Government rules out national pay scale for children's social workers

Published by Professional Social Work magazine, 2 November, 2023

Children’s social workers in England will be supported and assessed through their first two years under a new framework setting out the skills and knowledge they must prove.

The Early Career Framework (ECF) will replace the Supported Year in Employment (ASYE) under government reforms aimed at fixing the crisis in children’s social care.

It is envisaged the framework will eventually be extended to ‘expert practitioner’ level for workers covering between three and five years.

However, the new framework will not be linked to a national pay scale, as recommended by the Independent Review of Children’s Social Care.

The government’s strategy, published today in response to the review, said: “Nationalising child and family social worker pay and removing a subsection of council employees from local government pay and conditions may be destabilising to councils without having the desired effects.

“However, we do think there is helpful action we can take to increase transparency on pay. We will work with the sector to ensure that current pay rates, job descriptions and grading reflect the challenge of the role and career progression, and we will look to improve the quality of pay data.”

Latest figures show vacancy rates among children’s social workers at English local authorities at a record high of 19 per cent, with 8.6 per cent of the workforce quitting in 2021.

The government said feedback suggests a need to better support social workers in their early years, both to retain them and prevent them having skills and knowledge gaps.

“The early career experience of social workers sets the groundwork of professional confidence and competence and can support social workers to stay in practice for longer,” it said.

“The Early Career Framework will give child and family social workers two years of consistent, high-quality support and development.”

While having national consistency, the new framework should be able to “adjust to the local realities” of individual authorities, said the government.

It plans to work with social workers and employers to develop a “rigorous, supportive and fair assessment process”.

This, it said would learn from “what did and did not work” in the scrapped National Assessment and Accreditation pilot scheme.

The government said it will also act to reduce over-reliance on agency workers by establishing new national rules and price rates on how they should be used.

To ease workload pressures on social workers, a National Workload Action Group will be set up this spring. It will be tasked with looking at removing “unnecessary workload pressures that do not lead to improved outcomes for children and families”.

A study with also be launched this spring with two local authorities examining how case recording can be streamlined.

 “This will aid development of solutions that ensure that the data gathered is of maximum benefit to all in the children’s social care system, in a way that reduces the recording burden on social workers and supports, rather than hinders, good social work,” said the government.

A separate project with two other local authorities will work with software companies to “reimagine” how information is recorded, shared and analysed.

A recommendation in the review that social work managers and leaders must do at least 100-hours of practice a year to retain accreditation was rejected by the government.

See BASW's statement on the government's implementation strategy for children's social care here