Please provide information about the recruitment and retention of social workers employed by the council.
Specifically, I request information for financial years 2009/10 through 2023/24, relating to each of the following:
1. Social work staff turnover rate (i.e., number of social work staff who left the local authority / total number of social work staff).
2. Social work agency [locum] rate (i.e., number of social work positions occupied by locum staff / total number of social work positions).
3.Social work vacancy rate (i.e., number of unfilled social work vacancies / total number of social work positions).
4. Social work staff sickness rate (i.e., the total number of days lost to sickness amongst social work staff / the total number of available working days)
5. Unfilled social work vacancies for each of the requested financial years.
6. Staff on long terms sickness (i.e., away from work for a period that, on any single occasion, lasts longer than four consecutive weeks) for each of the requested financial years.
7. Number of days lost to sickness for social work staff for each of the requested financial years.
Compliance with this request would exceed the appropriate cost limit under Section 12 of the Freedom of Information Act 2000 which is £450 or 18 hours of officer time.
To locate and retrieve the data for 2010/11 – 2018/19 we would need to access our archive databases due to a change in our Human Resources and Payroll system. It would take two hours and 30 minutes to manually locate and extract the data to retrieve the requested information for each of these 9 years. This equates to 22.5 hours which is over the appropriate cost limit.
Please note that we do not hold any of the requested data for 2009/10 and do not hold any agency workers data prior to 2016 due to changing our agency model from multiple agency providers to a multi- service provider. Therefore this information is not held by Devon County Council.
In the interests of providing advice and assistance, the Council can provide the following information in response to questions 1-7 for part of the request, covering the period from 2019/20 to 2023/24.
Please note that from 2019/20 to 2020/21 the vacancy rate is just for children’s social workers. We did not collect this information prior to 2022 for adult’s social workers, therefore this information is not held by Devon County Council. From 2022/23 to 2023/24 the vacancy rate is for both children’s and adult’s social workers.