‘Challenge’ to recruit social workers

Recruitment of social workers in the county “remains a challenge,” especially in terms of experienced workers.

Shropshire Council said it had lost  three of its 14 team leaders since September 2018 and one of its 12 senior social workers.

The council’s people overview committee was told the council had pushed social media campaigns, advertised in local newspapers and made recruitment videos in a bid to boost interest.

Colleen Male, assistant director, children’s social care and safeguarding, said: “The recruitment and retention of social workers is a key priority for the service.

“A stable social work workforce is important for a number of reasons, including consistency in social workers for children and families; stable teams which improves staff morale with workers feeling supported and safe at work; skilled staff who have received training on Shropshire’s systems and practice models; and less of a reliance on agency social workers which come at a high cost to the local authority.

“Nationally, there is a shortage of social workers and like other local authorities Shropshire struggles to recruit to social work vacancies which is why the retention of social workers is as important as recruitment.

“Due to Shropshire’s location the pool of social workers available to us is not as wide as other local authorities across the West Midlands.”

She added: “We are now seeing fewer social workers leave the local authority and we are successful at retaining social workers through either progression opportunities or through other opportunities across the service, for example additional posts that were created in fostering and adoption which were attractive to frontline social workers.

“Although our leavers rate is relatively low, our vacancy rate due to workers moving across the service was higher than we would have liked (16 per cent).
“Every vacancy is difficult to recruit to.”

She added: “The lack of availability of experienced workers at the point of recruitment is a risk to the local authority.

“We cannot run a service on newly-qualified workers and this increases our reliance on agency social workers who bring the necessary experience to the service.

“We are confident that current strategies relating to ‘grow your own’ social workers will place us in a good position going forward, in the meantime the offer of a retention payment will secure key experienced workers with us for the next two years with the option to extend this further for an additional two years at the end of this period.”

The authority is currently promoting the Step Up to Social Work fast-track training programme which can see participants start a career as a children’s social worker in 14 months.

All course fees are paid and you will also get a £19,000 bursary towards living expenses, travel costs and childcare arrangements.