OFSTED has released a new report highlighting how the pandemic has worsened the staffing challenges in children’s social care. Keep reading to learn about the impacts and how Imperium Solutions can contribute to aiding local authorities with these staffing struggles.
The report draws on data that OFSTED has collected from inspections, focus groups and interviews. This data has revealed that the pandemic has put increased pressure on the already struggling children’s social work sector due to many reasons. These reasons include professionals not being able to identify children at risk of harm because of school closures, which led to delays in children receiving the help they needed. Also, there is still limited access to services such as therapeutic and respite services for disabled children, which results in families and children still being left without the support that they require.
Additionally, children and young people experienced deterioration of their mental health during the pandemic, which has resulted in an increase in complex cases and needs. Furthermore, many relationships between care leavers and their care workers have been disrupted as a result of the restrictions from the pandemic. Overall, these issues and the backlog of cases are having serious consequences on vulnerable children as their vital needs are not being met.
Collectively, the pandemic has also put lots of pressure on social workers by increasing their workload and hours as well as reduced work-life balance and mental health, resulting in continuous recruitment and retention issues. With covid infections on the rise once more, continued staff absence will only exacerbate this issue.
The implementation of managed services could be a solution to the issue; introducing specialist teams whose sole focus is to take the pressure off existing staff will help to improve retention and morale, as well as clear case backlogs.
Our project-based solutions help ease the pressure on social work staff and improve retention by providing a managed service. From our initial scoping call, our team can clearly identify points of improvement at the local authority and build a bespoke solution based on our assessment. From that point, we provide a social work team, alongside additional managers and coordinators who aid the LA in fulfilling its objectives quickly and efficiently. Examples of some of these management members can be found below:
A Head of Practice, who acts as a direct liaison between the Delivery Support Team, helping with the setup and mobilisation of the team and being a regular point of contact with the Team Manager(s).
A Project Coordinator will also be on hand to provide social workers with continued professional and personal support that they need throughout their placement on a 1-to-1 basis.
A Business Support officer, who takes care of all admin duties in a timely manner; such as legacy reporting and case tracking.
A Team Manager, who will directly support and supervise the QSW’s as well as being key in the allocation of cases, breaking the team down into targeted areas across CIN/CP/PLO allowing for maximum allocation and workflow.
The structure of our team is just the beginning, we also make sure to introduce capped individual caseloads, a tactic that has proved effective in previous implementation across local authorities in the UK. By limiting the number of complex caseloads per social worker, this helps to provide the capacity to hold additional cases, which provided some much-needed respite to other teams in the Locality Service.
An example of our previous implementation is Bradford Council, who were in need of additional capacity in order to build resilience across the service, stabilise staff numbers and provide continuity for vulnerable children and young people. In response, Imperium Solutions developed a standalone locality service to support the increased demand. This consisted of 1 Service Manager, 3 Team Managers and 18 Level 3 Social Workers. As well as this, we proposed a new and improved model of working which involved engaging temporary workers on a 12-month fixed term contract to provide stability. Consequently, Bradford Council saw an increase in the quality of work, throughput of cases and team morale as well as a significant reduction in the turnover of social work staff, which all contributes to reducing the negative impacts that the pandemic caused on the children’s social work sector. Read more about our work with Bradford Council here.
If you are a local authority in need of a children’s social work staffing solution, we can scope out a proposal for you based on your goals, values, and immediate needs, along with a full plan of what we hope to achieve in the time frame agreed. For more information, click here and to book in a call with someone from the team, click here.
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