PHEW.

We have just published our annual investigation into social worker vacancy rates in local authorities throughout the UK. It takes a lot of work behind the scenes to gather and analyse data for more than 200 local authorities and health and social care trusts - but I think it's worth it, because we now have a series of interactive maps where you can find out the vacancy rates in your organisation and where the biggest improvements have been made.

The results this year were surprising. We suspected, in the office, that the average number of posts per council might have fallen as employers are forced to make job cuts. But they haven't; in fact, they are exactly the same as last year. So it appears vacancy rates really have gone down.

In our Freedom of Information requests to local authorities, we defined vacant posts as "unfilled", i.e. not filled by any member of staff, agency or otherwise. We also asked for data on the use of agency staff - check back next week for the findings.

NB: For the web tech savvy among you, we used batchgeo.com to create the maps because you can paste in a list of local authorities and the corresponding data and it maps it to the UK (with no need for geocodes)

Read the complete post at http://www.communitycare.co.uk/blogs/social-work-blog/2011/09/social-worker-vacancy-rates-be.html