Children’s Social Care Workforce

(Limited Text - Ministerial Extracts only)

Wednesday 20th July 2022 Westminster Hall

[The Parliamentary Under-Secretary of State for Education (Brendan Clarke-Smith)]

Of course, Mr Sharma, and may I say what an absolute pleasure it is to serve under your chairmanship? I congratulate the hon. Member for St Helens South and Whiston (Ms Rimmer) on securing this important debate on a subject that she is passionate about. I share that passion and I thank her for bringing her extensive knowledge of local government to the table as well.

I thank our children’s social care workforce: the child and family social workers, our children’s homes teams, our family support workers, and all those with whom they work. I pay tribute to every single person working in children’s social care and striving to offer life-changing support to children and families day in, day out.

I am sure the hon. Member will be pleased to know that I will chair the first interim meeting of the national implementation board tomorrow, bringing together experts to deliver the kind of transformational change that we want to see in children’s social care. I also met Josh MacAlister today to discuss our ambitions, so I am equally keen to progress this as quickly as possible. I hope that I can address the concerns of other hon. Members present; I believe we share a great deal of common ground on a number of issues.

Children’s social care is central to our mission to level up the country and enable all children in the country to make the most of their abilities. I was in Worksop in Nottinghamshire on Monday where I had the opportunity to speak with social workers on the frontline. I want to capture the good news stories that are all too often overshadowed by the tragedies. I saw the excellent services and dedicated professionals that the hon. Member has focused the debate on. I applaud her work on ensuring that we have the opportunity to talk about this vital workforce that we so value and am pleased to be doing so in my first Westminster Hall debate as a Minister, which I hope will not be my last.

As my predecessor, the hon. Member for Colchester (Will Quince), said on World Social Work Day in March, there are few professions that can claim to transform lives as much as child and family social workers. The Government are dedicated to ensuring that there is an excellent child and family social worker for everyone who needs one. That is why there are more child and family social workers than ever before: 32,500 such social workers were employed by local authorities in England in September 2021, which is the most recent data we have at a national level. That is 14% more than in 2017.

We invest over £50 million each year on recruiting and developing child and family social workers to ensure that the workforce continues to have the capacity, skills and knowledge to support and protect vulnerable children. We train an average of 800 new social workers annually through our fast-track programmes Frontline and Step Up To Social Work. The Frontline programme alone plays a fundamental role in our recruitment strategy, with approximately 3,000 new social workers due to graduate and enter the workforce by 2024 since the programme began in 2013. In addition, each year almost 3,000 newly qualified child and family social workers are supported through our assessed and supported year in employment, and around 750 social workers go through one of our leadership development programmes.

I am delighted that just last week we announced our new leadership programme, which will run from this August to July 2024, called social worker leadership pathways. It will provide consistent and high-quality leadership development throughout a social worker’s career. That will run alongside the upon future leaders programme launched in 2020, which gives aspiring and new directors of children’s services the skills they need to thrive in such a challenging and pivotal role. However, I absolutely recognise the challenges that colleagues have described today. I know that local authorities face increasing challenges with their workforce, and I am grateful to everyone who has brought those issues to the fore. As I say, we share a lot of common ground on the issues.

The Government recognised the need for children’s social care reform in our manifesto, as has been rightly stated, and we announced our intention for an independent review of children’s social care. As the review sets out, and as we have heard, social worker recruitment, retention and quality are not consistently at the levels they need to be across the country. Sadly, that inevitably has an impact on the outcomes for our most vulnerable children. That is why, in addition to continued investment in our programmes, we intend to publish our children’s social care reform implementation strategy by the end of this year. As we develop the strategy, it is an absolute priority to work with the sector to ensure there are sufficient numbers of child and family social workers with the skills and knowledge to meet the needs of the families with whom they work. We are currently considering the recommendations from the independent review of children’s social care and the national panel review.

[Rachael Maskell]

The independent review comes as a package and holds together as such. Is the Minister committing that the Government will accept the package and make the level of investment that the review calls for?

[Brendan Clarke-Smith]

I thank the hon. Member for her question. When we come to the implementation board, those are exactly the things we will discuss and I share the view that there is a lot of good stuff in that report, and I would like to see us do as much as possible. That will obviously come when the board meets, and those are things that we will discuss. I can promise that we will look seriously at all the recommendations that have been made there before making any decision. That is something that certainly want to put across as the Minister. It is a passion that I equally share, and I will do my best to make sure that we have the best reform possible based on the information and resources available to us.

Some of the ideas we are considering in the review include regional staff banks, national pay scales and memorandums of understanding to help to reduce the cost of agency social work, which I agree is a problem and something that needs to be addressed. As my predecessor, my hon. Friend the Member for Colchester set out on the day of publication of the independent review,

“Providing more decisive child protection relies on the knowledge and skills”—[Official Report, 23 May 2022; Vol. 715, c. 33]

of all those in the workforce, and in particular our child and family social workers. That is why we are keen to support the principle of the review’s proposed early career framework.

We intend to set out plans to refocus the support that social workers receive early on, when the Government publish their implementation strategy later this year. The plans will have a particular emphasis on child protection, given the challenging nature of that work. I am particularly delighted to share with the hon. Member for St Helens South and Whiston that yesterday I signed off £250,000 of improvement funding for St Helens and the Liverpool city region. That will go towards a staff bank pilot, with the ultimate aim of reducing the region’s reliance on agencies.

It is not right that social workers feel their work is undervalued and overlooked. It saddens me to think that those working to protect our most vulnerable children are stigmatised in such a way. Unfortunately, the public only hear about social workers when something goes terribly wrong. They do not hear about the hundreds of thousands of cases where children and parents are empowered and supported to create a better life. Those are the stories that we should hear continually, to remind us of the crucial role that social workers play in protecting the lives of vulnerable children.

Importantly, it is because most social workers do their jobs so well that we are able to overlook them in such a way. That is a national scandal, because dedicated social workers are essential to keeping children safe. It is impossible to quantify the number of children’s lives that social workers have saved, the number of families that they have helped or the harm that they have prevented. When children are in need, social workers work hard on their behalf to ensure that they receive the love and care they deserve. When families are in awful situations and children are in danger, social workers help to make things better. When a family is able to stay together, a social worker is behind the scenes helping to make that happen. Throughout the pandemic, social workers have continued to meet families in person, helping to turn lives around. That is why the Government have invested heavily in training and support for child and family social workers, and will continue to do so.

The quality of a work environment is key to recruitment and retention, including effective professional supervision, wider support and case work levels. Our programme seeks to address a number of those points directly. We are supporting the recruitment of social workers through our investment in initial education and our fast-track programmes. Our investment in continued professional development programmes has a leadership focus, precisely because there is such a strong relationship between leadership, retention and quality.

There is great practice out there, with local authorities driving down agency rates and stabilising their workforces. We see the fruits of everyone’s labour in the number of child and family social workers increasing every year, up 14% from the number in 2017 to 32,500 in 2021. Average case load numbers have fallen from 17.8% in 2017 to 16.3% in 2021, something that we continue to build on.

We recognise that that may not be the picture that some local authorities are seeing on the ground. We are working closely with local authorities, using central programmes and funding to respond to their needs. Informed by the recommendations in “The Independent Review of Children’s Social Care” and the national panel review, we are aiming to stabilise and strengthen children’s social care as we transition out of the pandemic. We want the best possible outcomes for children and young people and to provide a strong foundation for longer term reform.

In addition to our £50 million investment every year in social worker initial education and professional development programmes, the Government have set up a brand-new regulator just for social workers. It is called Social Work England and has been running since 2019. Social Work England’s role as a specialist regulator for social workers is a fundamental part of our reforms to improve the quality of social work practice. Social Work England ensures that people who have a social worker receive the best possible support whenever they might need it in life. Its regulatory framework allows the organisation to adapt to emerging opportunities, challenges and best practice.

We introduced clear post-qualifying standards in 2017 to strengthen the social care system and improve social work practice and safeguarding across the country. They set out the knowledge and skills expected of child and family social workers. We remain committed to assessment and accreditation as key elements of improving children’s social care. We also continue to engage and collaborate with stakeholders and subject experts as we develop the long-term future of post-qualification training and development for child and family social workers.

This year, local authorities have access to more than £54 billion in core spending power to deliver their services, including those for children and young people. That is £3.7 billion more than in 2021-22. It is right that councils should be able to make spending decisions based on their local needs.

[Mike Amesbury]

The Conservative-led Local Government Association has recently published figures about the funding pressure. Of course, that was based on a settlement, with inflation around 2%. We are looking at a shortfall of around £3.4 billion for local government, and 60% of local council finances and budgets go on social care. The system is broken; the current situation is not sustainable.

[Brendan Clarke-Smith]

I thank the hon. Member for his point, and I agree there are considerable pressures on local authorities. The hon. Member for St Helens South and Whiston mentioned agency rates earlier, and the spiralling cost of those. What the Government believe—and I have spoken with the LGA about this—is that the early intervention in some of the things that we are looking at putting in place, and this implementation, will help us to cut some of those costs. I fully recognise that there are significant challenges at the moment, but I hope that what we are doing will drive down some of those costs for local authorities and allow us to provide them with the support that I accept local authorities certainly need.

[Rachael Maskell]

On a similar theme, there has been a real increase in demand for services. Many of the figures the Minister gave predate the pandemic, and after the pandemic we have seen a real spike in demand for children’s services. How is the Minister compensating that with the investment in local authorities?

[Brendan Clarke-Smith]

Coming out of the pandemic, we face significant challenges in the workforce across the country, not just in the social care sector. Regarding funding, as I said, that is why the implementation board will be so important, because these are the things that we really need to focus on. I can assure the hon. Member that this is something that I do take seriously, and we will look at the points she raised as part of this review.

I am enormously grateful for the time we have had today, and to the hon. Member for St Helens South and Whiston for bringing this debate. This is a subject I share a passion for, and I hope the steps we have taken underline the importance of this and our commitment to getting this implementation done. I hope the pace at which we move towards that goal reflects the importance of the issue.