Social Work England has made "significant progress" in its more than six-year history, but its effectiveness has been "undermined by serious and persistent weaknesses in key areas", a review has found.
The Independent Review of Social Work Professional Regulation in England, carried out by Annie Hudson, said the regulator had weathered the "challenging circumstances" of its inception, in December 2019.
It had also "established significant expertise across its core regulatory functions", including maintaining the register and quality assuring social work education courses, added Hudson, the former chair of the Child Safeguarding Practice Review Panel.
Review's key criticisms of Social Work England
However, she concluded that the organisation needed to deliver "sustained improvement", particularly in relation to fitness to practise, where Hudson found that "unacceptable" delays were "weakening public protection and eroding trust".
The review also criticised "disproportionate" requirements on practitioners to submit continuing professional development (CPD) to the regulator annually and said that the regulator's communications, including with social workers involved in fitness to practise, were not good enough.
Hudson added that, as a priority, Social Work England should develop, within six months, a turnaround plan for fitness to practise, while also producing a new communications strategy and making CPD requirements less frequent and subject to greater external moderation.
Regulator accepts recommendations
In response, Social Work England accepted these and all other recommendations made by the review, though in relation to CPD, it said it would "explore" potential changes to the annual requirements as well as mechanisms to strengthen external moderation
Hudson also urged action from the government to simplify a "confusing" system of standards for social workers and tackle sector "misunderstanding" about Social Work England by clarifying that it was a regulator, and not an advocate or improvement agency for the profession.
In its response to the review, the government agreed to both of these priority recommendations, as well as accepting Hudson's "central conclusion" that "sustained improvement" was needed to social work regulation in England.
However, it only accepted "in principle" another priority recommendation from Hudson, for it to legislate to tackle barriers in the fitness to practise process at the next available opportunity.
Hudson's probe was carried out under section 64 of the Children and Social Work Act 2017, which requires the government to commission an independent review of social work regulation to cover the first five years of Social Work England's lifespan.
Its primary purpose was to assess how well Social Work England was carrying out its statutory functions and delivering on its objectives to protect, promote and maintain the health, safety and wellbeing of the public and to promote and maintain public confidence in, and proper professional standards for, social workers in England.
Hudson was also asked to assess the education secretary's oversight and funding of Social Work England and make recommendations on how social work regulation could be improved.
What Social Work England is doing well
In her review report, Hudson listed a number of things that Social Work England was doing well. She found that:
- The regulator's professional standards were well known and understood across the social work profession. Almost three-quarters of practitioners (74%) and a similar proportion of social work managers (71%) who responded to the review's call for evidence agreed that the standards helped them understand the knowledge, skills and behaviours they needed to do their jobs.
- The education and training standards (ETS), and the inspection of providers against these, were "generally strong". Of education providers who responded to the call for evidence, 71% agreed that the standards supported them to prepare students to become social workers. The review also received "substantial positive feedback" from providers on Social Work England's first round of course inspections, from 2021-25.
- The registration of social workers was "functioning effectively", and there had been improvements in Social Work England's handling of registration for international applicants.
Hudson even praised aspects of Social Work England's performance on fitness to practise. This included a 59% rise in 2025-26 in the number of decisions made at the triage stage - where the regulator decides if a concern about a social worker merits investigation - on the back of increased investment in the team. She added that there were "no concerns about fitness to practise decision making".
'Serious and unacceptable' fitness to practise delays
However, the review concluded that fitness to practise delays were "extensive, systemic and unacceptable, weakening public protection and eroding trust".
Hudson found that:
- Triage decisions were taking too long: of the March 2026 open caseload, around a third had been in triage for between six and 12 months, and 22% for over a year, against Social Work England's target of completing the stage in six months.
- Though Social Work England met its target to complete investigations within 54 weeks by the end of 2025-26, investigations were taking too long, with the process "widely perceived by registrants, employers and complainants as slow and opaque".
- The median duration of cases that reached the hearings stage in 2025-26 was 168 weeks - just over three years - with timeliness "deteriorating more sharply here than at any other point in the process".
- Of 82 members of the public who responded to the review's call for evidence, most expressed "low or no confidence" in the fitness to practise process, with delays the most consistently reported concern.
- The "human impact" of delay on social workers subject to fitness to practise was "stark".
A challenging inheritance and context
Hudson's review acknowledged the significant challenges Social Work England faced in its early days, as a result of inheriting 1,459 fitness to practise cases from the Health and Care Professions Council (HCPC) and becoming regulator shortly before Covid-19 struck.
As a result of pandemic restrictions, it had to stop holding in-person hearings and to redesign the fitness to practise process to allow for virtual delivery.
The regulator also received 52% more fitness to practise referrals in its first year than was anticipated. And while referral numbers stabilised subsequently, until the end of 2024, they have since risen sharply, with 38% more concerns reported in 2025-26 than in 2024-25.
In addition, Hudson noted that rules limiting the sharing of information from family court proceedings with Social Work England were leading to fitness to practise delays, particularly at the triage stage.
Criticisms of Social Work England's handling of fitness to practise
However, Hudson found that this context did "not fully explain" current levels of fitness to practise delay, and was critical of Social Work England's management of the system.
She said there had been "insufficient strategic grip across the fitness to practise system as a whole", with interventions too often appearing "reactive and ad hoc".
Social Work England told Hudson and her team that it was not sufficiently resourced - by the Department for Education (DfE) or social worker fee income - to manage the HCPC legacy cases, higher than expected volume of referrals and external challenges.
However, though the higher than expected case volumes were known about in 2020-21, Hudson found that the regulator did not, at the time, make an "end-to-end strategic assessment of business processes", to enable it to make "an iron-clad compelling case to government of its resource needs".
"In the absence of such a strategic approach, it is difficult to conclude that the organisation did all it could to resolve resourcing issues," she said.
Hudson also cited December 2022 regulatory changes that increased Social Work England's powers to require information from employers and others at the triage stage. While this helped more cases get resolved at this stage, it lengthened triage timescales "considerably", putting significant pressure on the process in the context of the recent spike in referrals.
While the regulator could not have anticipated the referral spike, Hudson criticised the fact that a review into the triage and investigations process was not initiated until May 2025.
She was also critical of the fact that nearly a year elapsed between this review starting and the regulator beginning to implement the conclusions. These include a new triage team structure, to strengthen capacity and resilience, and "a clearer pre-triage process that supports earlier and more confident decision making", the regulator has said.
In addition, while it has long been clear that most referrals come from the public and the vast majority of these are closed at triage, Social Work England has only this year started managing these cases differently to referrals from employers, said Hudson.
'Poor' communications with social workers and complainants
She also concluded that the "user experience of fitness to practise has been poor, with participants describing communication as deficient, and that processes [were] opaque".
Employers and social workers reported "long periods of inactivity followed by urgent requests for information", while practitioners "often said direct messages from Social Work England lacked empathy", with some feeling "judged or criticised".
Complainants, meanwhile, described communication as "infrequent, impersonal and difficult to navigate", with several saying that the process was "particularly inaccessible for individuals experiencing trauma, disability or stress related to safeguarding or court proceedings".
More -
https://www.communitycare.co.uk/content/news/social-work-englands-significant-progress-undermined-by-serious-and-persistent-weaknesses-finds-review
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