A 'culture change' is needed by social work employers to tackle high vacancy rates, says BASW chief exec
Published by Professional Social Work magazine, 21 March, 2023
A “culture change” is needed among organisations that employ social workers to address the profession’s recruitment and retention crisis, BASW’s chief executive has said.
Ruth Allen was speaking in the wake of data showing the extent of workforce problems across the UK, plus concerns expressed by social workers about working conditions.
Latest figures from the Department for Education show more social workers left children’s services in England in 2022 than joined the profession, and vacancy rates are at a record high of one in five.
Respondents to BASW’s annual survey have cited recruitment and retention as the second biggest challenge facing the profession, behind lack of resources. More than three quarters say they are unable to complete their work during their contracted hours.
A recent survey by BASW Northern Ireland and the Northern Ireland Social Care Council found three-quarters of workers feel bogged down by excessive admin.
And regulator Social Work England has this week called for a National Workforce Strategy.
Speaking at a webinar to launch BASW’s annual survey this week, Dr Allen said: “This is a UK-wide phenomenon.
“I think key to this is a need for culture change. There is something fundamental about employers understanding what it means to be a professional social worker with a set of regulatory standards, professional ethics, expectations on oneself to be able to do a good job, and then to be trying to do it in an environment where those things are not fully valued, or are not enabled.
“That becomes an intolerable situation for some people. Many people work with that and develop ways to work around it.
“But as a professional association, we need to enable social workers to feel connected to the bigger sense of being a professional - that they have a right to decent working conditions, that we can work with them and their employers to create some of those better working conditions.”
BASW council director Annie Ho highlighted common themes coming through from social workers contacting BASW’s coaching Professional Support Service.
She said: “They say they love their work, they have a strong belief in the fundamental values of the profession. But that makes the dissonance and the struggle and the challenge even harder, because a lot of them don't believe the wider organisation and its structures actually substantiate those really fundamental values.
“We hear in coaching a lot about social workers wanting to continue because of what they believe in, and why they entered the profession in the first place. And yet they increasingly feel they're almost sacrificing their own wellbeing and it comes to a point where the cost is simply too high.”
The government has pledged to address the recruitment crisis within children’s social care in England. It plans to recruit 500 children and family social work apprentices and create a national virtual hub with resources on how to improve working conditions.
It is also consulting on proposals to reduce reliance on agency workers and is planning to create a new Early Career framework to improve retention of newly qualified social workers.