Recruitment and Management of Childrens Agency Social Workers

A key priority of the Trust’s workforce strategy is to stabilise the workforce and build sustainable capacity for the future. A critical part of this is the Trust’s ability to utilise Children’s Agency Social Workers in an efficient and effective manner to meet any shortfalls in permanent staffing, and to deal with specific peaks in caseloads. The recruitment of children social workers is constantly challenging, with a shortage of sufficiently experienced candidates, a limited pipeline into the sector and it operates in a crowded geographical area. It is acknowledged that agency workers play a critical part of the social care workforce to enable it to flex to meet changing priorities and to fill resourcing gaps. Following authorisation of the Trust Board it was agreed to commence a procurement process for a new MVMSP to recruit Children’s Agency Social Workers, to begin at the expiry of existing MVMSP