In late January, unions lodged a claim for a £3,000 pay rise for local government and school support staff in England, Wales and Northern Ireland for 2025-26.

UNISON, the GMB and Unite said council workers were “overdue” a significant pay rise, having previously “missed out on the higher wage settlements” awarded to other public sector staff, such as NHS workers.

‘We deserve compensation’

But what do social workers think of the 2025-26 pay claim?

Out of 1,839 respondents in a Community Care poll, the majority (63%) said the pay rise was “the least” they deserved “to compensate for years of pay cuts”.

Of the rest, 18% believed it was “a recipe for protracted pay talks that would achieve very little”, a reference to the experience of the last two years when unions have settled for employers’ initial offer after several months of negotiations.

Meanwhile, 19% said the £3,000 claim would be “good in an ideal world”, but was “unrealistic”.

Discussions in the article’s comment section revealed divided opinions: some doubted unions’ ability to deliver, while others argued it was up to members to take action to achieve a decent increase.

‘Having three unions is counter-productive’

One reader said it was “counterproductive” for staff to be represented by three separate unions.

“They can’t agree, and by the time they ballot people, half the year has passed,” they said.

“I have voted to strike every single time, but the process drags on so long that it plays into the hands of the employer.”

Glen echoed this view, calling for a union specifically for children’s and adults’ services.

“The three public sector unions are too big with too many members from disparate roles and services,” he said. “Until there is a union dealing solely with adults’ and children’s services, nothing can or will change.”

‘Ineffective pay negotiations’

Others criticised unions’ negotiating processes.

“As usual, pointless ballots will be sent out at significant cost to the members and all for the initial offer to be accepted,” said Simone Davis.

“Meanwhile, the value of the pay rise [will be] reduced in value in the several months since it was offered due to inflation.”

Another practitioner, James, attributed this to a lack of strategy and leadership in managing negotiations.

“The unions serve a general purpose and that’s not to be entirely dismissed but anyone arguing that their pay negotiations are effective is living on another planet,” added Johnny Ross.

He added it would be another year in which the unions accepted employers’ initial offer “without negotiating any changes at all”.

‘Social workers don’t use their vote’

Photo: New Africa/Adobe Stock

However, a number of social workers argued that union strength depended on active members.

“The unions are only as good as [their] members and if we don’t vote for strike action then their hands are tied and they have less power to negotiate,” said Cath Howard.

“We would have even worse conditions and pay if not for the unions. They play an important role – don’t underestimate that.”

Jason said that while social workers are dedicated to their roles, they aren’t very active as union members.

“We don’t use our vote, ignore the ballot, then get [angry] that what we think we are entitled to and deserve isn’t given to us. We then blame the union, our employers, and the government rather than take responsibility for the outcome. This is just a fact. It may be uncomfortable, but it is.”

Abdul added: “Change can start with social workers owning their part rather than blaming [the union]. I’d warrant in any given team 95% don’t know who their shop steward is and 99% have never attended a union meeting.”

‘Give unions a strong mandate’

Sam argued that members who were not active and non-members had lost “the privilege” to comment on this year’s pay claim.

“If social workers can’t be bothered to vote on the ballot then of course union negotiators are going to be hamstrung. Give them a strong mandate and if they fail on that, then legitimately criticise them,” he added.

“Moaning from the sidelines is the disease that is rotting social work and not just on this issue.”

Alison Johnson, who some years ago went on a strike for pay, said she was discouraged by the low turnout.

“Most of my team […] did not want to lose a day’s pay. It was frustrating but, as a result, I would be reluctant to take action again, because there is no collective will for it. There is now a minority in my team even in a union.”

Councils unable to meet pay demands

One practitioner, Doris, said councils wouldn’t be able to meet pay demands, so she would accept whichever offer was put forward.

“A decent pay rise that we all deserve would bankrupt most, if not all, councils. Because of this, we are in a terrible negotiating position. 

“The general public isn’t really that bothered if we go on strike. Maybe refuse collection but certainly not social work. [We aren’t] visible. Because of this, I will be voting to accept the first offer put forward at the first opportunity.”

What are your thoughts on the 2025-26 pay negotiations?

Celebrate those who’ve inspired you

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Do you have a colleague, mentor, or social work figure you can’t help but gush about?

Our My Brilliant Colleague series invites you to celebrate anyone within social work who has inspired you – whether current or former colleagues, managers, students, lecturers, mentors or prominent past or present sector figures whom you have admired from afar.

Nominate your colleague or social work inspiration by filling in our nominations form with a few paragraphs (100-250 words) explaining how and why the person has inspired you.

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If you have any questions, email our community journalist, Anastasia Koutsounia, at anastasia.koutsounia@markallengroup.com

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Unions have lodged their pay claim for local government and school support staff in England, Wales and Northern Ireland for 2025-26.

UNISON, the GMB and Unite have called for a £3,000 rise for all staff, on the grounds that council workers are “overdue” a significant increase in salary, having “missed out” on more generous settlements given to other public sector workers last year.

In 2024-25, council staff were given an increase of £1,290 or 2.5%, whichever was higher, with slightly higher amounts given to those working in the capital to cover London weighting.

Less generous pay deal for council staff

This was worth 3-4% for most social workers, significantly less than the 5.5% received by their counterparts in the NHS and also below the 4.43% settlement for practitioners working for Cafcass.

Besides the headline increase, the unions’ claim also includes establishing a £15 an hour minimum wage for the sector, compared with £12.26 currently, increasing annual leave by one day and cutting the working week by two hours.

“Services provided by council and school workers are vital for communities to thrive,” said UNISON’s head of local government, Mike Short. “But wages have remained low, and without decent pay, staff feel undervalued and are looking for better-paid work elsewhere. A proper pay offer is essential.”

‘Low pay, cuts and workload increases’

GMB national officer Sharon Wilde said its members were experiencing “low pay, funding cuts and increasing workloads”, while Unite counterpart Clare Keogh said local government employers needed to “recognise that there is growing anger among workers, especially the lowest paid, about the way they are treated year after year”.

Pay negotiations are conducted through the National Joint Council for Local Government Services, which includes representation from the unions and employers, and whose decisions cover most, but not all councils, in England, Wales and Northern Ireland.

Employer leaders will consult councils will on the unions’ 2025 pay claims at online regional pay briefings during February and March, the Local Government Association (LGA) has said.

Offer likely to be far below claim

Employers will then make an offer to staff. This will likely be far below the unions’ claim, in the context of the significant pressures facing councils in 2025-26, including those arising from the government’s increase in national insurance contributions for employers.

Meanwhile, the government has budgeted for pay increases of 2.8% across the NHS and other parts of the public sector, with these now being considered by independent pay review bodies.

Unions have lodged their claims for an increase in pay for local government staff in Scotland this year.

UNISON has called for a 6.5% rise in 2025-26, while the GMB and Unite have jointly urged an increase of £1 per hour, or 6.5%, whichever is greater, along with more annual leave for staff.

The proposed rises are comfortably above the rate of inflation, which was 2.5% in the year to December 2024, according to the government’s preferred consumer prices index (CPI) measure (source: Office for National Statistics). The CPIH measure, which, unlike CPI, includes the housing costs of owner occupiers, was 3.5% as of last month.

‘Severe erosion of pay’

However, UNISON said an above-inflation deal was necessary to address “the severe erosion of pay” in local government in Scotland in recent years and ensure staff were fairly compensated.

It also said this year’s pay settlement needed to address “growing recruitment and retention problems across councils”, claiming that staff were “increasingly compelled to leave, and vacancies [were] becoming harder to fill” because of the “declining value of pay”.

Council pay in Scotland is negotiated through the Scottish Joint Council for Local Government Employees (SJC), which comprises representatives from the three unions, the 32 councils and employers’ body COSLA.

2024-25 pay rise

In 2024-25, staff were given a rise of 3.6% or 67p per hour – whichever was higher – after COSLA increased its initial offer with the help of a cash injection from the Scottish Government. This was above the CPI inflation rate (2.3%) at the time of the settlement.

Though the deal was accepted by Unite and the GMB – enabling COSLA to implement it – it was initially rejected by UNISON, which took strike action in schools in protest, before finally agreeing to the settlement.

Unite and GMB said their priority for the deal was moving towards the objective – shared by COSLA – of achieving a £15 an hour minimum wage in Scottish local government, up from the current £12.56. That explains why it included a flat-rate element to its claim – the proposed rise of £1 an hour – which would benefit the lowest paid.

Scottish Government budget settlement

According to the Scottish Government, annual revenue funding for local authorities in Scotland is due to rise by about £1bn, to £15bn, in 2025-26. Of this, £289m of the increase being available to authorities to spend on meeting local needs, and the rest committed to particular services or schemes.

COSLA said the budget was “step in the right direction” but warned that it “may not be enough to reverse planned cuts to vital services”.

In relation to pay, COSLA said that a 1% increase in pay would cost councils £125m in 2025-26, with a 3% rise – less than half of what the unions are claiming – wiping out the £289m in increased resource.

Social work and social care staff shortages

It also said the budget did not “provide sufficient funding to improve social care and social work capacity”, and enable councils and providers to “attract and retain a skilled and supported workforce”.

This was in the context of 97% of authorities having reported social care staffing shortages and 90% social worker shortages in a 2023 survey carried out by the Society of Personnel and Development Scotland and council leadership body Solace.

COSLA told Community Care that the SJC would meet later in January and in February to discuss the unions’ pay claims and councils’ budgetary position. Over the same period, Scottish council leaders would meet to agree their negotiating position.

“We have still to receive pay claims from some of our unions within our chief officials and teaching negotiation groups. In addition, at this time of year, council budgets are still being worked on and finalised,” a COSLA spokesperson added.

Almost a quarter of social workers in Wales are finding it difficult to manage financially, with most practitioners having seen their financial position worsen since 2023, a survey has found.

Just over a third of practitioners were dissatisfied by their pay, found the research commissioned by regulator Social Care Wales, answered by 5,024 members of the country’s social care workforce, including 838 social workers, in February this year.

However, compared with a similar survey carried out in March-April 2023, greater proportions of social workers reported higher morale, that their services were appropriately staffed and that they felt valued by managers, colleagues and those they supported.

The Have Your Say survey, whose results were published last week, was designed to capture what it was like to work in social care in Wales. It was carried out by researchers from Buckinghamshire New and Bath Spa universities, and from the British Association of Social Workers (BASW).

Quarter of social workers struggling financially

It found 23% of social workers were finding it very or quite difficult to manage financially, up from 20% in 2023, while 62% said they were finding it slightly or a lot more difficult to cope financially than a year earlier.

This is despite the annual rate of inflation having come down from 10.1% in the year to March 2023 to 3.4% in the 12 months to February 2024. In the meantime, social workers employed by Welsh councils received a pay increase of £1,925 for 2023-24, which was worth between 4% and 6% for most practitioners.

In relation to pay, 37% of social workers said were fairly or very dissatisfied with their pay, with a higher rate of dissatisfaction, 41%, among children’s practitioners.

Improved workplace satisfaction

However, this marked a fall from 47% being dissatisfied with their pay in 2023, one of a number of areas in which social workers demonstrated greater satisfaction with their roles in 2024.

Most significantly, 70% said they always or mostly had positive morale, up from 38% in 2023. In addition:

• 72% said they had good management support, up from 69% in 2023, while 74% felt valued by their managers, up from 68%.
• Though there was a fall, from 86% to 81%, in the share of social workers who reported always or mostly having good peer support, the proportion who felt valued by their colleagues rose from 78% to 85%.
• Just under three-quarters (74%) felt valued by individuals or families, up from 64% in 2023, and while only 35% felt valued by the public, this was up from 20% the year before.
• Under half (48%) of social worker respondents said they always or mostly had appropriate staffing, but this was an increase on the 34% who reported this in 2023.

In relation to retention, 23% of practitioners said they were considering leaving social work and anticipated spending a further 17 months in the sector. This compares with one in five (21%) social workers saying they were very or quite likely to leave the social care sector within the next year in 2023, when the equivalent question was phrased differently.

Rates of bullying and discrimination

Despite the positives, 11% of social workers said they had been bullied by their managers in the past year, with the same proportion reporting discrimination from managers. This was higher than the rates for all respondents to the survey, which was 8% in each case. Four per cent of social workers reported harassment from managers, in line with the rate for respondents in general.

Social workers were less likely to have been bullied (6%), discriminated against (4%) or harassed (2%) by colleagues than respondents in general, but were more likely to have faced these issues from individuals or families.

Notably, 12% of social workers said they had faced harassment from individuals or families, compared with 7% of all respondents, while 8% reported bullying and 6% discrimination.

The government will collect data on social workers’ salaries in its annual census of the local authority children’s services workforce in England.

Councils will be required to submit figures on each permanently employed practitioner’s base annual salary in next year’s census, for the 12 months ending 30 September 2025, according to guidance published this week by the Department for Education.

They will also have to provide information on whether they offer some or all of their social workers recruitment bonuses, retention payments, relocation packages, performance rewards, car allowances or regional weighting, or cover their Social Work England or Disclosure and Barring Service fees.

Councils may also supply data on recruitment and retention payments and additional top-ups to salary that they pay to individual social workers, though this is not mandatory.

The 2025 census will also see the removal of the voluntary collection of the institution social workers qualified through and local authorities’ assessment of their status against the DfE’s knowledge and skills statements – as a newly qualified or frontline practitioner, practice supervisor or practice leader.

The changes will not apply to the forthcoming census for September 2024, which will have the same dataset as the 2023 collection.

The DfE said collecting salary information would provide it with data to analyse the social worker labour market and assess the costs and benefits of the programmes it funds, while also supporting the public sector equality duty. This requires public bodies to promote equal opportunities for people with protected characteristics.

It is not clear how the DfE will report the salary information in its annual census report.

Data is already produced on the salaries of social workers in local authority adults’ services, through Skills for Care’s annual report on adult social care staff working for councils.

The latest figures showed that the real value of adult social workers’ wages has fallen progressively over time, with the average full-time equivalent pay in September 2023, £41,500, worth 7.2% less than the average in 2016.

Social workers have resumed strike action after a two-week pause, as their dispute with their local authority remains unresolved.

The nine independent reviewing officers (IROs), child protection conference chairs and local authority designated officers (LADOs) from Swindon council returned to the picket line for two days this week.

They have also started a work to rule, under which they are refusing to carry out management-level tasks.

Pay gap with team managers

The social workers are in dispute with Swindon over the impact of a pay and grading review. According to their union, the GMB, this led to a pay gap of about £6,000 between them and team managers at the authority, with whom they had previously been on the same grade and pay rates.

The practitioners initially walked out for two days last month and then the GMB paused the action, requesting talks mediated by employment relations body ACAS, it said.

“We put this to the council in the hope that they would be as keen as we are to see this issue resolved, however they made it abundantly clear that they will not meet with GMB to find a way through the issues,” said GMB branch secretary Andy Newman.

However, this was rejected by the authority.

Council rejects union’s charge that it is rejecting talks

A Swindon Borough Council spokesman said: “We are disappointed we have not been able to come to an agreement with the GMB, but any suggestion that we do not want to meet with the union on this issue is just not true. We have been trying really hard to build a constructive relationship with the union and the local rep’s comments simply don’t reflect the reality of the situation.

“Our door is always open and we very much hope the GMB continues to talk to us, rather than to the media, so we can bring this matter to a satisfactory conclusion for our valued staff.

“We remain committed to supporting our workforce and have taken steps to minimise any disruption to service users during the current strike action.”

Two other groups of social workers represented by the GMB remain in dispute with the council about issues relating to the pay and grading review, having also taken strike action in recent months.

Two other social worker pay disputes

Emergency duty service staff took action over the removal of a payment from staff worth £8,400 annually for working unsocial hours.

The council has said that other changes it is making would leave EDS staff about £3,000 a year better off; however, the GMB has claimed that these are not guaranteed – a view Swindon rejects.

The other group is assistant team managers (ATMs), for whom the average gap in pay with advanced social workers has narrowed as a result of the review, according to GMB. It said this meant ATMs’ additional responsibilities – including supervision and running case conferences – were not acknowledged in their salary.

There are no strike dates planned in relation to either of these two disputes, and ATMs have been voting on an offer put to them by the authority, said the GMB.