Social Worker Working Conditions and Psychological Health: A Longitudinal Study

Good social work benefits the recipients of the social worker role, social workers themselves, their employing organisations and society more broadly. However, it is difficult to conduct consistently good social work when social workers have been shown to have chronically poor working conditions. This article, therefore, outlines UK social worker working conditions and well-being from 2022, as well as comparing these results to surveys conducted in 2017 and 2018. We, therefore, report a series of cross-sectional surveys, in addition to open-ended questions, to collect data from 533 respondents in 2022, and compare these to findings from similar surveys in previous years. Results demonstrate that working conditions improved slightly between 2018 and 2022, although these conditions are still very poor compared with other occupations. Qualitative analyses suggest that work-load, resources, lack of respect and lack of consistent and good quality reflective supervision are significant issues for respondents. As such, we argue that policy makers and employers need to provide greater support for social worker working conditions and well-being, and that this support would likely negate current high levels of turnover and sickness absence. Additionally, however, for the first time in these surveys, poor pay also emerged as an issue needing attention. It is well known that social workers love their jobs, but suffer from chronically poor working conditions characterised by high work-loads and few resources. We are also seeing high levels of social workers leaving the role. In this article, we report the findings of a series of national surveys conducted with social workers between 2017 and 2022, in order to look at whether (and how) working conditions have changed across that time, and what social workers would like to see done to improve their working conditions. We found that working conditions continue to be very poor—worse than many other occupations in the UK. And these conditions are leading to social workers wanting to leave the job, as well as contributing to ongoing poor well-being. Therefore, we suggest that policy makers and employers alike should focus on the improvement of social worker well-being, in order to retain the social workers we have, and train those we would like to have.