Question to the Department for Education:

To ask the Secretary of State for Education, what steps he plans to take to help ensure that children's social workers have appropriate and manageable caseloads.

Local authorities are responsible for the recruitment and deployment of social workers in a way that effectively meets their local needs. The right caseload for an individual social worker will depend on their role, and the nature of the cases. Ofsted inspects children’s services to ensure consistent, high quality decision making.

Strong leadership in children’s social care is essential for creating the right environment for social workers to support and protect children, including ensuring they have appropriate and manageable caseloads.

Through our professional development programmes, the department supports leaders in social work to continue to develop the knowledge and skills needed to provide the best possible services for children and families.

For example, 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 are also supporting local authorities with the recruitment and retention of social workers through our investment in the fast-track programmes Frontline and Step Up to Social Work, as well as through our professional development programmes.

The number of child and family social workers has increased by over 10% since 2017. As at 30 September 2020, local authorities reported that the average child and family social worker caseload across England was 16.3 down from 17.8 in 2017.