Children’s Minister vows to tackle social worker burnout and "undervalued" workforce

The Minister for Children, Families and Wellbeing promises to tackle the burnout caused by an “overstretched and undervalued” workforce.

Speaking to an audience of directors of social services, Janet Daby, a former social worker herself, said the Government would be giving extra support to local authorities to recruit and retain more social workers.

“When I woke up this morning and I told my husband what I was doing today, he said to me: ‘Well, tell them that you're the real deal,’” Ms Daby joked at the opening of the speech. “I don’t really know that means but what I want to say is that we all need someone that's championing us. That's going to speak out for us. That's going to look out for us.”

“I do recognise the many pressures this vocation puts on fellow professionals. We have therefore given extra support to local authorities to boost the social work recruitment and retention, to prevent burnout, to ensure they are not overstretched and undervalued, as has been the case for far too long.”

The Children’s Minister said that increasing the numbers of social workers will help with this issue.

“Now, it's not a surprise to you that not everyone in can be with the social worker, or indeed is suitable for the job. That's not to discourage anyone, but we do need to do more to attract the right kind of people into the profession. We also need to do more to keep people in the profession and maybe to persuade some of those to return.”

The Minister also promised to “turn the page on 14 years of Conservative government”. Local government spending on children's social care has risen by £4.4 billion over the past decade. Ms Daby said this increase in spending was not correlating to progress, however.

“The care market is broken and a number of local authorities are on the brink of bankruptcy.

“We intend to fix the broken care market and tackle profiteering. We'll invest in the cogs that keep the children's social care system moving.

“Some private providers make excess profits. Profit is fine, but excess profit is not. That is unacceptable and needs to change.

“The costs have been getting higher, but the outcomes have been getting poorer. It is time to change.

The Children’s Minister also promised that this new Labour government would have more of a focus on early intervention, and also would give kinship care a more prominent role.

“In this care setting, we know that children often achieve better outcomes than those in other types of non parental care, which is why we're supporting kinship placement.

“Kinship care is critical to our reforms to ensure children can grow up in safe and loving homes.”

Many of the children’s services leaders in the audience were keen to hear where the money for early intervention or preventative services would be coming from, however Ms Daby said that this wouldn’t be laid out until the upcoming local government finance settlement policy statement.