Rotherham Council looks to recruit 40 social workers

Rotherham Council is set to recruit 40 new social workers in a bid to help reduce its agency staff bill.

It is expected the move will generate £1.3 billion in savings over the next five years and comes after a series of damning reports following the Rotherham child exploitation scandal in 2013.

Agency social workers were brought in to bring caseloads down for social workers. But now the authority wants to recruit its own social workers to ‘reduce cost’ and to create ‘a permanent stable workforce.’

So far the council has already recruited 22 social workers and aims to recruit 19 more.

Council director Ian Thomas commented: “It’s a thankless task in many respects. Children's social workers can often be labelled as child snatchers when they remove children, but then when children aren't removed and something goes wrong, they're vilified as well."

“We have worrying national statistics - a third of new entrants into children's social work will leave in the first two years. That rises to 58 per cent in five years, so we need to reverse that trend."