Question to the Department for Education:

To ask the Secretary of State for Education, what steps he plans to take to ensure stability in the social worker workforce.

The department has invested over £100 million in the last two years on the recruitment, retention and professional development of child and family social workers in England.

On average, we train over 1,100 new social workers each year through our fast-track programmes. Overall, the number of child and family social workers increased by 11.8% between 2016/17 and 2019/20.

Each year, almost 3,000 newly qualified child and family social workers are supported through the assessed and supported year in employment, ensuring they get the support they need to make the transition from initial training to child and family social work. We know this early career support is important for longer term retention.

We know there is a strong relationship between leadership, churn, agency use and Ofsted rating, therefore we are focused on improving local authority performance and investing in leadership programmes. We intervene decisively in failing local authorities and facilitate and fund sector led improvement support to drive up performance and prevent failure. At the end of March 2021, 50% of local authorities were judged Good or Outstanding at their most recent inspection, compared to 36% at the end of academic year March 2017.

This year, the department is investing £3 million in our leadership programmes, supporting more than 750 leaders across 110 local authorities. These programmes support leaders from practice supervisor level through to the Directors of Children’s Services

We recognise the challenges that local authorities are facing, including the pressure on children’s services. Therefore, we are providing local authorities with £4.8 billion of new grant funding over the Spending Review period to enable the sector to maintain vital frontline services, including children’s social care.