Question to the Department for Education:

To ask the Secretary of State for Education, what steps she is taking to encourage the retention of social workers in that profession.

This Government has invested over £700m in social worker training and improvement since 2010. Programmes like Step Up to Social Work, Frontline and the Assessed and Supported Year in Employment are all focussed on bringing high quality people into social work and supporting them in their first year. Early evidence suggest that this investment is paying off: the first findings from a three-year longitudinal evaluation of Step Up cohorts 1 and 2 indicate that 84% cohort 1 Step Up graduates identified in the study were still practising in child and family social work after three years (compared to 65% of all social work education graduates in 2013-14 who were employed as social workers six months after leaving their course).

As well as supporting high quality training and development of social workers, we are developing a national, practice-focused, career pathway based on the skills and knowledge that social workers should display at all levels in their career and incentivising new teaching partnership arrangements between employers and higher education institutions to improve recruitment, retention and development of social workers.