espondents found child protection and court social work the most challenging areas to recruit to, as well as specialist roles such as in pre-birth teams or adoption, particularly as the latter requires three years’ post-qualification experience. DCSs report that a negative judgement following inspection by Ofsted generates increased staff churn and reliance on agency social workers, some of whom operate as ‘project teams’. In one survey response, over 40% of social workers had left the authority within two years following an ‘inadequate’ Ofsted judgement; another rated as ‘requires improvement’ reported operating with 40% agency staff. National data showed 7,200 full-time-equivalent agency social workers in post, an increase of 6.1% since 2022 and the largest number of agency staff since 2017, representing nearly 7 Since spring 2023, Nigeria and Zimbabwe have been on the red list of countries that should not be considered for recruitment by health and social care employers in order to retain these workforces in their home countries to meet demand for services. 57 18% of the children’s social work workforce (DfE, 2024f). These data also demonstrate the relationship between Ofsted judgements and use of agency workers. All ten authorities with the lowest rate8 of agency workers were rated ‘good’ or ‘outstanding’. Of the ten with the highest rate of agency workers, seven were rated ‘inadequate’, two ‘requires improvement’ and one ‘good’ (DfE, 2024f). While there had been some success in converting long-term agency staff to permanent positions, a respondent from London hypothesised that the London Pledge9 has caused the most experienced agency staff to remain with agencies because if they left, they would not be able to return to the agency on the same rate in the future. A 