Effective social work deployment requires an understanding of local need. The workforce capacity planning model offers a range of questions, prompts and tips to help employers to gather information about a particular area and link it to workforce requirements.
You could also consider how social workers can help you gather and examine local information.
Social workers – through the face to face relationships that they build within a locality – are in an ideal position to contribute a qualitative layer of understanding about individual and community need. They can provide critically reflective analysis and make person-centred recommendations about how the workforce can respond to this need.
The Care Act guidance specifies areas for social work deployment, lend themselves to this type of activity. These include the roles in prevention, early intervention, information and advice, assessment and market shaping. The experience of social workers employed in the independent sector, many of whom undertake these type of roles, will find this information useful.
Universities can help to locate independent sector workers through their local links, which centre on the need for social work student placements. Supporting information may also be obtained through local social work partnerships.
Matching social work supply and demand and predicting future need for social workers, is a long standing challenge.
The demand for social workers varies in accordance with local need and deployment decisions made to meet this need. The supply of future social workers is another complex area as there is no national coordination of places on qualifying programmes. This is further complicated by variations in the recruitment and retention levels of more experienced workers.
Despite this, Standard 2 of the Standards for Employers of Social Workers in England advocates effective workforce planning to make sure that the right number of social workers, with the right level of skills and experience, are available to meet current and future service demands. [HK1]
'Re-visioning social work education' also recommends the need for a new strategic workforce planning system. At the time of writing (October 2014) a response from government is awaited.
Locally social work partnerships provide a forum for discussion between social work agencies and universities.
The Centre for Workforce Intelligence developed a tool on behalf of the Social Work Reform Board, which helps employers match supply with demand.
Useful sources of data:
In addition to the needs of the local community, there are a range of other factors which also influence the demand for social workers.
Click on the diagram below for more information about recruiting and retaining workers.
The Care Act identifies social workers as the lead professional responsible for personalised, integrated care and support in following roles:
- Assessment, review and care planning.
- Provision of information and guidance.
- Promoting well-being & prevention.
- Transition support.
- Integration & cooperation.
- Safeguarding, mental health and mental capacity.
Many of these roles have been tested through the social work with adults practice pilots. Click here to view the final report. As part of their activity to develop the business case, The College of Social Work worked with a number of organisations who have approached social work deployment in a variety of ways.
Many local authorities are using the workforce capacity planning tools and resources to identify the different ways of deploying their social work workforce to meet the requirements of the Care Act.