Wales social work crisis

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COUNCILS are offering £3,000 “golden hellos” and student loan pay-offs in an effort to combat a widespread shortage of social workers in Wales.
Wales on Sunday can reveal that these are just two of the emergency measures being implemented to solve the growing crisis.
Other councils are even flying as far away as the United States and New Zealand to recruit experienced staff to fill key vacancies.
Councillor John Dixon, Cardiff Council’s executive member for social care, warned that if councils did not take action, he feared the deficit would remain indefinitely.
“There’s a Wales-wide shortage of child social carers – any professional in the business will reaffirm that,” said Mr Dixon. The problem has existed for a very long time now.
“Councils have no other choice but to take increasingly innovative steps in order to tackle this problem because it doesn’t look like it is going to go away any time soon.”
Mr Dixon said his own council was regularly visiting Germany as part of its recruitment campaign.
“We’ve found that there seems to be a surplus of social workers there,” he said. “Luckily for us, their social work system operates in a similar way to ours, meaning that anybody that we recruit from there does not have to go through such a lengthy induction period.”
Although there is no centralised record of the shortage, the three biggest councils – Cardiff, Swansea and Wrexham – all have a significant number of vacancies.
Swansea Council says it currently has 19 vacant posts and was urgently trying to fill them.