Working with NWADCS to reimagine the children's social care workforce

A bit of background

As emphasised in the Independent Review of Children’s Social Care Final Report, recruitment and retention of Children’s Social Workers within Local Authorities are proving extremely challenging across the UK, with increasing use of agency workers as professionals move outside of direct LA employment. In the North West, there has been a 62% increase in the agency worker rate since 2013, compared to a national increase of 29%.

There will always be a role and requirement for some level of agency work in a front-line profession like Social Work. However, “the rates in children’s social work are inexcusably high at 15.5%, double the rate of adult social care (Skills for Care, 2020; DfE, 2021). 2.6% of social workers moved from permanent local authority employment to agency roles in 2021 alone (DfE, 2022). Once social workers are in agency roles, they are more likely to move around, contributing to the instability children and families experience” (Independent Review, June 2022).

Agency social workers generally cost significantly more than a permanent social worker, as the independent review highlighted, “recent analysis conducted for the DfE has estimated the additional cost of employing agency staff at approximately £26,000 per worker per year (53% of the average social worker salary) (Kantar, 2020). This means there is a loss of over £100 million per year that could be better spent on front-line activity to support children and families.

We know the best sort of social work comes from great relationships between people, and to have those we need staff teams that aren’t always changing. Families need social workers they can develop strong bonds with and who can earn their trust. But that can’t happen if social work teams are constantly changing. We need to change Local Authority departments, so people want to work directly in them, because it’s a great atmosphere, because they feel like part of a team and most importantly because they as people feel looked after themselves.

What we heard

In January 2022, Capacity met with Simone White (Director of Children’s Services for Wirral MBC) to explore ways that our skilled and committed team could continue to support positive change for children and families in the North West.

We were keen to understand how our approach and expertise could support wider system change and achieve real impact for local partners.

The challenge that Simone posed to Capacity was:

1. How do we create a permanent Local Authority workforce of engaged and effective social workers who support children and families to thrive?

2. How do we compete with the flexibility, benefits and variety that agencies can offer individuals in the sector? Is there a role for an LA-backed, not-forprofit agency that gives us more control in terms of quality and cost?

We knew that teams across the North West and the wider UK face similar issues and are looking for imaginative, sustainable solutions for change. With 18% of the workforce nationally employed by an agency, it was time to create space to think differently about how Local Authorities can really tackle this growing challenge.

We set out on a project with three outlined phases: phase 1 would involve deep listening to surface the main challenges and potential solutions, phase 2 would use those insights to build a proposed plan, and phase 3 would involve the roll-out of the feasibility plan, which would likely take place in 2023.

What we did

The first phase of this project relied on really listening to the current workforce, senior leaders in Local Authorities and regional agencies to understand what a competitive alternative offer needs to provide to be an effective and sustainable business.

We listened closely to the people who do or have done, the role of children’s social workers in the region, as well as those who lead, train, and support them. We held detailed one-to-one conversations with Principal Social Workers and/or senior managers as well as social workers from 7 local authorities. 220 additional social workers (26 of these were agency workers) from across the region engaged with this project by participating in a detailed survey asking about their experiences and drivers, which shows the shared passion across the workforce to get this right. We also spoke to officers within procurement, finance and organisational development and understood the relationships and contracts the Local Authority currently holds with recruitment agencies they currently use.

We identified some consistent themes with the ultimate aim of improving recruitment and retention amongst the children’s social care workforces of all Local Authorities. These included: improvements in organisational culture, salary and perks harmonisation, increased tech and back-office support and tangible offers for workforce development. We found that a not-for-profit agency/ bank model could help to bring in more consistency of pay scales across the region, resulting in fewer bidding wars, and more quality control by providing experienced staff. All these insights were distilled in a 20-page report presented in July 2022.

We were asked by NWADCS to put together a funding bid and won that funding, and then proceeded to prepare an in-depth feasibility study to break the cycle of temporary recruitment, which we presented in September 2022. The report presented different service models to pilot an alternative to the existing set-up, listing thoroughly the pros and cons for each of them, while emphasising that this new “external” model had to be rolled out together with a series of “internal” changes.

A group of authorities have now decided to deliver the pilot and working to decide which model they will test. At Capacity, we will continue to support them during 2023 with the rollout.