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Loading …The number of social workers employed by council adults’ services in England has reached a new record high, official figures show.
Local authorities had 19,200 practitioners in post as of September 2024, up 700 (3.8%) on the total 12 months previously and 1,900 (11%) higher than the number in September 2022, showed Skills for Care’s annual report on the council workforce.
While the 2022-23 increase was based on rises in the numbers of both permanent and agency workers, the latest jump was entirely driven by permanent workers, whose numbers grew from 16,250 to 16,950, 88% of the total. The number of agency staff remained steady, at 1,900 (10%), with the remainder (375) being bank staff.
Alongside the rising numbers of staff, the vacancy rate for adults’ fell markedly, from 10.5% in 2022-23 to 8.8% in 2023-24, while there was a fall of a similar scale in the turnover rate, from 14.5% to 12.8%.
Impact of government cash and priorities
While the number of council adult social services staff has also increased in each of the past two years, the number of social workers has risen at a faster rate.
The rise in staffing numbers is likely to reflect an injection of government grant funding and council tax receipts into adults’ services from 2023-25. As a result, councils increased real-terms adult social care spending by 7.5% (7.5%) in 2023-24 and had budgeted to do so by 9.1% in 2024-25.
Ministers tasked councils with focusing their increased resource on a few priorities: increasing the size of the wider adult social care workforce, boosting fees for providers, reducing the number of delayed hospital discharges and cutting waiting times for services.
The latter two were dependent on authorities carrying out more assessments and arranging more packages of care, incentivising them to recruit more staff, including social workers, to carry out these functions.
Reintroduction of CQC council checks
Another possible factor in the growth of the workforce is the reintroduction of Care Quality Commission checks of local authority performance in relation to adult social care in December 2023.
Social workers, and other assessment and care management staff, are critical to councils’ performance on several of the nine quality statements authorities are judged against, such as those on assessing need and safeguarding.
However, beneath the England-wise rise in social worker numbers over the past two years were significant regional differences.
Regional differences in social work trends
The vast majority of the increase in practitioner numbers came in four of the nine English regions – the East, East Midlands, North West and South West – each of which saw their workforce grow by 400 posts from 2022-24. There was much more limited growth in the North East, South West and West Midlands, London and Yorkshire and the Humber.
The vacancy rate grew in the South West (from 13.5% to 14.5%) and East Midlands (from 13.3% to 13.8%) and was relatively unchanged in the North West (dropping from 12.1% to 11.9%). However, it fell much more sharply than the national average in Yorkshire and the Humber (from 11.8% to 3.4%) and the South East (from 14% to 7.1%).
There was relatively little change in agency worker rates across the different regions. However, the proportion of locums in London – at 29% – vastly outstripped that in the other regions, all of which had a rate that was lower than 10%, with the North East having the lowest, at 1%.
Practitioners’ (mean) average level of experience in their roles was 5.2 years in 2024, down from 5.6 years in 2022, with relatively little difference between regions.
Demographic breakdown of workforce
Meanwhile, the (mean) average age of the adult social work workforce has remained constant, at 45, with a slight increase in the proportion of women, from 82% in 2022 to 83% in 2024.
The proportion of black practitioners has also grown, from 18% in 2022 to 20% in 2024, with a corresponding drop, from 71% to 69% in the share of the workforce who were white, a trend driven by two regions, London and the West Midlands.
In the capital, the proportion of black staff reached 52% in 2024, up from 48% in 2022, whereas the share of white staff fell, from 38% to 32%; in the West Midlands, the share of black staff rose from 16% to 22%, whereas the proportion of white social workers dropped from 66% to 59%.
By contrast, in the North East, the share of white staff has remained constant, at 94%.
The proportions of staff who were Asian (7%), of mixed ethnicity (3%) or of other ethnicity (1%), has remained constant, nationally, from 2022-24.
