The Department for Education (DfE) has scrapped plans to cap agency social worker pay to the equivalent of permanent staff in local authority children’s services, according to Communitycare.co.uk.

The plans, announced earlier this year, would see agency social worker pay capped to the equivalent earned by permanent staff to reduce the use and cost of locums in statutory children’s services.

The change in plans is part of a wider dilution of proposed national rules to limit the use of locums, who accounted for a record 17.6% of full-time equivalent posts in council children’s services as of September 2022. The rules, part of the Department’s children’s social care reform agenda, are designed to reduce workforce churn, thereby improving continuity of support for children and families, while cutting mounting costs to councils.

However, while it still going ahead with national rules, the Department has made significant changes to its original plans, following a consultation that exposed a wide gulf in views on the issue, in particular between permanent and agency social workers.

In its consultation response to the pay cap plan, the Department found mixed views on whether agency pay really was higher, once contractual differences, such as permanent staff’s access to holiday and sick pay, were accounted for. It ultimately concluded that it did not have the data on pay, and variations in salaries between authorities were too great, to calculate national caps.

Under the new plan, councils will be required to work within their region to agree and comply with agency social worker price caps, with no prescribed link to permanent staff pay.

The Department also pledged to work with councils and the agency sector to ‘build a more consistent and robust evidence base’ to enable it to model, and understand the impact of national price caps. It would also set out in the statutory guidance a process for mapping social worker job titles to broader groupings of roles that agency costs could be reported against consistently across regions.

The Recruitment and Employment Confederation (REC), which has opposed the rules from the start, welcomed the prospect of consultation on the planned statutory guidance, as a way of preventing agency staff from quitting the sector.

“By working together across government, local authorities, recruiters and social workers, we can lessen the risk of losing these vital workers from the sector,” said deputy chief executive Kate Shoesmith. “We understand the need to save money in public sector spending, but targeting agency social workers through a change in rules is not the solution. We need to make social work as attractive a profession as possible – and that means offering flexible work which is only really provided by agency contracts at the moment.”

The Association of Directors of Children’s Services (ADCS), which has pushed strongly for the rules, to help councils control the agency market, expressed disappointment at their dilution.

The consultation response showed a gap in views between agency and permanent staff. Most, or 84%, of permanently employed social workers backed the national rules in principle, compared with 16% of agency staff. Meanwhile, 75% of permanent staff, but just 10% of agency workers, believed the rules should be implemented in spring 2024, as originally proposed.

The Department of Education also announced that it has dropped the idea of banning outright the use of so-called project teams, where agency staff are engaged en masse, while it has shortened the period during which early career social workers will be prohibited from carrying out locum work.

Its rationale for the change in early career social worker proposal is to avoid a two-tier system (based on year of qualification) and in response to concerns that a five-year limit would have a negative impact on the supply of social workers. The Department’s rationale for the change in plans for the project teams was because some consultation respondents identified circumstances under which project teams were appropriate, for example, where caseloads, staff absences or vacancies were high, or to support struggling authorities.

The Department will also carry out further consultation on statutory guidance to define the detail of the national rules, delay their planned implementation from spring to autumn 2024 and allow councils and the agency market a transition phase before they apply across the board.