The Field Social Work Implications of Residential Child Care

Summary The workloads of field social work staff vary markedly, andlittle is known about the ‘burdens’ imposed by differentgroups of clients or cases. The research study reported hereset out to examine the extent to which field social work involvementin residential child care varied between individual childrenand to attempt to explain that variation in terms of the characteristicsof children, the characteristics and workloads of staff andtheir teams, the packages of services received by children andtheir families, and some general features of the residentialplacements. Field social worker involvement was measured interms of the number of contacts between ‘caseholders’and ‘case’ and the total amount of time spent onthe case over a three month period. The observed variationsin these two indicators were found to be significantly associatedwith the characteristics of cases and other factors. Indeed,these characteristics explained almost two-thirds of the variance.The empirical results have a number of policy implications whichare discussed under six heads: supply constraints, caseloadweighting, fieldwork organization, coordination and monitoring,out-county placements and travelling time, and comparative costings.     

Who Leaves Social Work?

Summary Turnover and wastage rates among social work staff are highand subject to marked variation between grades, locations andlocal authorities. Such high rates have a number of deleteriouseffects on the quality of social work, and consequently on clients,on the costs of delivering personal social services and on thegeneral administration and organization of social care. Employingdata on 13,750 basic grade field social workers employed byEnglish and Welsh local authority social services departmentsin 1974–75, turnover and wastage rates were predictedusing information on the personal characteristics of employeesand the workplace locations. The analyses revealed the importanceof age, sex, educational background, social work qualifications,length of service and workplace in determining the probabilitiesof changing social work jobs and leaving social work completely.