Social workers for West Sussex may be recruited from abroad to tackle shortage

Social workers from overseas could be recruited in West Sussex in a bid to boost staffing levels. Urgent efforts to recruit extra social workers for front-line children’s services have so far achieved only a ‘marginal’ improvement in staffing levels.

Now new measures being considered include looking for staff from overseas, it was revealed at a meeting of the children and young people’s select committee.

The recruitment drive follows an ‘inadequate’ assessment of child protection services in the county by Ofsted.

Mark Frankland, the county council’s principal manager for integrated services, said the message the council had from the Department for Children Schools and Families improvement team was that it was focussing on the right things.

But the issue was how quickly, and how the county council went about doing it.

There were problems over recruitment in both adults’ and children’s services.

“We have recruited plenty of social workers, and vacancy rates in teams not on the front line doing assessment work have improved dramatically,” he added.

But only marginal improvement had been made so far in recruiting to front-line teams.

“This is a real challenge,” said Mr Frankland. “If we do not recruit, we cannot deliver a chunk of the children’s delivery programme. It is our biggest challenge.”

Recruitment across the whole workforce had gone well, but there was still a hole at the front end of the business.

Measures being taken included good-quality advertising, working with agencies, and looking for social workers from overseas, to see if any of these could help.

The county was also working on a trainee scheme, with a deal involving working and studying at the same time.

The county council had already agreed an extra £500,000 for retention and recruitment, making sure the West Sussex starting band matched its neighbours.

“It is a very competitive local market,” he added.

Julian Harris, director of resources for adults’ and children’s services, said a lot of investment had been put into trying to boost recruitment. The overall vacancy rate across adults and children had been running at about 18 per cent.

It was now forecast to drop to about 12 or 13 per cent by about this time, and the corporate plan aimed to get it to ten per cent by the end of the current financial year.

“We are doing what we can, but whether we hit the target depends on how many people resign and leave,” said Mr Harris.

“We will do all we can to stop this happening, which is very difficult when people feel overburdened with work, and the level of vacancies we have.”

Thirty social workers had been added to the base in children’s services, and they were trying to reduce vacancies as well.

Cllr Robert Dunn said that with a national shortage of social workers, solutions were not easy to find.

One problem over recruiting them was bad publicity nationally around social work. “Staff are fed up with complaints in newspapers and on television,” he added.

He would like to be optimistic. “But we can’t magic up these experienced people,” he admitted.