Stephen Timms – 2016 Parliamentary Question to the Department for Education

The below Parliamentary question was asked by Stephen Timms on 2016-02-29.

To ask the Secretary of State for Education, what steps she is taking to encourage more people to train as children’s social workers.

Edward Timpson

Government policy intends to improve the quality of social work and overhaul the system of social worker education to make it more effective.

In December 2015, the Prime Minister announced a further package of measures to underpin the Government’s commitment to reforming social work and protecting vulnerable children, part of which is a £100m investment during the current parliament for fast-track social work training programmes such as Step Up and Frontline.

There were 1875 applications for the 2015 cohort of Frontline, and 4306 applications for 2016 Cohort of Step Up. We aim to train over 3,000 new social workers through fast-track schemes over the Spending Review period.

In addition to this commitment to fast-track schemes government invested £695m into mainstream social work training between 2010-15, including social work bursaries and Education Support Grant, which supported generic qualifications for those wishing to enter social work. The 2015/16 funding for social work bursaries and Education Support Grant is £81M. There is no confirmation for the 2016/7 allocation.