Overseas workers to be brought in to reduce reliance on agency staff

Children’s social work in the district was discussed by a Council committee last week, with members hearing that instability in the workforce and reliance on temporary staff was harming improvement plans.

The Children’s Services Scrutiny Committee were told that social workers from Africa and India will be among the first cohort of international workers coming to Bradford within the next month.

It follows years of Bradford struggling to recruit qualified social workers.

Bradford Council’s latest financial figures show that the authority is paying £2.1m per month to employ agency staff. There are around 208 agency staff employed as children’s social workers, and the financial report says: “There are currently the highest number of agency social workers that there has ever been.”

Since Bradford Council’s Children’s Services was judged Inadequate by Ofsted in 2018, the issue of churn of social work staff and a reliance on agency social workers has been raised as one of the main issues facing the Council.

As well as costing the taxpayer huge amounts of money, it also means vulnerable young people have no consistency when dealing with social workers.

Bradford Council recently commissioned an independent audit of Children’s Social Work. It was this report that the scrutiny committee discussed at a meeting on Wednesday.

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A report to members said: “The findings of our own audit activity mirrors the outcomes from our various Ofsted monitoring visits in that there is evidence of some good practice identified but that this is not consistent across the service.

“Key areas for continued improvement identified by audits include the quality of assessments, quality of children’s plans, impact of drift and delay (due to changes in the workforce) and quality of supervision.

“Audits have confirmed that changes in social worker can impact the quality and in particular the timeliness of intervention.

“The stability of the workforce is a high-focus area for children’s social care and in particular the recruitment of experienced social workers.

“This is a challenge for all Local Authorities given the number of experienced workers who move into management or specialist posts, or who choose to work for an employment agency. These workers are in short supply and there is a great deal of regional competition.”

Chair of the Committee Councillor Geoff Winnard (Cons, Bingley) said: “Clearly the instability in the workforce makes it more difficult to improve – I understand that, but when will we know when the level of consistency we are aspiring to has been met?”

Niall Devlin, a Children’s Service Manager, said the management side of the department was more consistent, and added: “We still have a lot of agency staff, there is a way to go before we have proper stability in the workforce. But we look to see progress in the next five to six months – there will be hopefully a number of things that stabilise the workforce.”

He said the establishment of the Children’s Trust in April that will take over Bradford Council from running Children’s Services should create more stability.

He told members the quick turnover of social work staff had big issues for how effectively children could be supported.

He said: “It can be difficult for new workers to pick up on where an old worker left off. Children will lose faith if they have to keep telling their story. If the workforce keeps turning over families might think ‘why should we engage if they’re not going to stay around.’”

When asked what was being done to bring more social workers to Bradford, officers said the Council was recruiting workers from overseas, and had set up an academy to upskill Council staff.

Over 20 social workers had passed through the academy in the year since it was set up – members were told.

Referring to the overseas recruitment, Picklu Roychoudhury, Assistant Director for Improvement, said the first international cohort of social workers were due to start working in Bradford in the coming months.

He added: “There will be 40 starting over the next three to four months. The first cohort will arrive in February.”

When asked where the international social workers will be coming from, he said many were from Africa, the Caribbean and India.

He said efforts have also been made to recruit social workers from Europe.