Longitudinal Study of LA

Delivery of a national longitudinal study of local authority child and family social workers in England. The aim of the study is to collect robust evidence on recruitment, retention and progression in child and family social work, by following a large and representative sample of social workers, at different stages of their career, over the next five years.

The Contractor will undertake 25 face-to-face exploratory qualitative interviews within five 'case study' LAs. The survey phase will adopt a longitudinal design, aiming to achieve a representative sample of LA child and family social workers in England.

The survey needs to recruit a large enough sample of both new entrants and established social workers at Wave 1 (Autumn 2018) to retain sufficient numbers by Wave 5 (Autumn 2022) to enable reliable subgroup analysis e.g. by gender, age, length of service, full/ part-time etc. The aim is to retain at least 500-800 'new entrants' and 1000 'established' social workers in the study at Wave 5. For consistency, the survey will adopt the same methodology and timing each year.

In September 2018 and of each subsequent year through to 2022, it will start with an online approach moving to telephone among non-responders after four weeks. Qualitative telephone interviews will also be conducted with 20 leavers and 20 stayers each year.