Nearly 30,000 social workers to miss registration deadline

Almost 30,000 social workers in England will not be registered
with the General Social Care Council in time for the April 1
deadline, despite a lead in time of over two years,
writes Simeon Brody.

The registration of the 65,000 social workers expected to apply
is unlikely to be completed before July, the GSCC has admitted,
despite registration becoming a legal requirement in April.

Only 37,963 social workers were fully registered by last week
– 6,472 fewer than the number who had applied by December 1,
which was supposed to guarantee registration by April.

The GSCC said the April target had been missed because of the
thousands of last-minute applications received after the December
deadline.

The applicants who had met the December deadline but had not yet
been registered had omitted information from their forms or had
made declarations which needed further investigation, a
spokesperson said.

She said she was confident the vast majority of social workers
had now applied for registration and denied that processing the
thousands of recently-submitted forms would take longer than three
months, given the limited progress made over the last two
years.

The vast majority of the 37,000 forms processed so far had been
received in the last few months, she explained.