Social Work England annual report and accounts 2024 to 2025

Social Work England is a non-departmental public body, taking a new approach to regulating social workers in their vital roles. Our sponsor department, the Department for Education, has responsibility for child and family social workers, and the Department of Health and Social Care has responsibility for adult social workers.

We have published our annual report and accounts for 2024 to 2025, marking 5 years as the regulator for social work in England. Overall, our performance for 2024 to 2025 was in line with what we set out to achieve. We met all our business plan objectives and most of our key performance indicator targets.

Some highlights from the report include:

• Our social work register remains above 100,000 social workers, with 98% (103,287) renewing their registration during the most recent renewal period. 
• New education and training standards for approved mental health professionals and best interests assessors courses have been introduced, with inspections against these standards to begin in September 2025.
• We met 17 of the 18 standards of good regulation set by the Professional Standards Authority for the period of 1 January 2024 to 31 December 2024. We continue to face challenges in achieving timely resolution of fitness to practise concerns that are referred to us. This is due to the high volume of concerns we receive from social work employers and members of the public, in comparison with the resources available to investigate these. This situation is unacceptable for us and for everyone involved. We are doing all we can to make sure our processes are efficient and to secure the necessary funding and resources over time. An uplift in our grant-in-aid in 2025 to 2026 provides an opportunity to commit more resources to improve our performance in this area.
• We reviewed options to bring some fitness to practise legal advocacy work in-house, with implementation planned for late 2025 to 2026.
• We continue to seek ways to improve people’s understanding of social work as a regulated profession. This year we began preparing for a second phase of our ‘Change the Script’ campaign, building on our earlier success in informing and educating people about the reality and role of social work.
• We worked with an external organisation to review our organisational culture and behaviours, providing an understanding of our current and desired future culture and recommendations for future leadership development.

We'll continue to work closely with social workers and everyone with an interest in this vital profession to tackle challenges and improve the way we regulate.