Entries are now open for the 2021 Social Worker of the Year Awards, which returns this year after a Covid-induced break in 2020.

The awards has a slimmed-down list of categories this year – 12, as opposed to 16 to 18 in previous years – with the merger of some awards previously split into children’s and adults’ sections. However, there are two new gongs this year: the social justice advocate award and university of the year.

In 2020, a ‘thank you social workers’ event took place, which focused on individual experiences of working during the Covid-19 pandemic. Peter Hay, chair of the Social Work Awards, said this year’s event hopes to “inspire social workers across England to connect together”.

‘Time to reconnect with each other’

“This year, as we navigate through the turbulence caused by the pandemic, it’s so important for us to take the time to reconnect with each other,” he said.

“As a charity we also feel the time is right to bring back the awards to recognise outstanding social work practice during the pandemic.”

The closing date for entries is Friday 23 July. The shortlist will be announced in early October and the winners revealed at a virtual ceremony at the end of November.

Sponsors for the awards are being finalised.

For more information about the 2021 Social Worker of the Year Awards, including the criteria for categories and how to enter, visit www.socialworkawards.com.

Cafcass has been granted an extra £7.9m in government funding for this financial year to enable it to tackle its record number of outstanding cases and staffing issues.

The family court advisory body said it would use the resource to recruit more social workers, having already increased full-time practitioner numbers by 11% from March 2020 to March 2021, tripling agency worker headcount in the process.

The extra funding from the Ministry of Justice (MoJ) has boosted Cafcass’s total resource budget to £135.7m for 2021-22. This is a 3.4% increase on its final budget for 2020-21 (£131.2m) but a 6.2% rise on its original budget for last year, after the MoJ granted it an extra £3.4m to deal with work pressures exacerbated by the pandemic.

“This temporary increase in funding will help Cafcass to recruit additional social workers to meet this demand and alleviate some of the pressure on our staff and on the children and families we serve,” said a spokesperson for the service.

Cafcass said that prior to the pandemic, along with the whole family justice system, it was already under stress due to “unprecedented demand”.

“The pandemic has exacerbated these pressures by slowing down the ability of the courts to conclude applications within previous timescales. As well as the higher demand, the cases held by family court advisers are, therefore, staying open for longer. The result is that caseloads have been building up to levels that are not sustainable.”

Open cases reached a record high of 44,753 at the end of April 2021, up from 33,640 in April 2020.

‘Merely touch the surface’

Nagalro, the professional body for social workers who represent children in court proceedings, said it welcomed the extra funding.:

“We trust that the money will be targeted to enable the practitioners to provide and appropriately expand the necessary depth of exploration and understanding of the needs of the vulnerable children, in order to fully appraise and advise the family courts at that critical point in the children’s young lives, when so much is at stake for their futures.”

Napo, the trade union that represents staff at Cafcass, also said it welcomed the extra funding but said that it would “merely touch the surface”.

 General Secretary Ian Lawrence said: “On its own this modest increase will merely touch the surface and until Cafcass pay becomes more competitive then the staff shortages, workload crisis and the associated stress issues will just get worse. Napo will be engaging with the employer to see exactly how this increase can be best utilised.”

The MoJ said the extra funding was designed “to ensure Cafcass has the staff and resources to deliver its vital work”. A spokesperson stressed that Cafcass operated independently was responsible for deciding how to allocate the funding.

The Association of Directors of Children’s Services (ADCS) has given partial backing to the government’s proposed reforms to the asylum system for unaccompanied children, amid substantial opposition from social work groups and charities.

When they were launched for consultation in March, the proposals were criticised as undermining social workers’ roles and increasing the chances of children being treated as adults and put at risk.

However, in its response to the consultation, which closed last week, the ADCS backed key elements of the proposals.

The association said it supported plans to introduce a National Age Assessment Board (NAAB), which would set out the criteria, process and requirements for age assessments, and may also carry out assessments itself in certain circumstances.

In its response, the ADCS said that, while it supported the NAAB, it would need to be “child-centred” rather than have an “immigration focus”, and that “social work expertise” would be essential to its effective running.

Proposal for ‘scientific assessments’

It also said that key questions needed resolving, including how it would be funded and under what circumstances it could compel local authorities to carry out age assessments or reverse decisions they had made.

ADCS also supported the introduction of codified age assessment criteria, as well as the government’s proposal to allow scientific methods to be used “subject to agreement and thorough research evidence as to their effectiveness”.

Currently, the UK does not use or commission dental checks or x-rays to determine age on the grounds that they can only estimate age. But, in its policy paper, the Home Office said these were widely used in other countries, a point echoed by ADCS in its response.

However, the use of scientific checks has been criticised by groups including Social Workers Without Borders and Coram Children’s Legal Centre, on the grounds they would cause confusion and error and raise ethical concerns.

‘A significantly greater risk’

The directors’ body said it also supported plans to change the law so that immigration officers carrying out initial age checks could deem someone an adult where their physical appearance and demeanour strongly suggested they were significantly over 18.

This was the criterion in place prior to a Court of Appeal ruling in 2019, in the case of BF (Eritrea) v Secretary of Stage for the Home Department. This found that the use of the term “significantly” made the criterion too vague, given the unreliability of judging age by appearance or demeanour and the principle of giving claimants the benefit of the doubt when they say they are a child.

In finding the then guidance unlawful, Lord Justice Underhill said: “In my view it follows that it creates a significantly greater risk than would otherwise arise of children being unlawfully detained as adults.”

On the back of the ruling, the Home Office changed the guidance to say that a claimant could be deemed an adult if their appearance or demeanour strongly suggested they were over 25.

The Home Office also appealed the decision, with the case heard by the Supreme Court in March and the judgment due shortly.

Reversing impact of legal case

However, in its immigration policy paper, the Home Office said it would legislate to enable immigration officials and other non-social workers to carry out “reasonable initial assessments of age”, including exploring changing the criterion back to “significantly over 18”.

In its response to the consultation, the ADCS said: “Secondary legislation should make clear that initial age assessments conducted by immigration officers should revert the pre-BF(Eritrea) judgement ie an individual shall be treated as an adult where their physical appearance and demeanour is such that they are significant over 18.

“This is probably more important than ever given that the UK no longer has access to EuroDac information for making enquiries of other European countries for them to share any documentary evidence they may have to support of an individual’s age assessments.”

ADCS stressed it was also important that immigration officials were “thoroughly trained” for this role, to “reduce the volume of legal challenge”.

‘Circumventing case law’

However, the Refugee Council said this would be the wrong approach.

Policy manager Judith Dennis said: “In May 2019 the Court of Appeal quite rightly ruled that the policy that allowed Immigration officers to decide someone is adult does not properly identify the margin of error inherent in the conduct of initial age assessments, therefore creating a significantly greater risk than would otherwise arise of children being unlawfully detained as adults. The government should not seek to circumvent this caselaw by legislating, simply because it doesn’t like what the court says.”

The government’s plans would also see those who had passed through safe countries on their way to the UK, have their claims for asylum deemed inadmissible. In such cases, the person would either be returned to the safe country they passed through or another safe country, or be given “temporary protection” status, with less generous entitlements, if they could not be returned.

ADCS said it opposed this in relation to unaccompanied children, on the grounds that they may be unaware of the safe countries they had passed through on their way to the UK.

ADCS added that temporary protection leave could have “a deleterious impact on children and young people” and would also make it “extremely challenging” for local authorities to plan care and support for them.

The government will set out how it proposes to take forward the reforms, on the back of the consultation, in due course.

A growing number of local authorities have reported an increase in the complexity of children’s social work cases due to pandemic pressures, a Department for Education (DfE) survey has found.

The report on wave 22 of the department’s vulnerable children and young people survey found councils reporting issues including increased mental health problems among parents and children, parental substance misuse, neglect and emotional abuse, non-accidental injury, more newborns presenting in care proceedings, self-harming in young people, acute family crisis situations and escalation of risk in existing cases.

The survey, which has tracked local authorities’ pandemic response since the end of April 2020, found that increasing numbers of councils reported greater case complexity between September 2020 and March 2021, to which the latest wave of the research refers. Some said this had been evidenced in the fact that there had been an increase in conversion rates from contact with families to referrals to social care, and from referrals to assessments.

In addition to the more recent increases in case complexity, the survey has found a “clear and consistent theme” of rising numbers of domestic abuse cases throughout the pandemic.

Councils split on anticipated referrals

Since the start of the pandemic, referrals volumes have lagged behind previous years’ levels, a trend that continued into the second week of March 2021, when they were 11% lower than the annual average for the equivalent week in 2017-20. Across all 22 waves, referrals are also 11% down on the previous three years. This has raised concerns about a sharp rise in referrals due to “hidden harms” caused by the pandemic or left unexposed by successive lockdowns and school closures.

The report found a split in whether local authorities anticipated a rise in referrals following the reopening of schools in March, the truth of which will be revealed in subsequent waves of the survey.

Councils not anticipating a rise in referrals said that more children had been in school, and that schools had been in touch with all children during the latest lockdown, compared with previous ones.

Authorities that were anticipating an uptick in referrals upon the reopening of schools said that they were increasing their staff capacity and were working with partners and schools to ensure resources were available to support families.

Some local authorities said that any anticipated rise in referrals and demand would not happen immediately. One council reported: “Referrals from schools have not increased since the return to school – this follows a similar pattern to the last return in autumn and we are anticipating that as things settle we will see a rise.”

Social worker absences drop

The proportion of councils reporting more than 10% of their social workers were absent from work due to Covid also dropped in the latest wave of the DfE data, to just 1% of local authorities, from 22-24 March 2021.

This is a decrease from 3% in wave 21 of the data (8-10 March), 6% in wave 17 of the data (11-13 January) and down from the peak of 13% in waves one and two in May 2020, when the first wave of the pandemic hit.

The British Association of Social Workers (BASW) and the Association of Directors of Children’s Services (ADCS) both responded to the survey results by calling for greater investment in children’s services.

A BASW spokesperson said: “Since the beginning of the coronavirus outbreak, social workers have gone above and beyond to meet the needs of the most vulnerable at a time of skyrocketing demand and increasingly complex cases, with members reporting working around the clock to meet the shortfall of available staff in their teams. However, a lack of funding, resources and staffing has meant that inevitably, children and families have not been able to receive the support they deserve.

‘Risk of further harm to at-risk generation’

“At a time where children have the odds stacked against them, after a year of being deprived of access to education, social-emotional stimulation, and increased household vulnerability to poverty, poor mental health and substance misuse, the government must pull out all the stops when it comes to investing in social care, or risk further harming an already at-risk generation.”

ADCS president Charlotte Ramsden said: “Although Covid-19 appears to pose a lower risk of infection to children and young people, they have been affected by the secondary impacts of the pandemic such as loss of learning, the impact of successive lockdowns on their mental and emotional health and being unable to access services they may have previously relied on. For many, the pandemic will have exacerbated pre-existing challenges such as poverty, hunger, parental ill health and domestic abuse.

“As the survey findings note, local authorities are now seeing greater complexity of need being presented by children and families. Added to this, we know that early help and preventative services across the country are experiencing an increase in demand.

“Now more than ever we need to work with children and families who are at risk of poor outcomes at the earliest possible stage, but only with adequate long-term national investment can we continue to provide this vital support.”

Social workers have split over whether assaults on practitioners in the line of duty should carry tougher penalties.

The British Association of Social Workers (BASW) and Social Workers Union (SWU) have issued a petition urging the government to add social workers to a group of professions it is an additional offence to assault. The petition has almost 13,000 signatures so far – which means the government must respond to it – but a group of social workers and academics have come out against the idea, on the grounds it is unlikely to work and is ethically questionable.

BASW and the SWU’s petition asks the government to use the current Police Crime Sentencing and Courts Bill to amend the Assaults on Emergency Workers (Offences) Act 2018, which makes it a specific offence to assault an emergency worker in the line of duty.

How to manage fear in social work
Community Care Inform’s guide to managing fear is now available as a free download to support all practitioners.

Tougher sentences

The legislation currently covers police, prison, fire, ambulance and NHS frontline staff who have interaction with the public as part of their job. It means that assaults on these staff, as defined by the legislation, carries penalties of up to 12 months in prison, double the standard penalty of six months, though the government has proposed doubling this again to two years through the Police Crime Sentencing and Courts Bill.

The equivalent legislation in Scotland, the Emergency Workers (Scotland) Act 2005, covers social workers enforcing child protection orders or involved in the emergency removal of children, and mental health officers – who are all social workers  – carrying out assessments under the Mental Health (Care and Treatment) (Scotland) Act 2003.

Government must ‘right historic wrong’

In letter to home secretary Priti Patel accompanying the petition, BASW chief executive Ruth Allen and SWU general secretary John McGowan urged the government to “right [the] historic wrong” of social workers’ exclusion from the 2018 act.

They said: “[We] regularly hear from our members about difficult and challenging circumstances that they have had to work in as part of their job. There is no shortage of stories from social workers about their experiences of being threatened or assaulted when on duty.

“This is unacceptable. Social workers are entitled to parity of esteem with other public sector professionals such as health workers in the NHS. This is not an attempt to penalise those individuals who use social work services and are genuinely vulnerable, “an important right for social workers knowing that they enjoy the same legal protections as other professionals in similar situations.”

However, the petition has prompted an open letter to BASW and the SWU in opposition, which has now been signed by 28  social workers, retired social workers, students and academics, and campaign group the Social Work Action Group.

‘Not the most ethical or effective way’

The signatories said they agreed that social workers, and others who put themselves at risk in their line of work, deserved to be protected when carrying out their roles, but that including them in the act was “not the most ethical or effective way to achieve that”.

The letter said there was no evidence the act had effectively prevented assaults, citing National Police Chiefs Council figures showing assaults on emergency workers had risen. The NPCC said the number of such assaults were 14% higher in February 2021 than February 2020.

It also said including social workers in the legislation would not protect staff who are not professionally qualified and who faced similar risks, which it said did not seem just and risked being “corrosive” to staff relationships.

Increased risks to mental health

It would also create an “asymmetry” by giving citizens who assaulted social workers tougher penalties than social workers assaulting citizens, said the letter, which cited the government’s impact assessment of its plan to double the maximum sentence from one to two years, which said offenders could “create a greater chance of unemployment, loss of housing, negative effects on relationships or mental health”.

The letter concluded: “We [the signatories] are of the view that, in seeking such redress, social workers should advocate for restorative, not punitive, justice approaches, in line with our professional values and principles, our code of ethics and our professional standards.”

The open letter is signed by some prominent names within social work, including Joint University Council Social Work Education Committee Janet Melville-Wiseman, who has signed it in a personal capacity, and academics Brid Featherstone and June Thoburn. Christian Kerr, chair of BASW North East, co-ordinated the letter.

BASW welcomes debate

BASW said that it welcomed debate on the topic. A spokesperson said: “While the number of signatures shows strong support for the petition, we know that rarely are matters in social work simple and clear cut. We welcome debate and will be further detailing the reasoning behind our petition shortly.”

In response to the petition, the Ministry of Justice said: “We changed the law to punish those who assault the emergency workers who risk their lives carrying out their duty. Attacks on social workers are of course also completely unacceptable, which is why the courts already have the power to treat these as aggravated incidents when sentencing.”

Community Care understands that the inclusion of social workers in the Act was considered when the legislation was written, but deemed unnecessary by the Ministry of Justice as courts can already consider this as an aggravating factor in an offence.

With a feeling of hope at lockdown restrictions lifting, incoming Association of Directors of Children’s Services president Charlotte Ramsden says this year “feels like the year to reset the ambition for children and young people” and that now is a “really exciting time for children”.

Following a year in which children have missed months of school and been separated from friends and loved-ones, and mental health problems have deepened as child poverty and domestic abuse have increased, this strikes a highly optimistic note.

However, Ramsden, who spoke to Community Care last week before she took on the presidence, is clear that being ambitious for children and families requires a long-term plan from government – similar to the 10-year plan for the NHS issued in 2019 – backed by sufficient investment.

At the same time, amid conversations about a lost childhood, Ramsden, director of people at Salford council, says the Covid story that needs to be told is of children’s resilience and strength.

‘Children have been incredibly resilient’

“Lots of children have done incredibly well during this year of Covid, have been incredibly resilient and are bouncing back, but they’ve suffered loss, they’ve suffered missing seeing people, just in the same way that we all have. So, it’s about trying to keep that message balanced so that there is that real sense of hope for the future.

“We don’t want children to be over-anxious about all that’s happened in the past year, we want to support them where they’re at as part of that long term plan to building back better.”

So what would such a plan look like?

In her inaugural presidential speech last week, Ramsden said it would need to focus on “enabling all children to achieve their potential, whilst retaining a focus on the poorest and the most vulnerable”.

She also said it would require a long-term approach to government funding for children’s services, ending the short-termist approach that ADCS has criticised previously for stifling councils’ ability to plan for the future

‘Stop the waste of time and money’

“Please stop the waste of time and money that results from dangling disparate, small, time -limited pots of funding to tackle complex, multi-dimensional and entrenched social and cultural problems,” Ramsden said in her address. “Short-term investment is not a sound basis for resourcing sustainable joined-up services.”

However, she also made clear that “building back better” for children, particularly the most vulnerable, would involve increasing the quantum of investment in services, not just the timeframes over which it is provided.

With ministers due to deliver a long-awaited comprehensive spending review later this year – setting out government funding plans for the next three years – Ramsden said ADCS’s view was that children’s services needed an additional £12.5bn over this period. Councils were due to have spent £9.8bn on children’s social care in 2020-21, according to government figures.

Ramsden said the additional money was required “to stabilise, sustain and adapt services to meet the needs of the growing number of children and families who need our support to thrive, not just survive in the wake of the pandemic”.

She added: “That’s a lot of money but it would be worth every penny to create a country that works for all children.”

Feeding into the spending review will be the initial findings of the government-commissioned review of children’s social care, led by Josh MacAlister, and due to report next year.

Care review ‘needs to deliver additional cash’

The government faced substantial criticism last month, when it revealed that its contract with MacAlister set out that the care review could not assume any additional funding to implement its recommendations. Any additional resource would need to be paid for by savings elsewhere in government over time.

Ramsden tells Community Care that the status quo in resource terms is not an option: “Whatever comes out of the review, we would want to make sure that it was properly invested in in order to deliver. There’s no point in making recommendations without then also making sure that we have a sustainable approach to resources.”

She says she hopes the review will help to identify “the right shape of services”, making sure the best prevention methods are used and that the best support and care for children is available when necessary.

In terms of specifics, she says there are “very big concerns about the residential care market at the moment”, both in terms of its ability to meet need and cost. She says there needs to be a better understanding of what is and isn’t working in this sector and how to reshape it to better meet needs. This is also the subject of a review by the Competition and Markets Authority, which is examining the sufficiency and price of placements in children’s homes, fostering and unregulated accommodation. This will feed into the care review.

She is also concerned about vulnerable teenagers: “There’s been lots of discussion around the increase in serious youth violence, of the continuing concerns around complex safeguarding and exploitation, concerns around children’s mental health, so we really want to build on that and say how can we collectively prioritise the needs of our vulnerable teenagers and meet their needs – what does that look like, what have we learnt that works well?”

Ramsden says ADCS are “very keen to be able to influence [the care review] and showcase good practice about what works well, but also be open to learning about things that could be done differently.”

She is in a prime place to influence the review as part of the recently-created ‘design group’ it has set up to help those involved in children’s services feed into its work.

Still a registered social worker

Ramsden is a social worker by background and remains a registered practitioner.

“I came into social work really because there was something about families in poverty and families who were vulnerable and I just wanted to do something, so I’ve always been incredibly passionate about enabling families to support themselves and to be able to make a difference and to see that difference for children,” she adds.

Her career has been entirely based in the North West, starting out as a social worker in Salford, before taking roles in a number of other Greater Manchester before moving back to Salford as director of children’s and families services (DCS) in 2014. Less than a year later, she added adults’ services to her brief as director of people.

Of Salford, she says: “It’s a really proud vibrant city with lots going for it but at the same time, a lot of need.”

OBE for services to children

Alongside her director role, she also got involved in work supporting the development of services for children and young people across Greater Manchester, which saw her receive an OBE last year.

This involved the development of a regionwide children and young people’s plan for which Greater Manchester was awarded £7.4m from the Department of Education to support more families with early social care and work intensively with children and young people on the verge of going into care.

She says she hopes that the work she’s done in Greater Manchester, which was centred around influencing and brokering for the good of children “will be helpful to me in the ADCS presidency because that’s about influencing and supporting a much larger national system”. Ramsden is now stepping back from the Greater Manchester work to enable her to focus on the presidency and her role as at Salford.

A new normal

Like all directors, Ramsden has had to manage the substantial and repeated changes, in services, interactions with families and for the workforce, necessitated by the pandemic, include widespread remote working.

As the country comes out of lockdown, Ramsden says she envisages “a new normal” involving a blend of face-to-face and virtual practice.

“Nothing can replace face-to-face working with families and children and nothing can replace face-to-face working with other professionals but, equally, some significant things have come out of virtual working which may add value to the way we work with some children and families, not instead of face-to-face but as an added opportunity.”

She says unexpected bonuses of the past year has been high attendance at virtual meetings, reduced travel time and costs and the ability to have quick meetings.

“So you can have a half hour conversation on something with people from wherever. That massively helps working  on a national basis because you can connect around the country, bring people together to discuss things quickly, so that the opportunities for much wider for professional engagement have really grown out of this and we’ve certainly seen the benefits of that in ADCS.”

Community Care’s recent survey of children’s social workers’ caseloads asked respondents to categorise their current caseload as one of four categories: comfortably manageable, mostly manageable, hard to manage or completely unmanageable.

As well as those classifications, we asked practitioners to comment in more detail about what factors lead them to consider whether their workload was manageable or not and what bearing this had on their lives, wellbeing and future plans.

The comments we received underline the fact that workload stress cannot always be gauged by simple case numbers and often it was the complexity of cases – not their number – that determined how manageable they were.

The added factor in this year’s survey is the impact of Covid-19. Many of the practitioners who deemed their cases unmanageable cited  the impact of the pandemic in their comments.

Completely manageable: ‘I’m able to be the professional I want’

“I left frontline child protection work in December 2020 due to the high caseload and unrealistic expectations, and pressure on staff to work magic. I am now in an adoption team, able to focus on the children and build relationships with them, learn about them in detail and do good quality, focused work where I no longer feel I’m ‘winging it’ and am able to be the professional I wanted to be.”

Social worker in an East of England adoption team, 7 cases

“I have time to make additional visits, beyond the required amount to complete intervention work and actively inform assessment. My management team are aware of my cases and ability to take on more, they look at the challenges of cases as much as possible when allocating so we are not overstretched. When I have challenging cases, they try to give space and a breather after. I am actively encouraged to take TOIL (time off in lieu) and not work late.

“The culture in our office is to finish on time as much as possible especially on a Friday…A manageable workload has made all the difference to my stress levels, family life and practice. I have time to care about the families I work with and delve deeper to the facing issues and exploring root causes.”

Social worker in a South East referral and assessment team, 14 cases

“I’m in my 3rd week of starting a new role and feel I don’t have enough work. I’m a very experienced worker and feel my manager is being very generous allowing me time to settle back into frontline practice.  Across the team I am aware average caseloads are around 18-24 children.”

Senior social worker in a South East referral and assessment team, 7 cases

Mostly manageable: ‘It only takes one crisis for things to become unmanageable’

“It is manageable at times, but it only takes one crisis in cases and the amount you are holding quickly becomes unmanageable. It’s hard to quantify, as managers can sometimes think that, because you’re experienced and up to date that it’s acceptable, however, it leaves little time for other work and intervention.”

Senior social worker in a Yorkshire and Humberside safeguarding team, 24 cases

“My caseload is mostly manageable, however with others in my team having higher caseloads, when crisis arises it tends to fall on us to support, which I do not mind, however this takes away the time I have left to spend managing my own cases. These past two weeks I would say my caseload has been unmanageable due to reasons within my wider team, this has impacted my personal life, working late, feeling stressed and emotionally drained.

“I am in my ASYE in safeguarding and I love the area, however, Covid has massively impacted our service and it makes me question whether I will be able to emotionally and physically cope with the demand, whilst still maintaining my personal life and commitments.”

ASYE social worker in a Yorkshire and Humberside safeguarding team, 15 cases

“I have previously had caseloads of over 30, sometimes pushing 40. I worked part time and had 20 plus cases. My cases feel manageable at the moment as the local authority I work for has invested a lot of money into extra teams (agency) and workers. I feel this is only a temporary fix though and not a true reflection of most local authorities.”

Social worker in a North West referral and assessment team, 27 cases

Hard to manage: ‘Social work becomes your life’

“There is not enough time in the day to complete all the tasks and it’s exhausting trying to keep things within timescales and meet specific deadlines with such high caseloads. Mangers are stressed, co-workers are stressed and this severely impacts on team morale. There seems to be a lack of social workers and our organisation currently has a high turnover of staff, which bumps up the caseloads of those left on the team and causes frustration for families as they are allocated a new social worker time and time again.

It saddens me that I do not have the available time to support the families and be the social worker that the families deserve and need. I often work late in the evening and switch the computer on at weekends to catch up on admin tasks. My own child has shared that they hate my job and as a parent, that is heartbreaking to hear. It makes me feel that I need to do better, not just in my work life but my home life.”

ASYE social worker in a North West safeguarding team, 27 cases

“Whilst 19 seems relatively low, the complexity of the cases is significant when considering whether my caseload is manageable. Being a senior worker, naturally I hold more complex cases than colleagues newer to the profession. The time and energy required on these cases is much greater than cases where there is less complexity.

“Travel is another factor when considering whether my caseload is manageable. Of 19 cases, only four of these are living in placements within my local authority. I spend an awful lot of time on the road and this takes me away from the job. There’s a lot of wasted time travelling. This then means I fall behind on the admin side of the role and feel the need to put in extra hours just so that I keep up.

“It also means late nights home as I can only see children after school. If a placement is two or three hours away, I’ve lost my evening and, more importantly, valuable time with my own family. I love being a social worker but it does take over your life. It becomes your life.”

Senior social worker in a South East children in care team, 19 cases

“I hold a varied caseload ranging from assessment, court and CIN work. I am contracted to work 37 but will often work 50-hour weeks to try and get everything done. The paperwork element of the job is becoming unmanageable. There’s a focus on targets, deadlines and lots of management scrutiny. I’m suffering from stress and anxiety which impacts my sleep. I’m meant to be on leave this week however worked a full day yesterday, two hours today and need to work another full day before Monday to complete paperwork. I’m looking at leaving social work in the very near future.”

Senior social worker in a South East referral and assessment team, 28 cases

Completely unmanageable: ‘My team and I are operating at harmful levels of stress’

“The impact of the isolated nature of practice during Covid-19, and how this seriously impacts the wider team’s ability to support and learn from each other is making beginning to hold a complex case in the PLO very difficult.  Similarly, our local authority has lost a raft of social workers from the service, due to the massive reach and high caseloads in our service, and we have also had a full new team of managers, who are not as experienced as the managers we lost.

“Our team is mostly made up of agency staff, who almost all began their work with us under Covid, and we have extremely low resources of support workers, who are responsible for all supervised contact for the children in care in our team, and all of the parenting and perpetrator work with our families due to our early help service not jointly working with us. The result is having to watch families struggling and not gaining access to the right resources, and so as practitioners completing large proportions of work ourselves and crisis managing our cases.

“I am two years into practice, have not managed to complete my ASYE due to having very high demands on my caseload and a lack of buy-in from my line manager, who has seriously struggled to take on their role. They are quite inexperienced as a manager, and are currently off sick. A 15-day training program stretched over seven months has not correlated with an appropriate reduction to my caseload. I am likely to leave the authority once I have been able to complete my ASYE, and next level of progression.”

ASYE social worker in a North West generic/end-to-end team, 29 cases

“Caseload is not manageable due to high caseload and the complexity. Shortage of family support workers has also added additional pressures. Covid has made it more difficult to have support from colleagues. The stress of the job makes me consider leaving the profession and going elsewhere.”

Social worker in a West Midlands safeguarding team, 25 cases

“Expectations and volume of work are beyond any individual social worker’s capacity. Number does not reflect the complexity of cases. I and my team are operating at harmful levels of stress. Staff are burning out, despite the emotional support from management. I feel I have no long-term future in safeguarding children.”

Social worker in a Yorkshire and Humberside safeguarding  team, 22 cases

Over three-quarters of statutory children’s social workers  in England are struggling with their caseloads, and the situation has got worse over the course of the pandemic, research suggests.

Seventy nine per cent of respondents to Community Care’s annual caseloads survey, carried out last month, said their caseloads were either “completely unmanageable” (23%) or “hard to manage” (56%). This is up from 72% in our poll last year, carried out on the eve of the pandemic. Just over 800 children’s practitioners responded to the 2021 survey, all of whom work for English local authorities or children’s services trusts

Just 4% of practitioners perceived their work as “comfortably manageable”, while 18% said it was “mostly manageable”.

‘Harmful levels of stress’

One safeguarding social worker in Yorkshire and Humberside, who said their caseload was completely unmanageable, said: “Expectations and volume of work are beyond any individual social worker’s capacity. Number does not reflect the complexity of cases. I and my team are operating at harmful levels of stress. Staff are burning out, despite the emotional support from management. I feel I have no long-term future in safeguarding children.”

Among those who classed their cases as hard to manage, one senior social worker in the South East said: “I’m meant to be on leave this week. However, I worked a full day yesterday, two hours today and need to work another full day before Monday to complete paperwork. I’m looking at leaving social work in the very near future.”

The results add to a growing body of evidence of the impact of the pandemic on social workers. A recently published survey found that UK practitioners’ wellbeing had declined between the summer and autumn of 2020, and a separate Community Care poll found three-quarters of social workers in England felt worse about their working life last November compared to the previous year.

Average caseload figure well above DfE estimate

In our latest survey, the average caseload figure for full-time case-holding practitioners was 23.9, compared with 24.4 last year, but well above the 16.3 given last month by the Department for Education as the average for full-time equivalent children’s social workers in England, as of September 2020.

This number – which is calculated based on the number of cases divided by the number of caseholding social workers – has fallen year-on-year since the DfE first published the figure in 2017, when it was 17.8.

As in previous years, the DfE statistic was widely questioned by children’s social workers, who said their workload was much higher.

Unsurprisingly, social workers on the assessed and supported year in employment (ASYE), who are supposed to have at least 10% of their time protected for learning, had lower caseloads on average (19.6) than more experienced social workers (24.7). However, the latter group only had marginally higher caseloads than senior social workers (24.2), despite the latter often having responsibility for supervision.

Among teams, cases were highest on average among referral and assessment teams (26.3), with practitioners in safeguarding teams holding 23.6  cases on average and those in children in care teams 20.7.

‘Children don’t want tired social workers’

British Association of Social Workers professional officer Gavin Moorghen said: “Children and families don’t want tired social workers, they don’t want social workers who are burnt out. But that’s the position that they’re being put in and, with the best will in the world, too much pressure means that, long-term, you’re not going to get the best outcomes for children and families and that’s where our concerns lie.”

Unison’s national officer for local government, Gill Archer, said: “Social workers are being pushed to the brink of exhaustion. The pandemic has put significant strain on a sector that is already suffering from years of under-investment.

“Demand for services has soared over lockdown, while coronavirus has meant more staff have had to take time off sick or to isolate. This means that those who are able to work face an unbearable caseload.

“The sector needs urgent funding from the government, or many staff will find it too difficult to continue in their roles.”

‘We are facing a crisis’

Social Workers Union general secretary John MacGowan raised similar concerns, saying: “Positive working environments are necessary for social workers’ psychological and physical welfare and to keep social workers in posts.

He added. “If the stated increase in caseloads is not addressed then we will be facing a crisis; impacting on the loss of skilled, well trained and necessary staff who impact daily on our lives from the work social workers do covering all ages and backgrounds.  The government needs to listen to this.

From an employers’ perspective, Association of Directors of Children’s Services vice president Charlotte Ramsden said the results gave “cause for concern”.

“If social workers feel overwhelmed by their work this will have a knock-on effect on their mental health and wellbeing as well as on their work with children and families, so there are some important messages for local authorities and national government to take away from this survey,” she added.

“We are now seeing greater complexity of need being presented by children and families and this is likely to have been exacerbated at a time when members of staff have fallen ill or needed to self-isolate due to Covid-19.

‘No magic number for cases’

“There is no ‘magic’ number of children or families in a caseload and social care cases will vary in complexity. While it is obviously preferable for social workers to have smaller caseloads, enabling them to work more intensively with children and families, a range of factors need to be considered during the allocation process from complexity, risk and the experience of the social worker.”

Yvette Stanley, Ofsted national director for regulation and social care, said it was “obviously concerning that many social workers say they have unmanageable caseloads”.”

“We know that higher caseloads are a common challenge for local authorities, but many are making significant efforts to decrease them by investing in social workers, their practice and the support services children and families need.

“This leads to an environment of high challenge, high support, where social workers are able to do their best work and where managers and leaders have a clear line of sight on practice and the risks to children, which are being managed in the community.”

The children’s social care review cannot assume additional government funding to implement its recommendations, a contract, signed between review head Josh MacAlister and the Department for Education, has shown.

The document, published this week, said that while extra funding from the review was not out of the question, it would have to be based on a very strong case and matched by savings elsewhere in government over a period of time.

The news has caused significant concern given the pressure on local authority budgets since 2010, exacerbated by Covid-19, and the belief that the review needs to herald significantly greater in children’s social care to succeed.

Recommendations ‘must be affordable’

The contract, which also revealed that MacAlister would be paid just over £140,000 for leading the review from 1 March 2021 to 31 March 2022, said he would need to ensure that the recommendations were “affordable” to government.

It said that the Department for Education (DfE) could not “assume any additional expenditure funding from the [Treasury] to meet the [review’s] recommendations” and that for any recommendations that do involve additional expenditure, the DfE must demonstrate a “robust and detailed evidence base”, and how this will be offset by savings elsewhere in government and over what time period.

The contract also said that the DfE must share with the Treasury early findings from the review to inform its bid for this year’s government spending review, which will set public spending limits for the next few years.

Carolyne Willow, director of children’s rights charity Article 39, said that “we can now see [MacAlister] is tied into a legal contract which says there is no new funding for children’s social care. Any extra resources for children and families which may come out of this review have to offset by savings from other public services, which are already on their knees.”

‘Inconceivable’ additional funds won’t be needed

She added: “It is inconceivable that ideas and proposals would not require public funds, just as any once-in-a-generation review of the NHS or education would inevitably point towards additional resources.”

Association of Directors of Children’s Services (ADCS) president Jenny Coles said: “Local government budgets have been reduced by 50% since 2010 and recent ADCS research shows that £800 million is needed in one year to close the budget gap just to ‘stay still’. If we are to improve the outcomes of children and young people we must have the necessary funding to achieve this.”

 Judith Blake, chair of the Local Government Association’s children and young people board, said: “The independent review of children’s social care is an important opportunity to make sure that services are working as well as possible to support children and their families, making sure that every child has the safety, stability and love that they need to thrive. There are many lessons we can learn from those with lived experience of the system, and about how we can best provide the support people need.

“But this will fail to make the changes children deserve if funding is not available to implement those lessons. There is only so much services can do in the face of falling funding and increasing need, and transforming services in itself costs money.

“However, the driving force for investment must always be unashamedly about outcomes for children. With a growing child population and increasing need among children and families that has been exacerbated by the pandemic, we strongly believe that additional funding will be needed to ensure this review has the positive impact that the government intends.”

Biggest costs ‘paid by children and families’

Responding to the concerns on Twitter, MacAlister said: “Doesn’t the contract show that the review cannot secure extra government funding? No. It says that I “cannot assume any additional funding” but goes on to acknowledge that I can recommend new funding and that I’d need to make a case for it. The biggest cost of children’s social care failing is the human cost paid by children and families.

“Beyond the £10bn+ spent within the children’s social care system there are £bns more spent as a result of poor outcomes. The review therefore needs to show the whole cost to the country when we fail children and young people and show how money can be better spent getting things right for children and families.”

Guy Oscroft, an agency social worker in the assessment and safeguarding team at Darlington council, died on 15 January 2021 after contracting Covid-19.

His death follows that of 36 other social workers from the disease in 2020.

Oscroft qualified as a social worker in 2000 from the University of Central Lancashire and worked in several positions, including in children and families teams at Stranraer, Dumfries and Galloway. He then went on to become an agency worker and worked across the country.

Following a call we made for social workers to share memories of and reflections on practitioners who had died from Covid, his colleagues responded with the following tributes…