Social work recruitment and retention

Despite well-documented pressures, there are positive
developments in child and family social work in England. The
current refocusing of professional practice on direct work with
children and families has been widely welcomed, is endorsed
by research and (for reasons explored below) is likely to impact
positively on staff retention. Professional structures generated
through social work reform are widely felt to be contributing
to a higher quality of newly qualified staff entering the
profession. If these workers are to develop into the experienced
practitioners that are currently in such short supply, employers
need to build the organisational cultures required to support,
retain and reward workers to stay in this emotionally and
intellectually challenging profession.
The sustained rise in referral rates and reduction in public
sector resources since 2009 create huge workload issues
for children’s social care. We know that recruitment and
retention are strongly influenced by organisational practice.
In a competitive market there is a good deal that managers
can do to maximise their chances of recruiting and
maintaining a stable and healthy workforce.
This briefing aims to:
Provide an overview of pertinent research about the factors
that influence workers’ decisions to leave or to remain
within an organisation.
Introduce tools to assess and monitor ‘workforce health’
- an essential step in understanding where an organisation
needs to focus its recruitment and retention efforts.
Provide examples of national and local initiatives in
workforce development and planning.
Research on staff retention
The average working life for social workers is under eight
years, compared to 16 for a nurse and 25 for a doctor
(Curtis et al, 2010). Data from other countries show average
length of employment for child welfare workers of one to
three years (Baginsky, 2013) 3 . Clearly this represents a low
return on the investment in training and real challenges for
building and retaining professional expertise.
The strongest single predictor of actual turnover is intention
to leave. The most accurate predictors of intention to leave
are: organisational commitment, professional commitment,
burnout and job satisfaction (Mor Barak et al, 2001; cited in
Baginsky, 2013).
Experienced social workers leaving the profession impacts
on the quality of services since it is through experience that
workers develop the expert knowledge and analytical skills
that are vital elements of complex child protection work
(Ericsson et al, 1993). Definitions of ‘experience’ are not
about years of service per se. In Baginsky’s (2013) research
for the DfE, informants identified the following qualities:
depth and breadth of experience; an excellent understanding
of social work theory and messages from research; personal
and interpersonal skills, and professional humility based on
deeper feelings of competence and confidence.
Since new practitioners learn through interaction and
peer support, a shortage of experienced staff reduces the
quality of the ‘community of practice’ for those entering the
profession. A lack of skilled workers reduces service users’
and other agencies’ confidence in social workers (Buckley,
2008; cited in Baginsky, 2013) and the gaps left by those who
leave cause additional pressure for remaining workers.
Continuity of relationships for service-users is
compromised by high staff turnover. This instability cuts
through the core of relationship-based practice and is
likely to exacerbate the issues children and young people
face. Research shows qualitative differences between the
case work carried out by experienced and novice workers
(Forrester, 2000) and there is a strong correlation between
children achieving permanency and turnover rates amongst
their caseworkers (Baginsky, 2013).
High thresholds for referral mean that the nature of social
work with children and young people is increasingly
complex and focused on the most complex child protection,
often with children and young people who have experienced
trauma from their earliest years (Caw and Sebba, 2014).
Inducting NQSWs into this context requires mentoring,
supervision and collaborative and co-working approaches.
Use of agency staff is hard to avoid when trying to recruit
experienced staff but can further destabilise teams, since
agency workers have the apparent flexibility to leave difficult
situations. Those workers who remain can become more
unsettled and may look to leave themselves, sometimes then
reappearing as either agency workers or as self-employed
with the commensurate risk to employers of breach of HMRC
IR35 compliance. Recent research into why social workers in
adult services ‘go agency’ found flexibility to be a key issue,
alongside ‘the debilitating effect of office politics and the
influence and perceptions of inadequate managers and to
restricted opportunities [for direct work] (Cornes et al, 2013;
cited in Baginsky, 2013).
3
The DfE’s Children’s Social Work Workforce statistical return commenced in
2013 and will start to provide sector specific data on turnover and vacancy
rates not currently available.
www.rip.org.uk
3