Mental health social workers pose greatest recruitment and retention challenge for adults’ services

Mental health social workers pose the greatest recruitment and retention challenge for adults’ services, a survey of councils has found.

Authorities told the Local Government Association (LGA) that they were struggling to compete with other employers, including the NHS, on salary, while half lacked confidence in their ability to adequately staff mental health services over the coming year.

The LGA survey, which concerned councils’ workforce capacity in adult social care, was carried out from October to December 2023 and answered by 63 (41%) of the 153 English authorities.

The sample of authorities appeared to have more severe recruitment challenges than average, with a vacancy rate for social workers more than double the 10% recorded for council adults’ services practitioners in official data, as of September 2023.

They reported an average vacancy rate of 22% for adult and sensory social workers, 23% for mental health practitioners and 24% for learning disability social workers, with these rates all being comfortably higher than for adult social care staff as a whole in the councils concerned (16%).

Mental health poses toughest workforce challenge

Reflecting this, these roles, along with adult and sensory occupational therapists, were those that councils reported the greatest challenges in recruiting to and retaining, with the biggest difficulties concerning mental health social workers. The LGA reported that:

• 87% of councils had found it very or fairly difficult to recruit mental health social workers over the previous three years: 60% very difficult and 27% fairly difficult.
• 84% had found it very or fairly difficult to recruit adult and sensory social workers: 52% very and 32% fairly.
• 80% had found it very or fairly difficult to recruit learning disability social workers: 46% very and 34% fairly.
• 81% had found it very or fairly difficult to retain mental health social workers over the past three years: 24% very and 57% fairly.
• 73% had found it very or fairly difficult to retain adult and sensory social workers: 16% very and 57% fairly.
• 51% had found it very or fairly difficult to retain learning disability social workers: 20% very and 32% fairly (numbers have been rounded up or down).

Councils ‘unable to offer competitive salaries’

Councils reported that they were struggling to recruit and retain social workers because of an inability to offer competitive salaries compared with the NHS.

Though the report did not directly link this to mental health, it is the discipline with the highest number of NHS social workers, with the health service growing its contingent by 20% from 2019-22.

“According to respondents, recruiting and retaining social workers and occupational therapists has been particularly difficult,” the LGA report said. “In particular, respondents highlighted that being unable to offer a competitive salary in comparison to,
for example, the NHS was the reason their authorities have had recruitment and retention issues.”

In relation to mental health practitioners more generally, almost half of councils said they were not very (40%) or not at all confident (8%) that they would have enough of the right staff, in terms of numbers and skills, to maintain an adequate service over the coming year, the highest for any sub-category.

Experience of using agency staff

Three-quarters (74%) of councils also reported finding it very or fairly difficult to recruit agency staff to work in mental health services, compared with 67% who said the same about adult and sensory services and 64% for learning disability teams.

Half of councils (49%) said they had increased their use of agency staff across adult social care over the past three years, compared with 15% who said they had reduced locum use. The most common reason for using agency staff was to cover long-term absence – cited by 88% of respondents – followed by struggling to recruit enough people with the right skills (73%).

Authorities were generally satisfied with their use of agency staff over the previous three years, with 82% saying it had been very or fairly successful, including because it had helped them increase staffing capacity.

However, some reported that the quality of agency staff was more variable than that of permanent workers, that using locums undermined continuity of services to residents and that their use sometimes resulted in tensions within teams, including in relation to temporary workers receiving higher pay.

Seeking better pay key driver for staff quitting roles

The survey also highlighted the significance of pay in councils’ efforts to hold onto their staff.

Seeking a pay rise was the most common reason reported by councils for staff leaving their jobs, with 55% citing this, ahead of better career opportunities (37%) and workload (31%).

According to Skills for Care data, average pay for social workers in adults’ services fell by 7.2% in real terms from 2016-23, the result of tight pay settlements and, in recent times, high levels of inflation.