Caseloads blamed by council social work leader…
4th November 2011
Malcolm Newsam, Kent’s interim director for children and families services has said that one of the main reasons for their ‘Inadequate’ Ofsted rating in December 2010 was high social work caseloads.
Newsam joined in January 2011, and has focused on eliminating a huge backlog of cases, and bringing staff workload down to more “reasonable” levels. Some children’s social workers in Kent had been dealing with caseloads of up to 60 or 70 cases.
He told Community Care: “If you overload staff they can’t do their job properly”.
Earlier this year, Liquid Personnel’s Social Work Survey highlighted the key issues some social workers face, and perhaps the most prominent of these was the challenge of high caseloads.
Results from our survey:
- 39% of social workers told us their caseload was unmanageable.
- 81% of social workers often work over and above their usual hours to get their job done.
- 50% said their employer had not carried out a workload ‘health check’ as recommended by the Social Work Task Force, and a further 36% said they were ‘unsure’.
This not only has an effect upon the social workers themselves, but could impact the outcomes for their service users. Liquid’s managing director Jonathan Coxon commented:
“Monitoring your employees’ workloads is essential in any industry, but when the safety of vulnerable people is at risk, it becomes so much more crucial.”
