Kent County Council’s children’s social work workforce looks healthier on paper than it did two years ago. Vacancies are down. Turnover is down. Permanent staffing has improved. But the council’s own scorecards still show frontline children’s social work teams carrying caseloads above the authority’s target. In other words, Kent appears to be getting better at filling posts, while still asking many of the people in those posts to carry more than the council says it wants them to.
There is a longer national backdrop to this. The Department for Education says the current official time series for children’s social work workforce statistics starts in 2017. Its latest England-wide figures show the vacancy rate rising from 17% in 2017 to a high of 20% per cent in 2022 before falling back to 14.2% in 2025. Over the same span, England’s average caseload fell from 17.7 to 15.2, while the turnover rate fell from 13.4 % in 2017 to 11.8% in 2025 after peaking at 17.2% in 2022. That national trend matters because it shows Kent is operating inside a wider system that got worse before it started to recover.
Kent’s own published comparison figures tell a similar, though not identical, story. In the KCC scorecard using the annual collection as at 30 September 2022, Kent’s social work vacancy rate stood at 16.5% against an England average of 20%, while turnover stood at 15.9% against an England average of 17.1%. A year later, as at 30 September 2023, Kent’s vacancy rate edged down to 16.%, but turnover worsened to 19.4 per cent, above England’s 15.9 per cent. By the next published comparison, as at 30 September 2024, Kent’s vacancy rate had fallen again to 15.1% and turnover had dropped sharply to 11.1%, both better than the England averages of 17.3% and 13.8% respectively.
On one reading, that is good news. Kent was not in a stronger position than England on every measure in every year, but by the latest published comparison in KCC’s papers it was doing better than the national average on both vacancies and turnover. In a service where churn can mean vulnerable children repeatedly seeing new faces, that is not a trivial improvement. It matters.
But this is where the story stops being comfortable. KCC’s own operational scorecards show that lower vacancies have not translated into workloads the council would describe as on target. In September 2022, the average caseload in Kent’s Children’s Social Work Teams stood at 24.5 cases, against the council’s target of no more than 18. In July 2023 the scorecard still described the position as 23.7 cases. In July 2024 it was 22.2. In November 2025 it was 21.4. In January 2026 it was 21.1. That is movement in the right direction, but it is not mission accomplished. It is a long stretch of being above target by a fair margin.
The same pattern appears in Kent’s staffing mix. In November 2025, KCC said the percentage of case-holding posts filled by permanent qualified social workers had risen to 80.1%, the highest level since March 2022, but still below the council’s own target of 85%. That sounds like one of those local government sentences that deserves translating into English. Kent has improved, but it is still short of where it says it wants to be.
This leaves Kent with a rather awkward position. The council can fairly point to better workforce numbers than a year earlier. Its latest published vacancy and turnover figures compare well with England. Yet its own frontline caseload indicators remain persistently above target, and the council is still openly telling members that recruiting and retaining qualified social workers remains a priority. The danger in stories like this is to choose between two lazy versions: “crisis solved” or “everything is collapsing”. The published data does not support either. It supports something more irritatingly realistic: recruitment has improved, but workload pressure is still built into the system.
That, for residents, is the point worth caring about. A falling vacancy rate is better than a rising one. A lower turnover rate is better than a higher one. But children and families do not experience services as vacancy percentages on a spreadsheet. They experience them through delay, continuity, stability and whether the worker handling the case has enough time to do the job properly. Kent’s numbers suggest the council has become better at holding on to staff. They do not yet show a children’s social work system that is comfortably staffed on the council’s own terms.
The Shepway Vox Team
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