Response to Health Education England consultation

September 2021

We welcome the opportunity to comment on the 2021 Long-Term Strategic Framework for Health and Social Care Workforce Planning consultation.

About us

Social workers are a critical part of the health and care workforce and are instrumental in delivering person-centred support for millions of people. We are the specialist regulator for all social workers in England and our remit is to protect the public by assuring safe and effective social work practice.

We set the professional standards that social workers must meet and continue to uphold and we hold the register of nearly 100,000 professionals who are able to practise as a social worker. We investigate concerns where practice has fallen below our standards and respond proportionately and decisively to risks to the public. We also regulate courses of social work qualifying training as well as areas of specialist practice, including mental health and mental capacity.

The demands of the pandemic on the workforce over the past two years have required social workers to work in very difficult situations and under extreme pressures. The crisis arrived as the Government began to reconsider how health and social care is delivered in England and as we move through the pandemic response and return to these conversations, we must confront an ageing population with increasingly complex needs, demanding more from social workers and services.

We are keen to see explicit consideration of social workers in strategic workforce planning, appropriately recognising their importance to the overall health and care sector and acknowledging the important, unique and often statutory contribution they make. In order to support this, we are committed to sharing what we know and learn about social work and to engaging with strategic, academic and policy debates.

Consultation feedback

As the professional regulator, we have a vested interest in any work that seeks to influence the environments in which social workers practice. While not all of the HEE consultation is within our remit to comment on, we welcome the opportunity to participate in this consultation and in future conversations around the social work workforce.

Through our regulation, we hold information about the register of social workers in England and about courses of initial education and training. As of 9 September 2021, there were 98,722 registered social workers. The age profile of social workers is spread with between 11.9 and 13.4 per cent of the workforce in each age band, from 30—34 to 60 and above.

Table 1

Of all registered social workers, 89,936 (94.5%) identified themselves as British; the only other nationalities numbering greater than one per cent were Zimbabwean (1.6%) and Irish (1.1%). This suggests that the UK’s departure from the EU and the ending of free movement may be less likely to have a significant impact on the social work workforce composition, but again we are unable to offer any concrete evidence until we have been able to collect future datasets.

Our data also reveals the regional balance of social workers in local authority settings. Comparing our data to to mid-year estimates from the Office of National Statistics suggests that London, the East and the South East have proportionally more social workers per head of population compared to the other regions of England.

Table 2

As we progress through our second year of regulation, we are continuing to develop our data and insight into the social work workforce. We look forward to remaining fully engaged in conversations with HEE and our partners in regulation and social work so that we can contribute what we know about England’s social workers and their contribution to the wider health and social care workforce.

In addition to the data, we have also carried out research which we consider likely to be useful in informing the future of the workforce strategy. Perceptions of Social Work; Research among the general public and those with lived experience of social work found social work as a profession to be “…generally well regarded among the public but was not high profile in comparison with other public services. It was thought to be undervalued, under-resourced and deserving of more favourable media coverage.”

The report also found that “…there is a belief [among the public] that if there are problems in social work this is because it is under-resourced and probably struggling to recruit staff.” In relation to mitigating issues within the social work sector suggestions by members of the public included “improved training, better communication to clients, or different management approaches”.

We also published a report on the social work profession which included insights from social work students, professionals, those who have left the profession, other stakeholders involved with social care and community care organisations, as well as practice leaders and those in the voluntary sector.

The report found that “almost a quarter (24%) of social workers have low morale. For nearly half (47%), morale has not changed over the past year, but it is affected by the media.” The report also found that “The majority of current social workers report stress (85%) as a result of their job. The most common causes of stress are a high administrative workload (62%), a focus on targets rather than user issues (56%), and a high caseload (48%)”.

Resource was also reported as providing a challenge to the health and social care workforce being able to work together effectively, despite the relationships with professionals in other areas being perceived to be positive. Within the research social workers spoke of multi-agency working becoming increasingly challenging due to resources being cut.

A further focus of this research was the retention of social workers once they have entered the profession. The research found that “two-fifths (39%) of social workers expect to leave the profession within the next 5 years, with children and family social workers the most likely to plan to leave. The most common reason for people to leave social work is the high workload (39%), followed by poor health (32%) and poor work/life balance (29%).” There were some suggestions made around ways to improve retention which include “improving the public profile of social work, greater direct support to lower caseloads, and providing more training”.

The research insights we have gathered so far suggest that there are a number of factors that significantly impact the current social work workforce, including the public profile of the profession, challenges around resourcing and recruitment, and retention of staff. From the research it is reasonable to suggest that if not addressed, these factors will have a significant impact on the future social work workforce.

We are particularly interested in engaging with Health Education England and other strategic partners to identify any matter where a regulatory intervention might be needed to uphold our statutory remit. We encourage HEE and partners to bear this in mind as valuable strategic work progresses, and we welcome an ongoing and open dialogue to this end as a key part in the professional landscape.