Council sets up internship to help Hong Kong social workers register to practise

A council has set up an internship to help Hong Kong-qualified social workers living locally to register to practise in England.

Sutton Council has developed the scheme with Kingston University to provide the practitioners with sufficient supervised practice and formal study to enable them to meet Social Work England’s registration requirements for overseas staff.

Eight practitioners have been accepted onto the internship, which will run from November 2024 to February 2025.

Hong Kong migration 

From 2021-24, 150,400 Hongkongers arrived in the UK under British National Overseas [BN(O)] visas, enabling them to live and work in the country for either two-and-a-half or five years, bringing dependant family members with them.

The BN(O) scheme applies to people who were registered as British nationals when the UK handed Hong Kong to China in 1997, and to any of their children born subsequently. It was set up in 2021 in response to a 2020 Chinese national security law restricting the rights and freedoms of Hongkongers.

The introduction of the BN(O) visa was followed by a significant uptick in applications from Hong Kong-qualified social workers to register with Social Work England.

The regulator received 334 such applications from from December 2019 to March 2024, 37 of which were multiple applications, according to data published in response to a Freedom of Information request carried out by Dr Echo Yeung, associate professor in research at the University of Hertfordshire. Most of these were made in 2022 and 2023, with 207 practitioners gaining registration*.

Overseas registration requirements

To register as a social worker in England, practitioners from overseas must:

• pay a non-refundable scrutiny fee of £495 to Social Work England;
• verify their identity and address, for example, by providing passport details;
• demonstrate sufficient knowledge of English unless they have trained or practised in a country where English is the first and native language;
• have a social work qualification that is either equivalent to an English degree or, where this is not the case, sufficient practice experience to make up for this;
• have practice experience in a country where social work is regulated within the past 12 months or, where this is not the case, evidence of having kept their skills, knowledge and experience up to date.

Though social work is regulated in Hong Kong, many practitioners applying to register will have been out of practice for over a year, including because of the challenges of migrating to the UK.

In such cases, Social Work England requires practitioners to have demonstrated that they have kept their skills up to date through formal study, practising under the supervision of a registered social worker or private study.

Those who qualified two to five years previously must carry out 30 days of skills and knowledge updating while those whose qualification is more than five years old must do 60 days, with private study accounting for no more than half of the time.

Providing job opportunities while reducing social work shortages

Marian James, chair of Sutton council’s people committee, said the authority was approached by UK Welcomes Hong Kongers – a project set up by the charity UK Welcomes Refugees to support the integration of those arriving on BN(O) visas – about social workers in the area.

“The council designed an internship whereby Hong Kong-qualified social workers can gain supervised practice experience over a three-month period and worked with Kingston University on an accredited module to support the formal study hours that are required for Social Work England re-registration.”

She said it was “an innovative way of providing employment opportunities for Sutton’s growing population of Hongkongers while reducing the shortage of social workers locally”.