularly for children at risk of going into care.
The pilots are in Bath and North East Somerset, Birmingham, North Tyneside, Rochdale, Shropshire, Somerset, Westminster, Tower Hamlets and the Wirral.
The Remodelling Social Work Project, which will have 18 pilots in total, will run until March 2011, and there will be annual conferences analysing the results, the first of which will be in October 2008.
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