The North East is facing a “challenging” shortage of social care workers at a time when the number of children being put into care is escalating, a council boss has warned.
Vacancies for social workers are at a five-year high, the Local Government Association revealed earlier this year, and councillors in Newcastle have been warned that frontline staff in the city are increasingly stretched as the cost of living crisis pushes people to seek better-paid jobs. Average caseloads for children’s social workers in the city jumped from 5.9 in August 2019 to 23.3 in August 2022, local authority chiefs say, with services losing staff while the number of youngsters needing care placements continues to rise “significantly higher than the national average”.
A report to Newcastle City Council’s audit committee confirms that the city had 687 children and young people in care at the end of August, a rate of 117 per 10,000 children in the city up from around 90 per 100,000 in 2016. Those numbers are expected to climb by a further 15% by 2025.
Council children’s services director Cath McEvoy-Carr told the committee on Friday that there was a national crisis with placements for looked-after children “both in terms of cost and quality” and that a shortage of staff “does impact on our ability to be able to ensure we can deliver the same quality of services”. She warned that qualified staff are leaving North East councils for better-paid agency work and that, while the region’s local authorities have a “memorandum of understanding” that they will not pay social workers above a certain rate so that they are not in competition with each other, the dilemma is leading some authorities to break that pact.
Mrs McEvoy-Carr said: “We are seeing staff leave because of the cost of living crisis. They want to work for agencies because they get paid significantly more money.
“That is challenging for us across the region. We have some authorities feeling that they are in a position where they feel that they have to not adhere to the memorandum of understanding, and that is causing problems on an almost daily basis.”
She also reported that there are not enough social workers qualifying locally to fill vacancies in the North East, and that councils working with universities to address that, while some who were at university during the pandemic were not “fully prepared” to go into work. Mrs McEvoy-Carr confirmed that the council was seeking ways to change its staffing makeup so it could take on people who are “more skilled but without a professional qualification”.
Audit committee chair Hamish Moore said he feared the staff shortages were a “systemic, long-term problem” facing the care sector. The council report states: “First and foremost getting it right matters to the life chances of these young people.
“We know that care experienced young people do less well at school, are more likely to become NEET (Not in Education, Employment, or Training), are at greater risk of entering prison or becoming homeless and are more likely to die prematurely. By ensuring more babies, children and young people are able to stay safely at home we can make a difference to their longer-term life chances and reshape the directorate budget to increase investment in earlier work with families.”
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