Question to the Department for Education:

To ask the Secretary of State for Education, how many social workers working with children there were in England in each year since 2010.

The numbers of children’s social workers and agency social workers employed by English local authorities each year are published in the Children’s Social Work Workforce data collection. This can be found on GOV.UK: https://www.gov.uk/government/collections/statistics-childrens-social-care-workforce

The Children’s Social Work Workforce data collection was first collected in 2013, with the collection’s third release due to be published on 25 February 2016.

The Department does not currently collect data about children’s social workers in other agency settings or private sector.

The Department does not collect data on how many people qualified to be social workers in each year.