The Department for Education’s (DfE) statutory guidance on agency social work came into effect on 31 October 2024 before becoming a legal requirement from 1 October 2025. It features a range of measures like price caps, minimum notice periods, and preventing authorities from engaging with agency workers who have recently left a permanent role in the same region. The overall goal is to reduce instability and turnover in the workforce, as a sustainable workforce will lead to better outcomes for young people and families.

In response, Yorkshire & the Humber’s 15 authorities opted into a regional Memorandum of Understanding (MoU). This included adopting the DfE’s guidance and fully applying each of the guidelines as “musts” rather than “shoulds”, including introducing price caps ten months ahead of schedule. In doing so, each authority also agreed to support one another in implementing the guidance by sharing data and establishing a regional governance group in order to learn from each other and oversee compliance. The MoU adds a standardised approach to referencing and vetting and also requires agency workers to spend a set amount of time working on-site. A shorter regional timescale was also agreed, which helped identify and remedy any issues ahead of the national deadline. So far, this approach has delivered some promising early results.

Ann-Marie Matson, Director of Children’s Services at North East Lincolnshire, talked us through what it’s been like to implement the regional MoU. As part of an authority who recently received an improved Good Ofsted rating, Ann-Marie has already seen benefits to both staff and the children and families they support. Her experiences also shed some light on the challenges of implementing a regional agreement that goes beyond the national guidance, and the importance of “holding your nerve”.

Like many social work leaders, Ann-Marie’s initial reaction to the DfE guidance was cautiously optimistic.

 “I think it's fair to say I've been pretty vocal about the use of agency social work over many years across the region, and seeing firsthand the impact of the instability that that brings children and the impact on children's outcomes. So I absolutely welcomed it with open arms as a step in the right direction.”

In the past, Yorkshire & Humber have tried adopting a similar regional agreement, but it proved challenging to maintain in the face of staffing pressures. This time, having the weight of the national guidance behind the MoU has made it easier to achieve full buy-in. As an incoming DCS appointed to manage and lead a significant improvement journey, high reliance on agency workers to fill posts was one of the biggest issues Ann-Marie faced:

“When I came into post 20 months ago, North East Lincolnshire was graded as inadequate for children's services across every judgment area and had a significant over-reliance on agency staff. In fact, they made up the vast majority of the workforce. About 75% of the workforce in children's services were agency. Whilst I absolutely welcomed the MOU, I knew it was going to be a significant challenge to implement the new approach.”

Bringing the high agency reliance under control has been an important part of the improvement journey in North East Lincolnshire. To date, the authority has reduced the number of roles filled by agency workers from 74 to 14, a feat which would have been far harder to achieve without a consistent regional approach and the guarantee that neighbouring authorities would support their efforts.

“What the MoU has enabled us to do is to be really, really clear about our rates of pay, and it holds us to account on that. It's a legal document, signed off at the highest level with lead member, Chief Executive and DCS oversight. It was given the attention it needed from the senior level to then implement and cascade into our workforce. The MoU has played a part in the success of the turnaround in North East Lincolnshire's agency work rate.”

Reflecting on the process of turning these numbers around, Ann-Marie felt the most significant challenge was around holding firm in the face of pressure. In trying to transition away from an agency-reliant workforce, North East Lincolnshire still had to provide enough capacity to keep the service running day-to-day. Without the MoU in place there would also be the added pressure of competing with neighbouring authorities who were willing to offer higher agency rates. Instead, Yorkshire & Humber is able to present a united regional front.  

“I think the biggest challenge has been holding our nerve. On one hand, you absolutely need that social work capacity and the consequences of not having it are indescribable. But on the other, one of the strengths was as a region we agreed we would do this, and we have stuck with it. It's taken all 15 local authorities to really commit to that at the highest level and be obsessed with it, care about it and make it our daily business.” 

The additional stability in the workforce has enabled North East Lincolnshire to pursue an improved workforce development strategy. By allowing more time for professional relationships to build, they have found it much easier to plan around the development needs of their permanent workforce:

“It's not just about weaning off agency social work, it's about creating permanent skilled practitioners that are well supported, well supervised with robust management oversight to create the conditions for change in children's lives. We launched our workforce strategy around about the same time as the MoU as well as our “grow our own” model.”

Crucially, practitioners on the ground are already seeing the effect of a more stable workforce, and feedback from children and families has been positive:

“There's one statement that a child said to an inspector only a few weeks ago, which was quite simply, “Things are better.” In terms of the impact, not only are we seeing the stability of social work significantly improve, but we're seeing practice improve, outcomes improve, and sustainable change in children and families lives.”

What can other regions learn from Yorkshire & the Humber’s experiences in building a more sustainable workforce? For Ann-Marie, there are three big learnings: tell the story of social work as a transformative force for good; let children and young people’s voice do the talking; and recognise the opportunities for regional partnerships to change competitive relationships to cooperative ones.

“I think storytelling is an absolute must. We are in a profession where the nature of our work can be difficult to talk about. I know it's a really tricky balance and the sensitivities need to be managed, but I think there's something about storytelling and changing the perception of social work.

I think the second tip would be to use the experiences of children and young people and what they tell us. Use their experiences to help people understand why it's so important to have a stable workforce.  The more that we show people that this is having a massive impact for children and young people across our region, you would hope that that the appetite to do that becomes infectious across the country. There are some incredible agency social workers out there. They are great, but actually we want those people in permanent positions, building lasting relationships and trust with our children and families.

The third tip is, if I was thinking about our role as a region, it's how we use our collective strength. The competition shouldn't be between us. How do we align our ourselves, because we've demonstrated when we do put our collective strength behind something we can have the biggest impact.”