Children's social workers, England

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Source and licence

Publisher

Department for Education

Check it yourself

https://explore-education-statistics.service.gov.uk/find-statistics/children-s-social-work-workforce

Licence

Open Government Licence v3.0 – Contains public sector information licensed under the Open Government Licence v3.0.

Retrieved

8 November 2026, 13:07 UTC

Raw files fetched

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• https://www.gov.uk/api/search.json?filter_format=statistics_announcement&filter_organisations=department-for-education&count=1500&fields=title,release_timestamp,statistics_announcement_state,link,display_type,public_timestampSHA-256 c19f6fda377c65fca3c4f0c6a83e37992cf5759792c1eeffcc0fdfff1d5b37ac · 110,765 bytes
• receipts.json, made by the hub and not fetched: its receipt for each file it fetchedSHA-256 5cdccf2510ad8cf048b84cd635eece725a1b691dbb3092cbd8604fe0ae23ec84 · 3,079 bytes

Verification

! Latest check failed – showing figures verified against source 8 November 2026, 13:16 UTC Run at 10 November 2026, 11:32 UTC; the latest check failed, so these are the figures that matched the source in full at 8 November 2026, 13:16 UTC; they stand for up to 14 days while the failure is put right.

Notes

• “Child and family social workers are social workers registered with Social Work England (SWE) working in a local authority in a children’s services department or, if working in an authority where the services are joined up, a social worker that works primarily on children and families work. Child and family social workers are employed and paid directly by the local authority.” (the DfE's methodology) “Agency workers are child and family social workers not directly paid by the local authority. These may be social workers who are paid by an agency rather than the local authority or who are self-employed.” (the DfE's methodology)
• “FTEs are calculated by aggregating the total number of hours that child and family social workers are contracted to work and dividing by the standard hours for their grade.” (the DfE's methodology)
• Social workers in post as at 30 September, full-time equivalent: “Social workers in post - FTE (as at 30 September)” (the DfE's data guidance). Agency workers are counted apart and are not included. “Where the RAA is hosted by a local authority and staff have been transferred, the social workers working within the RAA are recorded against the host local authority in the children’s social work workforce data census.” (the DfE's methodology)
• The five series are the DfE's “Social workers in post - FTE (as at 30 September)”, “Agency workers in post - FTE (as at 30 September)”, “Vacancies - FTE (as at 30 September)”, “Social worker starters - FTE (year to 30 September)” and “Social worker leavers - FTE (year to 30 September)” (its data guidance), for England as it gives them. Its vacancy, turnover and agency rates and caseloads, for England and each council in the latest two years, are on the hub's records by council.
• “Figures for full-time equivalents (FTEs), rates, percentages, caseload and working days have been rounded to one decimal place. Therefore component parts may not sum to totals if applicable.” (the DfE's data guidance).
• “Kensington and Chelsea and Westminster were unable to provide data following a cyberattack in November 2025, which had a significant impact on their information management systems. Because of this, in data sets 1 to 3, figures for these local authorities are not available (indicated by ‘x’), and for data sets 1 to 4 at national and regional level, figures from the previous year were used as best estimates to replace this year’s missing data for these local authorities to calculate totals for England, London, and Inner London.” (the DfE's methodology) England's 2025 figures here are the DfE's, with those estimates in them.
• “In particular, comparisons with earlier years should be made with a degree of caution, as any changes may in part be as a result of improvements in data quality.” (the DfE's methodology)
• Each refresh checks that the nine regions' figures add up to England's in every year, within the one decimal place the DfE rounds to; the hub shows England's own figures, never the sum.
• The Department for Education publishes these as official statistics: “These statistics have been published as official statistics since the 2019 release, whereas previously they were classified as experimental statistics (now referred to as ‘Official Statistics in Development’).” (the DfE's methodology) Its data is released under the Open Government Licence v3.0, as its data guidance says.