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The Department for Education (DfE) has proposed a two-year support scheme for statutory children’s social workers, to replace the assessed and supported year in employment (ASYE) from September 2027.

The planned social work induction programme (SWIP) would give new practitioners “the best possible start to their careers”, said chief social worker for children and families Isabelle Trowler, in a video message to launch a consultation on the proposals.

However, the SWIP will only be implemented if the Treasury provides the DfE with sufficient cash in the forthcoming spending review, which will set public expenditure limits from 2026-29.

Under the plan, newly qualified social workers would receive two years of support – funded by the DfE – on joining local authority children’s services, at the end of which they would be assessed by employers against new post-qualifying standards (PQS).

The standards, also published yesterday for consultation, would replace the existing PQS (formerly the knowledge and skills statements) for children’s practitioners, which largely date back to 2015.

Proposed early career framework dropped

The plan for the SWIP replaces the previous government’s proposal for a five-year early career framework (ECF), under which the initial two years of support would be followed by a further three designed to enable children’s social workers gain specialist expertise.

The ambition to support advanced practice knowledge remains under the Labour plans, with the DfE saying it planned to “build on” the PQS by considering the knowledge and skills required to practise at higher levels, with an initial focus on child protection.

However, this would differ from the planned ECF, said Jim Magee, assistant director, social work workforce, at the DfE, in a session on the plans yesterday for Social Work Week, Social Work England’s annual programme of online events.

Magee said the department was not proposing a “continuous five-year programme”; instead, experienced practitioners would be able to develop specialist skills at any point in their careers, “not just in years three, four and five”.

Improving early career retention

As with the ECF, which was originally proposed by the 2021-22 Independent Review of Children’s Social Care, the purposes of the SWIP are to improve skills and knowledge and boost retention among practitioners joining the workforce.

“A lot of social workers leave in the first three, four, five years of their career,” Magee told the Social Work Seek session. “We don’t want that to happen; we want to keep people in the workforce and invest in their careers.”

As with the ASYE, the SWIP would be a work-based programme, delivered by employers, with participants given protected time for learning, which Magee said should be accompanied by protected caseloads.

The DfE said it planned to “produce high-quality, standardised curriculum and training materials, based on the PQS,” to support employers in delivering the SWIP and promote national consistency. This would likely be accompanied by support for practice supervisors, given their critical role in helping new social workers make a success of the programme, the department added.

‘More consistent’ assessment

Social workers would be assessed by employers against the new PQS at the end of their two years and, as with the ASYE, there would not be a nationally prescribed assessment system, said the DfE.

Also in line with the ASYE, practitioners’ progress would be evaluated by an assessor, which the department said would be based on activities such as observations of direct practice, case notes, feedback from families and peers and reflective practice.

However, the DfE said it wanted to ensure greater national consistency of assessment than was currently the case with the ASYE, and planned to produce guidance for employers on how to evidence whether practitioners had met PQS expectations.

It added that it wanted to minimise the burdens on participants, assessors, supervisors and employers, a point picked up by Magee in the Social Work Week session.

“There’s currently a lot of writing [involved in the ASYE], so we want to see if we can make it lighter-touch so people can show what they know,” he added.

Focus on statutory children’s social work

The ASYE for children is currently open to children’s practitioners in statutory, voluntary and private organisations, including locums. However, the SWIP would be geared towards statutory local authority social work because that is what the proposed PQS are designed to apply to.

As such, the DfE said it did not believe that the SWIP would be “appropriate for, or deliverable to, social workers in other areas of the profession, eg in non-statutory child and family social work or social workers who do not support children and families”.

However, it said wanted to test the eligibility criteria for the SWIP to see if it could be applicable to staff in other settings, particularly Cafcass, independent fostering agencies and charities delivering services on behalf of councils.

“We are keen to understand whether these organisations could deliver the new induction and if there may be challenges covering the new PQS,” the department said. “Should there be challenges, an option might be for those organisations to work with local authorities to enable their new social workers to experience the full range of the PQS.”

There are currently no plans from the Department of Health and Social Care to replicate the SWIP in adults’ services in England, despite calls from Social Work England for a consistent approach to supporting newly qualified social workers, regardless of sector.

‘Investment in early career support pivotal to retention’

The Association of Directors of Children’s Services (ADCS) welcomed the proposals, with its workforce policy committee chair, Nicola Curley, saying: “Investing in early career support is essential to building a more experienced, confident, and sustainable workforce. It can play a pivotal role in improving retention by ensuring social workers feel valued, supported and are equipped to navigating the challenges that come with this line of work.

“ADCS will respond fully to this important consultation to help shape a system that is practical, effective and properly resourced – ultimately benefiting both social workers and the children and families they support.”

Have your say

You can respond to the consultation by answering this online survey by 28 May 2025.

The Department for Education (DfE) is to give an update on its policy on early career support for children’s social workers next month.

DfE officials are delivering a session on the issue as part of Social Work Week, Social Work England’s annual programme of online learning for professionals.

James O’Donoghue and Jim Magee, respectively, deputy director and assistant director, social work workforce, will share the department’s plans to improve training and support for children’s practitioners early in their career, and beyond, in the context of wider children’s social care reform.

Clarity on future of early career framework

This will likely clarify the future of the early career framework (ECF), the system of learning and development for council children’s social workers in their first five years of practice proposed by the Independent Review of Children’s Social Care, in its 2022 report.

The last Conservative government took up the idea in its 2023 Stable Homes, Built on Love strategy and selected eight local authorities or children’s trusts as “early adopters” to help develop and then test the idea.

It also appointed an expert writing group to produce the knowledge and skills framework underlying the ECF.

End of ECF early adopters programme 

In March 2024, the DfE issued a callout for a second group of early adopters, but did not report back on whether any had been selected.

East Sussex County Council, which was selected to test the model in 2023, said it finished doing so in September 2024, “when the early adopter funding ceased following the change in government”.

Despite the current Labour government having taken forward many of the policies in Stable Homes, Built on Love, and set out further reforms of its own to children’s services, it has not provided any update on the ECF since taking power in July 2024.

‘A very positive process’

A spokesperson for East Sussex said: “We understand that the work achieved through the early adopter initiative is being used to inform the DfE’s programme going forward.

“We found being part of the ECF early adopter programme to be a very positive process. In particular it enabled us to develop an emotional informed support framework, focused on working with newly qualified social workers about the emotional impact of their work with children and families. This has improved individual wellbeing and resilience and created safer practice.”

Social Work Week

Social Work Week, which runs from 17 to 21 March 2025, is a free programme of events on social work, with other sessions this year covering topics including the future of the profession, artificial intelligence, retention, fitness to practise and social work’s public image.

You can book tickets for individual sessions now.

Social Work England has called for a consistent approach to supporting early career social workers, amid government plans to replace the assessed and supported year in employment (ASYE) in council children’s services, but not in other sectors.

The regulator said it was encouraging the government to “pursue an approach which would eventually ensure consistency and equity of support and training for newly qualified social workers across the whole of the profession”.

The Department for Education (DfE) is currently developing a five-year early career framework for social workers in local authority children’s services in England, for implementation in 2026, as part of its children’s social care reform programme.

About the early career framework

The first part of this would be a two-year programme of induction and support for newly qualified social workers that would replace the ASYE. This would be followed by a further three years of career development, in which social workers would have the opportunity to become expert practitioners in specialist areas, such as child protection.

The ECF will comprise a framework setting out the knowledge and skills required of social workers at practitioner and expert practitioner levels, a programme of support and training for social workers to achieve these requirements and a system of assessment against them.

Eight areas are currently involved in developing the ECF, with the DfE currently looking for others to join its early adopters programme.

Currently, there is broad equality in the post-qualifying support offer to newly qualified social workers (NQSW), regardless of sector and who employs them.

The DfE and the Department of Health and Social Care (DHSC) provide funding to Skills for Care to deliver the ASYE programme to staff in children’s and adults’ services, respectively, across all employment sectors, through a single framework.

Social Work England chief’s call for consistency

In a session during Social Work England’s online event, Social Work Week, its chief executive, Colum Conway, said it was “really important” that the ECF worked for the whole profession.

In a subsequent statement to Community Care, Conway added: “We are engaging with the Department for Education and the Department of Health and Social Care to explore how an early career framework may evolve or be applied in different settings and contexts.

“We are encouraging government to pursue an approach which would eventually ensure consistency and equity of support and training for newly qualified social workers across the whole of the profession. We see value in an early career framework structure and approach that can be adapted to suit different areas of social work practice.”

The issue was also addressed in a Social Work Week on the DfE’s social care reform programme, after a delegate questioned how far the department was working with the DHSC in relation to ensuring consistent support to NQSWs.

Framework ‘will not limit social workers’ job mobility’

In response, James O’Donoghue, deputy director, social work training, development and leadership, said: “We talk a lot to DHSC about this and they are very interested in what we’re doing [with the early career framework] and they may take forward their own plans in the future.

He said there was already specialisation within the sector with there being separate ASYEs for children’s and adults’ services, and the departments were looking to ensure that the ECF did not limit people’s ability to move between the sectors.

“We believe that extra support for child and family social workers is a benefit and will not limit mobility between the sectors,” he added.

The DHSC was approached for comment for this article but had not responded at the time of publication.

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A ‘massive reduction’ in the care population, with many more children cared for at home or with extended family, will be the key measure of success for the Department for Education’s (DfE’s) social care reforms.

That was the message from the DfE’s chief social worker for children and families, Isabelle Trowler, in a session today at Social Work Week, the annual online event organised by Social Work England.

Trowler also said that she thought that the general election was unlikely to alter the trajectory of the DfE’s reforms to children’s services, as the needs of children and families, and the problems facing the sector, would not change with the advent of a new government.

Stable Homes, Built on Love strategy

She made the comments alongside DfE colleagues in a session on the department’s reform agenda, Stable Homes, Built on Love, launched last year.

The reforms are designed to significantly enhance early support to families in need, to enable more children to stay at home, while enabling family networks and kinship carers to care for more of those who cannot stay with their parents.

Other goals include significantly improving the quality of child protection practice, enhancing the commissioning of care placements, boosting support to early career social workers and setting rules to limit councils’ use of locum practitioners.

In the Social Work Week session’s question and answer section, a delegate asked what would show that the DfE’s reforms had been a success in 10 years time.

‘Massive reduction’ in care population is key objective

Trowler replied: “We [will] have a massive reduction in the number of looked-after children and children are living happily and safely with their birth parents and extended families and those families are well supported and the workforce is truly multidisciplinary, with truly expert knowledge and skill, and the child protection part of the system is razor sharp in identifying significant harm and acting upon it quickly.”

The care population in England rose for the 15th consecutive year in the 12 months to March 2023, to 83,840.

The Independent Review of Children’s Social Care, on which much of the DfE’s reform agenda is based, predicted the care population would reach almost 100,000 by 2032, on current trends.

In its final report, the review, led by Josh MacAlister, predicted that full implementation of its measures, backed by £2.6bn over four years, would reduce the care population to about 70,000 by 2032.

However, the DfE has only committed £200m over two years so far while it tests its proposed reforms.

‘Reforms’ direction of travel will continue’ post-election – Trowler

Another delegate to the Social Work Week session asked what the impact of the general election, due by January next year, would be on the reform agenda.

“The children’s social care system won’t change, regardless of the outcome of any general election,” said Trowler. “The needs of the families have been pretty consistent over the 30 years I’ve been in the sector.

“And the problems we’ve got with things like placement sufficiency, that’s not going to change either. In general, the direction of travel is going to continue. Everyone involved in the sector wants to do the right thing by children and families.”

The Labour Party is strongly tipped by pollsters to form the next government and it is unclear what its election manifesto will pledge in relation to children’s social care.

Giving the party’s initial response to Stable Homes, Built on Love last year, shadow children’s minister Helen Hayes said it was “not the radical reset that the [MacAlister] review demanded and that we need”.

Specifically, she criticised the plan for lacking a “vision for the direction of children’s social care”, a workforce plan and action to tackle “profiteering” in the provision of care placements.

The government is urging more councils and children’s trusts to test its planned five-year programme of support for newly qualified social workers (NQSWs) in children’s services.

The Department for Education issued a second call for bids to trial the early career framework (ECF) today, after selecting eight organisations to do so last year.

The chosen organisations will help the DfE better understand the needs of early career children’s social workers, inform the makeup of the ECF and design an accompanying development programme for practitioners. They will get £50,000 for taking part.

Replacing the ASYE

Under the DfE’s children’s social care reforms, the ECF is designed to replace the 12-month assessed and supported year in employment (ASYE) with a longer-term programme of support.

This would be split into an initial two-year induction period for new staff, followed by a further three years of career development in which they would be enabled to specialise.

The policy is designed to boost social workers’ skills and knowledge, but also improve retention. This is in the light of feedback that practitioners struggled particularly in years two to four of their careers after losing the support provided through the ASYE.

In selecting the first eight ECF early adopters last year, the DfE specifically sought employers who were already providing support for NQSWs that stretched beyond the ASYE.

There is no such stipulation for the second round of early adopters, however, they must:

• Be Ofsted-rated good or outstanding (in the first round, ‘requires improvement’ authorities were permitted to apply).
• Appoint a minimum of 20 NQSWs in children’s services each year.
• Have sufficient capacity, flexibility and willingness to fully engage with the programme.

The DfE is particularly after councils or trusts from the East of England, East Midlands and Yorkshire and the Humber, regions that were not represented in the first round.

How to take part

To take part, organisations need to request the expressions of interest form by emailing SocialWork.ECF@education.gov.uk with their contact details.

You can also request, via the same email address, to take part in two online sessions – on 15 March (12noon to 1pm) and 20 March (2pm to 3pm) – to find out more.

The application deadline is 4 April 2024 at midday.

Joanne* recently completed the consolidation programme, a mandatory learning and development qualification for newly qualified social workers (NQSWs) in Wales.

“It was a good chance to consolidate and reflect on my practice and has been transformational in many respects,” she says. “But I am glad it is out of the way.”

All social workers who qualified in Wales on or after 1 April 2016 must complete the programme during their first three-year registration period.

They will do one of two courses approved by regulator Social Care Wales, both managed and delivered by partnerships of employers and universities.

The programme aims to develop skills and knowledge in applying analysis in assessments, collaborative working and applying professional judgment in complex situations.

It includes taught days at university, work-based training, observation of practice and self-directed study and reflection.

Juggling work and study

“I’m a bit of a research junkie and really like the theory element so that was enjoyable and the lecturer was great,” says Joanne, who works in adult services in South Wales.

But she says it was difficult to juggle work and study.

“You have a day at uni and then you’re back to your caseload,” she says. “You end up working nights and all through the weekend.

“My children have left home but other members of the team have teenagers and were very overwhelmed.”

Feedback on the consolidation programme

According to the latest data from Social Care Wales, there were 223 enrolments onto the rolling programme in 2022-23, with 183 achieving the qualification that year.

Feedback on consolidation is generally good, according to Tom Slater, education assurance manager at Social Care Wales.

The fact the programme can be completed within a three-year timeframe provides flexibility. “It recognises different people might be ready at different points in time,” he says.

But he acknowledges doing a qualification on top of the day job may be a struggle for some.

“That’s probably true of all social work qualifications when you’re doing it alongside a busy role,” he says.

NQSWs working for Cyngor Gwynedd Council, in the north west of Wales, generally embark on the programme after their first year in practice.

“It has been a very positive experience for us,” says workforce development manager Gill Paul.

“Those first three years are key to your development as a social worker and the consolidation process provides a structure that’s needed.”

The programme, which launched in 2012, has evolved over the years in response to concerns it was too academic, prescriptive and burdensome, with efforts made to ensure it was more flexible, work-based and relevant.

Sources of funding

The consolidation programme is normally paid for by employers. One of the sources of funding they can draw on is the Social Care Wales workforce development programme.

Social Care Wales does not restrict how local authorities use the funding, so it can be used to cover aspects like study release, workplace support and assessment and caseload protection.

Agency social workers may have to pay for and arrange the consolidation programme themselves, though this is dependent on the local authority where they work.

Covid-19 exacerbated pressures on services and longstanding workforce issues. A 2022 report for Social Care Wales exploring the impact of the pandemic on NQSWs found staffing shortages were having a significant impact on teams’ ability to support them or offer protected caseloads.

One NQSW who took part in the research said this contributed to their decision to leave children’s services.

“I wasn’t getting the supervision I thought I should be getting and top of that knowing that I was going to have to do the [consolidation] qualification this year made me decide,” they told researchers.

Wider workforce issues

It will be hard to provide good post-qualifying support unless these wider issues are addressed, stresses Samantha Baron, national director of the British Association of Social Workers Cymru.

“We can review the consolidation programme, change the content and requirements but you have still got NQSWs walking into teams with low morale, frequent staff turnover, unprotected caseloads and high numbers of referrals coming through, and that’s the perfect storm,” she says.

She believes there are important lessons for local authorities and policymakers in England, where a new five-year early career framework for children’s social workers is set to be introduced.

Positives include the fact it is built into professional regulation. “There is a lot of variability in England so if you want an early career framework you have to make it mandatory,” Baron says. “Pegging it to registration means employers have to do it.”

Many also highlight the benefits of good communication and strong partnership working between employers, higher education institutions and the regulator in Wales, and a genuine commitment to providing good post-qualifying support.

Value of link to pay and progression

Jenny Williams, who heads up the Association of Directors of Social Services Cymru’s workforce leadership group, suggests schemes that work best are explicitly linked to pay and career progression. These tangible incentives provide an additional motivating factor, especially when people are required to do the course on top of an already pressured day job.

While Wales is facing retention challenges more generally, Williams believes the programme plays an important role in supporting and retaining newly-qualified staff.

“It’s not that we’re seeing newly qualified social workers leave early, which would be a really worrying sign,” she said. “I think ultimately it does promote retention. I have seen some really good, long-standing social workers here who have gone through that route into management and I think there is a correlation between good support in those first few years and those workers staying. So there are loads of benefits of getting it right.”

*Name changed

Eight organisations have been selected to help design and then test the government’s proposed early career framework for social workers (ECF) starting their careers in statutory children’s services.

The Department for Education (DfE) has chosen three independent, non-local authority providers as early adopters for the five-year ECF: Achieving for Children, for its services in Kingston and Richmond; Birmingham Children’s Trust, and Together for Children in Sunderland.

They are joined by five local authorities – East Sussex, Gloucestershire, Plymouth, Stockport and Tower Hamlets – with the group working with the DfE to design a model for delivering the ECF during 2023-24, supported by an expected £50,000 in grant funding each, initially.

They would then, along with another group of authorities, test elements of the model from September 2024, with the DfE planning to implement the ECF from September 2026.

All eight have been chosen on the basis that they already have a system for supporting early career children’s social workers that extends beyond the assessed and supported year in employment (ASYE).

The DfE plans to replace the ASYE with a two-year induction period, which would be followed by a further three years of career development in which practitioners would be expected to specialise, for example, in child protection.

In guidance published in March, the DfE said designing the ECF would be complex because of the need to identify the knowledge and skills required by early career social workers, the method and delivery of training and assessment and the balance between central and local delivery of the programme.

It said it wanted to work with the early adopters to explore the strengths and limitations of their existing programmes of support for early career practitioners, including their impact on social workers.

Separately, the DfE has appointed an “expert writing group” to develop a knowledge and skills framework for practitioners undergoing the ECF.

A quarter of those who quit the social work register in England last year had been on it for less than a year, Social Work England has revealed.

Its Social Work in England: state of the nation 2023 study, published last week, showed that 24.1% of the 5,335 social workers who left the register in the year to 30 November 2022 had been continuously registered for less than a year.

This is only just short of the 28.7% of leavers who left after being registered for at least 10 years, despite there being more than four times as many in the latter group as the former on the register – 51,184 compared with 12,464 – as of 30 November 2022.

There were also more than twice as many practitioners who left the register after a year than departees who had been registered for two-to-five years on the register. This group made up 10% of leavers, despite there being significantly more social workers with two-to-five years’ registration at the end of the year (19,100) than with less than one.

Some of those who left after less than a year may have been registered previously or may have rejoined the register in 2022 after leaving, but Social Work England said the latter group would be very small.

Concerns over early-career departures from profession

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The findings add to concerns about social workers leaving the profession in the early stages of their career. The number of 20- to 29-year-olds leaving social work posts in local authority children’s services rose by 35%, from 698 to 939, between 2019-20 and 2021-22, revealed Department for Education data published last month. 

While the DfE did not publish any information on their destinations, research for 2020-21 showed that most leavers in that year did not take up another post in local authority children’s services during the 12-month period. 

The Social Work England data comes amid a push from sector leaders to address this and other pressures on the workforce.

Notably, the DfE has proposed replacing the assessed and supported year in employment (ASYE) for children’s practitioners with a five-year early career framework – an idea proposed by the Independent Review of Children’s Social Care, which reported in 2022.

In its draft children’s social care strategy, published for consultation last month, the DfE said that feedback from the profession had highlighted that “years 2 to 4 of social workers’ career are often the toughest as they lose the support provided by the ASYE”, which the ECF would seek to address.

The experience of early career social workers is also a focus of a working group of sector leaders convened recently by Social Work England to address the profession’s recruitment and retention issues, while the regulator also called for greater support for newly qualified social workers in setting out its approach to education and training last year.

Growth in registered population despite rising vacancies

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Despite statutory adults’ and children’s services experiencing rising vacancy rates, Social Work England recorded a 1.5% increase in the total number of registered social workers in the year to 30 November 2022, from 99,191 to 100,654.

The regulator said it would seek to understand the reasons behind this, adding: “We know that some social workers leave social work practice but maintain their registration. But this doesn’t account for the thousands of vacancies facing the sector. We will therefore carry out research in 2023 to gain a greater understanding of the key drivers in this picture across all of social work, not just in statutory settings.”

It launched a tender, worth up to £60,000, to carry out this research last month.

Just over half (52.1%) of registrants – 52,454 – worked in children’s services. Data from the DfE and Cafcass shows that:

• There were 33,689 children’s social workers employed by local authorities or children’s trusts as of 30 September 2022.
• There were 6,969 agency social workers working for councils and trusts as of the same date.
• There were 1,709 social workers in post, 55 locum staff and 114 self-employed associates working for Cafcass as of 31 March 2022.

That suggests there are, roughly, another 10,000 children’s practitioners working for independent fostering agencies, voluntary adoption agencies, charities or other children’s services employers, or in an independent capacity, such as doing expert court work.

Social Work England said a third of practitioners (31.2%), 31,379, worked in adults’ services, which compares with the about 23,000 recorded as doing so by Skills for Care, as of last year, 17,300 in local authorities, 3,300 in the NHS and 2,500 in the independent sector.

Seven per cent of social workers (7,018) worked in other areas of practice, with employment or sector information missing for 9.7% of registrants (9,803).

Regional differences

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As we’ve reported separately, Social Work England’s report highlighted significant growth in the number of practitioners from overseas applying to register, with most of the increase coming from social workers from Zimbabwe, South Africa and India.

The state of the nation also showed significant differences between England’s regions in relation to the number of social workers per head of population.

While London and the South East had one social worker per 495 people, slightly more than the North West (one per 501), North East (one per 503) and Yorkshire and the Humber (one per 514), these regions had significantly more practitioners proportionately than the Midlands (one per 610), South West (one per 638) and East (one per 671).

Social Work England said these figures had remained relatively constant over the three years it had managed the registration of the workforce.

Diversity of social work

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The report also highlighted the diversity of the profession, with 94.3% of practitioners having heeded Social Work England’s for them to provide data about their protected characteristics.

The regulator said 82.9% were female and with 16.9% male, while the average age of registrants was 46.

A third (32.5%) of social workers described themselves as being of an ethnicity other than white English/Welsh/Scottish/Northern Irish/British, compared with about a quarter of the English and Welsh population as of the 2021 census.

The regulator said 9.5% said they had a disability, which compares with 17.8% in the census, while 83.6% described themselves as heterosexual, 2.3% bisexual, 2.1% a gay woman and 1.3% a gay man, with the latter three groups being slightly more represented in social work than in the general population.

Eighty eight per cent of registrants said their gender identity was the same as their registered sex at birth, with 6.5% saying it was not, much higher than the 0.5% recorded by the 2021 census for England and Wales.

In relation to religion, 42.7% of social workers said theirs was Christianity (46.2% in the census), 3.6% Islam (6.5% in the census), 0.9% Sikhism (the same as the census), 0.8% Hinduism (1.7% in the census), 0.8% Buddhism (0.5% in the census) and 0.5% Judaism (the same as in the census). Just under two in five social workers (39.3%) said they were of no religion, just above the rate for the general population (37.2%).

Understanding inequalities in the profession

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Social Work England said it wanted to use the data to understand inequalities in the profession. It cited the under-representation of black and ethnic minority staff in senior roles, evidence of significant levels of racism, as set out in a survey published last year by the regulator and other bodies, and their experience of “disproportionality”.

This was a likely reference to evidence of the over-representation of black and ethnic minority staff in fitness to practise concerns, among other issues.

It added: “We will share some of these insights in future as we look to identify and monitor any disproportionate impacts of our work on different groups and take steps to understand and deal with potential bias and discrimination. The data will also help us understand where and how people may experience our work differently, including where our processes and systems could cause inequality or disadvantage.”

Falling number of fitness to practise concerns

The report also said that Social Work England received a falling number of fitness to practise concerns about social workers in 2021-22, with a particularly sharp drop in those from members of the public, the biggest source of referrals.

In 2021-22, 1,734 concerns were raised with the regulator, down 26% on the 2,328 received in 2020-21 and also below the 1,982 sent in 2019-20. There was a 38% fall, from 2020-21 to 2021-22, in concerns from the public, from 1,306 to 809, and while these made up 63% of referrals in 2019-20, this was down to 47% in 2021-22.

Of the 1,734 concerns received, 309 were deemed not to be a fitness to practise concern, and of the remainder (1,425), 46.1% were discarded at the triage stage, where Social Work England determines if there are reasonable grounds for investigating a practitioner’s fitness.

The vast majority of cases discarded at triage were public concerns (78.9%).

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The Department for Education (DfE) has backed a care review proposal for a five-year early career framework (ECF) for the development of children’s social workers, but rejected its call to introduce national pay scales to recognise progress.

The ECF would provide newly qualified local authority children’s social workers with two years of “high-quality support and development” that would replace the existing 12-month assessed and supported year in employment (ASYE).

In years three to five of the ECF, social workers would be supported to become “expert practitioners”, which the DfE said would create “a cohort of highly trained social workers capable of dealing with the most complex cases and spreading best practice”.

The ECF will be tested by a group of early adopter councils from this year with a view to it becoming an entitlement from September 2026.

In setting out the proposals in its children’s social care strategy, issued for consultation last week, the DfE has accepted the Independent Review of Children’s Social Care’s recommendation to introduce an ECF to boost social worker skills, knowledge, career development and retention.

National pay scales rejected

The care review said the ECF should be complemented by national pay scales, which would be tied to progression through the framework.

In its final report last year, the review, led by ex-Frontline chief executive Josh MacAlister, said the scales would “better recognise and reward the development of expertise”, while preventing councils from competing each other for practitioners on the basis of pay.

However, the DfE has rejected national pay scales on the grounds that they risked destabilising existing pay arrangements, which, in most cases, are set by individual councils in line with a national framework negotiated by employers and unions.

“Local government already has a national pay spine which includes job descriptions and grading for child and family social workers to help achieve consistency, transparency and fairness in pay and progression,” the DfE said.

“We do not intend to create new DfE-led pay scales. Nationalising child and family social worker pay and removing a subsection of council employees from local government pay and conditions may be destabilising to councils without having the desired effects.”

DfE wants ‘fairer’ pay

In its separate consultation on measures to reduce the use and cost of agency children’s social in local authorities, the department said it wanted to see “greater national consistency and fairness around pay” for practitioners doing the same role in different councils, whether agency or employed.

This would underpin its moves to place a national cap on council payments to agencies in a way that would reduce locum pay to the level of the average for practitioners doing the same role on an employed basis, once benefits such as holiday and pensions are taken into account.

In its consultation on the strategy, the DfE said that it wanted to explore how councils could recognise progression through the ECF using existing local government pay scales.

To achieve this, it said it would “work with the sector to ensure that current pay rates, job descriptions and grading reflect the challenge of the role and career progression”, and also “look to improve the quality of pay data”, though there are no details as yet on how this process will work.

Framework to be ‘based on key social work skills’

The DfE said the ECF would be based on a framework document “setting out the detailed, comprehensive skills and knowledge needed to support and protect vulnerable children, families and carers at both practitioner and expert practitioner levels”.

This would build on the existing post-qualifying standards for child and family social work (formerly the knowledge and skills statement), last updated in 2018, but also be tied to the proposed national framework setting out what the DfE expects of local authorities in children’s services.

The framework, recommended by the care review, was also issued for consultation last week, proposing four overarching outcomes councils should be aiming to achieve, two “enablers” to support them in doing so and a set of indicators tied to each.

The ECF will also be informed by a set of practice guides, also as recommended by the care review. The DfE said these would “set out what is known from current evidence and practice expertise about how best to achieve the outcomes and deliver against the expectations of the national framework”.

Practice group appointed to develop guidance

The development of the guides and the ECF will be overseen by the children’s social care national practice group, which was set up in October 2022, helped produce the national framework and was also recommended by the care review.

A 16-strong body chaired by chief social worker for children and families Isabelle Trowler and including 13 leaders from local government, national bodies, health, police and schools and two care experienced people, it currently includes no frontline practitioners or social work representatives.

The DfE said it would work with early adopter local authorities to identify the balance between national consistency and local flexibility in the training delivered to social workers on the ECF. It suggested at least some of the programme would be provided by a national training body commissioned by the DfE, with the rest delivered by councils with funding from the department.

With practitioners likely to be assessed at the end of years two and five of the ECF, the DfE said it would design “rigorous, supportive and fair assessment processes, which are integrated into the development and training aspects of the programme”.

In doing so, it said it would learn the lessons of the national assessment and accreditation system (NAAS), introduced in 2018 to test social workers’ knowledge and skills and accredit those who passed, but scrapped last year.

NAAS was delivered through in-person assessment centres and, in bringing the scheme to an end, the DfE said it wanted to move towards a “more sustainable” system, likely involving more remote methods of assessment.

Reserving tasks for expert practitioners

While the DfE has accepted many of the care review’s recommendations in relation to the ECF, it is not clear whether it will take up its proposal to reserve certain social work tasks to those who have become expert practitioners through completing the framework.

Specifically, the review proposed that child protection cases should be managed by expert practitioners, selected based on their experience to date or, in future, through passing the ECF.

“They would provide an experienced and specialist resource to investigate and make decisions about significant harm to children,” said the review.

The DfE has proposed testing the deployment of lead child protection practitioners to manage cases in up to 12 ‘family first for children’ pathfinder areas.

It said they would “have the specific practice skills and experience that social workers need to work directly with families where there is actual or likely significant harm”, but did not specify how they would be appointed or make a link to them having passed the ECF in future, should both initiatives come into force.

The appointment of specialist social workers to lead child protection cases will be piloted while a new framework will be introduced to support practitioners at the start of their careers, the government has said in its response to the care review.

The long-awaited children’s social care implementation strategy, published today by the Department for Education (DfE), also includes plans to support councils recruit up to 500 social work apprentices and consultative proposals on reducing authorities’ reliance on agency staff.

Claire Coutinho (photo: HM Government)

Announcing the strategy, children’s minister Claire Coutinho said: “Children in care deserve the same love and stability as everyone else. Yet we’ve seen from the two tragic murders of Arthur Labinjo-Hughes and Star Hobson that more needs to be done to protect our most vulnerable children.

‘Strong relationships at heart of care system’

“Our wide-ranging reforms will put strong relationships at are the heart of the care system. From supporting our brilliant foster carers, kinship carers and social workers to getting early help to families and improving children’s homes, we want every child to get the support and protection they need.”

The strategy is the DfE’s response to the Independent Review of Children’s Social Care, the Child Safeguarding Practice Review Panel’s inquiry into the murders of Arthur and Star and the Competition and Markets Authority’s (CMA) study of the children’s social care market, all issued last year.

Early career framework to be introduced

The DfE has accepted the care review’s call for the establishment of an early career framework, replacing the assessed and supported year in employment once established. This would likely be in 2026, though the DfE said it would be trialled from this year.

This would provide two years of “consistent, high-quality support and development”, with “rigorous, supportive and fair assessment processes, which are integrated into the
development and training aspects of the programme”.

The care review recommended a five-year framework, with those who completed it gaining the status of expert practitioners.

The DfE said it would “look to develop an expert practitioner level of the ECF for years 3 to 5
post-qualifying”, creating “a cohort of highly trained social workers capable of dealing with the most complex cases and spreading best practice”.

Lead child protection practitioners

As recommended by the review, the DfE said it would pilot the introduction of a lead child protection practitioner in up to 12 areas that will also be trialling the care review’s proposed establishment of ‘family help’ teams to provide early intervention to families in need.

The department will also test the headline recommendation from the national panel’s inquiry into Arthur and Star’s murders, namely the creation of multi-agency expert units to lead child protection cases in each area.

“We want a model of child protection where multi-agency practitioners work as a team on a day-to-day basis, to provide better consistency and robust critical thinking and challenge to each other when making child protection decisions,” it said.

However, it has rejected the care review’s recommendation to abolish the independent reviewing officer role, though it said it would look to review and strengthen the role.

Action on agency social work 

The care review also proposed a number of measures to reduce the “inexcusably high” use of agency social workers.

These included restrictions on who can be hired and stricter adherence to regional agreements, plus funding to help councils set up not-for-profit staff banks that would be their first port of call for hiring temporary staff.

The DfE has set out proposals for national rules that local authorities would have to adhere to in engaging agency staff, in a consultation also published today.

It is proposing:

• National price caps on what local authorities may pay per hour for locums.
• A requirement for social workers who graduated in or after April 2024 to have a minimum of five years’ post-qualified experience working within children’s social care and completion of the ASYE to be appointed to an agency post.
• A ban on agency project teams.
• A requirement for employers to request and provide references for all agency social worker candidates.
• That councils do not engage agency workers for a period of three months after they have left a substantive role within the same region (excluding certain exceptions).
• A requirement for a minimum six-week notice period for agency social workers.
• The collection and sharing of core agency and pay data, to support better workforce planning and the ability to monitor, enforce and assess the impact of the proposals.

These would be introduced from spring 2024.

It comes against the backdrop of increasingly severe pressures, with the proportion of vacant children’s social work posts in local authorities rising to one in five, and the number filled by agency staff to one in six, as of last June.

ADCS president Steve Crocker (credit: ADCS)

Councils ‘cannot wait’ for workforce support

Association of Directors of Children’s Services president Steve Crocker said he welcomed them but that the DfE’s proposed timescale for reform was too lengthy.

“It includes a range of sensible proposals but the timeline for implementation is too long, we cannot wait 15 months for change and urge government to progress the changes even more quickly.

“Local authorities are facing real recruitment and retention challenges now, particularly amongst our social workers which, in the short term, is leading to an increasing reliance upon agency staff to help us meet the growing levels of need we are seeing across our communities.

“At the same time, we are seeing increasingly aggressive recruitment tactics being employed by agencies to attract our staff and the costs of buying back their services spiralling.”

The latter charge has been rejected by agency leaders.

In response to the DfE’s proposals to reform agency work, Jonathan Wadsworth, managing director of the agency Charles Hunter Associates, said: “The consultation is proposing a clear attack on  vital hard working agency social workers. It is seemingly an underhand tactic to forcibly make prospective agency workers go permanent. It is essential that all stakeholders remember the critical staffing shortages we face and that this is only going to make things worse.”

Lack of funded plan for social work – BASW

In its response to the DfE’s wider strategy, the British Association of Social Workers (BASW) England said it “[did] not reveal a clear and funded plan on how to retain social workers in the children’s care system and ensure their working conditions are fit for their role”.

BASW England added: “The message from social workers is clear: high caseloads and complex cases increasing demand on the system has led to this crisis. The failure to address this sufficiently is concerning and a risk to vulnerable children and families.

“While extra funds for the recruitment of 500 children’s social care apprentices is positive, there seems nothing here to address the wishes of experienced social workers for a national review of their pay, terms, and working conditions to make sure the profession is properly supported.”

Regulator pledges focus on whole profession

Social Work England said it welcomed the DfE’s proposals and that its chief executive, Colum Conway, had been appointed to a “national practice group” that the department had established to oversee aspects of the reforms.

While the proposed reforms to social work would affect statutory practice with children and families, Conway said his priority would be to ensure a focus on the profession as a whole.

“While the focus of the strategy is on work with children and families, with our unique view across the entire social work profession, I am also keen to ensure that the development of statutory guidance can read across into all areas of social work,” he said.

“My role on the group will consider this principle of one social work profession to ensure that the public can have trust and confidence in their social worker at whatever stage of life they might need them.”

In an initial response, the Principal Children and Families Social Worker Network said: “As a principal social worker network, we are looking forward to reading and digesting the detail of the implementation strategy. We fully intend to utilise the collective skill, wisdom and expertise of the network to provide constructive feedback during the consultation period.”