Urgent Call For Social Workers Amid Fears Baby P Case Has Caused Exodus

Local authorities today launched a campaign to persuade 5,000 social workers to come out of retirement to tackle a child protection staffing crisis in the wake of the Baby P controversy.

The move comes amid fears that negative media coverage of social work in recent months has caused an exodus of practitioners, compromising some councils’ ability to protect vulnerable children.

A report published today by the Local Government Association (LGA) says the fallout from Baby P is likely to have exacerbated existing difficulties faced by many councils in recruiting child protection social workers, leaving one in 10 posts unfilled. “This figure urgently needs to be reduced so we can protect children effectively,” says the report.

The LGA says attracting older workers back is essential because many newly-trained social workers feel they are unprepared to deal with the rigours of child protection work. Older social workers “provide stability and leadership and … act as the crucial mentors and role models to those who are new to the job,” says the report.

More than a quarter of child protection staff are in their fifties, and the report says past experience shows veteran social workers “decide enough is enough and leave” when public respect for social workers declines following child protection controversies.

“The single greatest source of concern with respect to the children’s social work workforce at present is its lack of sufficient numbers of highly skilled and experienced practitioners able to operate as expert social workers,” the report says.

It cites Guardian research carried out in September 2008 before the Baby P case which found that most social workers felt negative media coverage and bureaucracy made their job harder and less attractive. The report adds: “It is reasonable to suppose that recruitment and retention in children’s social work will have become more challenging since then – threatening to undo the progress made by councils… in the previous four years.”

The Association of Directors of Children’s Services welcomed the report but said it was important to ensure that people who had been out of the profession for more than five years were up to date on recent developments in social work practice.

The media outrage over child protection reached a peak in November and December following an inquiry into the death of Baby P, a 17-month-old boy in Haringey, north London, who died after suffering more than 50 injuries at the hands of his mother, her boyfriend, and their lodger. The failure of social services to prevent the abuse suffered by Baby P fuelled a wave of public anger and distrust against social workers. Sharon Shoesmith, who was sacked as the director of children’s services in Haringey in December, accused the children’s secretary, Ed Balls, in a Guardian interview last month of “breathtaking recklessness” in his handling of the affair, and predicted that the fallout of the case would harm the profession and put children at risk.

The LGA campaign comes days before Lord Laming publishes his report on progress in implementing the child protection reforms he designed in 2003 in response to a previous child protection tragedy involving the death of nine-year-old Victoria Climbié in Haringey in 2000.