Social Work England to research profession’s recruitment and retention challenges

Project designed to examine causes and impact of vacancy levels, particularly in councils, and probe role of factors including flexible working and equality and diversity on workforce stability

By Mithran Samuel on February 17, 2023 in Social work leaders, Workforce

Colum Conway, chief executive, Social Work England

Social Work England is commissioning research into the profession’s mounting recruitment and retention challenges, particularly in councils.

It has issued a tender of up to £60,000 for researchers to examine the key drivers of high vacancies and help it identify whether there are sufficient social workers to meet demand across all services. This in turn would inform its approach to regulating the profession, it said, given the potential for current workforce pressures to lead to increased levels of risk to the public.

In a blog post published yesterday, chief executive Colum Conway said that “recruitment and retention pressures [were] increasing” and could “undermine the stability of relationships at the heart of good social work practice”.

“We will need to consider how the findings of the research can inform our work in this space, and within the parameters of our role as the regulator,” he added.

Increasing workforce challenge

Latest figures show mounting workforce pressures across both children’s and adults’ services:

Almost one in five (19%) of council children’s social worker posts in England lay vacant as of June 2022, up from 14.6% a year earlier, according to Association of Directors of Children’s Services research published last year.
11.6% of social work posts in council adults’ services were vacant as of September 2022, up from 9.5% a year earlier, said a Skills for Care report published this month. Turnover has also increased, from 15% in the year to September 2021, to 17.1% in the year to 2022.
83% of councils said they were experiencing problems recruiting children’s social workers, and 72% retaining them, found a Local Government Association survey conducted last spring.
The same survey found that 71% of councils were struggling to recruit adults’ social workers, and 57% having difficulties retaining them.

Workloads and cost of living among key drivers

Other research has identified several key drivers of these trends, including:

Workloads: three-quarters of social work staff said their workloads were sometimes excessive, in response to a UNISON survey in January 2022.
Pay and the cost of living crisis: three-quarters of practitioners said they had been ‘severely’ or ‘significantly’ affected by rising costs in response to a Community Care survey last summer.
Mental health and wellbeing: the latest of a series of surveys into Covid’s impact on health and social care staff, carried out last summer, found that social workers’ wellbeing at work was lower than other professions’, and had fallen further during the pandemic.
Public perceptions of social work: 78% of respondents to the UNISON survey said they were very or a bit concerned about being publicly identified or blamed in the media or social media in connection with cases.

In response, the Department for Education has proposed a number of measures to tackle at least some of these pressures, as part of its children’s social care strategy, published for consultation this week.

How far do the DfE’s workforce plans measure up against current pressures? Read our analysis

The regulator said a key question it wanted to explore was how increasing vacancies have come against the backdrop of stable numbers of social work registrants – about 100,000 – and numbers training to join the profession each year.

Questions for research to answer

Specific issues it wants researchers to examine are:

where social workers are moving to when they leave local authority roles, and the reasons for this movement;
the factors impacting on employers’ ability to fill permanent social worker vacancies;
the impact of social workers’ desires for more flexible working conditions on recruitment and retention;
the length of time social workers remain in their first role and their motivations for leaving these;
movement between statutory children’s and adults’ services;
the impact of vacancies on retaining the existing workforce;
to what extent equality, diversity and inclusion have an impact on employers’ abilities to recruit and retain staff.

The deadline to respond to the tender is 5pm on 13 March 2023.

Social Work England, social work recruitment and retention, social work vacancies

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5 Responses to Social Work England to research profession’s recruitment and retention challenges

Leroy Nicholas February 17, 2023 at 7:26 pm #

As someone with over 25 years service in the adult care sector, inclusive of working abroad, it has been very frustrating trying to secure employment. In my experience ( I remain unemployed after 7 months of trying) it appears employers, recruitment management are unimaginative in their hiring practices. There also appears to be a bias against part time workers and those over 50. So , in the absence of a “ let’s see what we can do”to have a diverse and flexible workforce, the status quo will remain and people in a similar position to myself will be lost to the service
Harvey Campbell February 20, 2023 at 11:36 am #

Cynic in me says, save £60K and just read the responses pages on this website.
keithbc6472 February 20, 2023 at 12:14 pm #

The strain on existing teams is huge and many social workers arrived but do not stay long when they realise the pressures we are under. I feel sorry for my colleagues as i am retiring later in the year. They will have further hardships to endure. I am not sad to be saying ‘ goodbye’
PB SouthEast February 21, 2023 at 10:07 am #

My local authority remain unimaginative in their approach to ‘part-time’ working. I am attempting to secure the ‘flexible retirement’ plan and it’s like pulling teeth even though the Policy is clear. I am in my later 50’s now and, whilst I am still committed to strong and effective social work, I appreciate that I only have so much energy in a given week and don’t want to carry out poorly planned and managed social work. And yet, because of this procrastination or lack of imagination in creating exciting, but not tiring 25 hour a week posts, I will probably leave earlier than I need to and the local authority looses another worker with over thirty years of experiences. And that loss of experience is noticeable to twenty or more years ago when a worker would like have had around ten years of experience before becoming an advanced practitioner rather than the two or so years which seems the mode in the twenty-first century. I would argue that reflective experience is as useful a skill as a DOLS assessor or AMHP or Practice Assessor but it is not seen as clear tool for the Advanced Practitioner role and thus we keep leaving…
Peter Ponderer February 24, 2023 at 8:28 am #

I can’t help but feel there’s something uniquely tone deaf about SWE.