The Costs of Qualifying a Social Worker

The Costs of Qualifying a Social Worker

Lesley Curtis*, Jo Moriarty, and Ann Netten

Lesley Curtis is Research Officer in the Personal Social Services Research Unit at the Universityof Kent. Her main research interest is cost estimation. Previous work includes self-funded

admissions to care homes and the assessment process for elderly people. Jo Moriarty isResearch Fellow at the Social Care Workforce Research Unit. She has particular interest indementia support and service development. Current and previous research addresses ageing

and ethnicity, social work education and user participation in social care. Ann Netten isProfessor of Social Welfare at the University of Kent, Canterbury. She joined the PersonalSocial Services Research Unit in 1987 and has been director of the Kent branch of the Unit

since November 2000. Her research interests include cost estimation and economic evaluationof health and social welfare interventions (including criminal justice), care of older people,

developing theoretical approaches to the evaluation of community care and measuring qualityand outcomes in social care.

*Correspondence to Lesley Curtis, University of Kent—PSSRU, Cornwallis Building,University of Kent at Canterbury, Canterbury, CT2 7NF, UK. E-mail: [email protected]

Abstract

Cost containment is a priority in most social care systems and there is an increasing

importance in using staff in the most effective way within available resources. Previous

work has revealed that the social worker does not remain in the profession for as long as

health professionals and this situation has far-reaching consequences for workforce

planners. Given that a major overhaul in social work is underway, it is important to

address questions such as how much could be saved if social workers were to remain

in the profession for longer and how we should target the limited stock of professional

expertise (or human capital). In this article, we have explored the full opportunity costs

of qualifying social workers that incorporates the human capital cost implications of

developing a skilled workforce. A survey of Practice Educators has been carried out in

order to determine the actual cost of the practice learning placements undertaken.

When all the costs are added to the cost of providing a social worker, the unit costs

increase is more than twice or three times that of health professionals. This is due to

the short working life and highlights how important it is to establish the causes of

social work attrition.

Keywords: Social worker, education and training, costs, Social Work Taskforce

Accepted: July 2011

# The Author 2011. Published by Oxford University Press on behalf of

The British Association of Social Workers. All rights reserved.

British Journal of Social Work (2012) 42, 706–724doi:10.1093/bjsw/bcr113Advance Access publication August 23, 2011

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Introduction

Based on a year-long review of the social work profession in England, thethird Social Work Taskforce (2009) report made fifteen recommendationsfor major reform. These included a proposal for a ‘new system for forecast-ing levels of supply and demand for social workers’, which, in order toattract the ‘right people in the right numbers’, could:

† model policy, demographic and other changes onto overall numbers of

social workers needed in future years; and

† advise on the implications of these changes for education, training and con-

tinuing professional development (Social Work Taskforce, 2009, p. 53).

The previous Labour government accepted all of the Task Force rec-ommendations (Secretaries of State for Health & Children, Schools andFamilies, 2009) and established a new Social Work Reform Board inorder to implement them. The current coalition government expressed itscommitment to implementing the Task Force recommendations and setup a separate review of child protection services (Hansard, 2010). TheSocial Work Reform Board has since confirmed that it is working on devel-oping a supply and demand model for social work (Social Work ReformBoard, 2010).

The Task Force concerns reflected a wider unease among policymakers,employers and social work educators that workforce planning was lessdeveloped in social work than in other professions such as medicine andnursing, where there is much tighter central government control over thenumber of places on qualifying programmes that are made available eachyear. The advent of the social work degree has brought substantial increasesin the number of students enrolling on social work qualifying programmes(Evaluation of Social Work Degree Qualification in England Team, 2008).Evidence from full-time undergraduate students’ progression (Husseinet al., 2009) suggests that, despite some misperceptions, while overall attri-tion from social work qualifying programmes has risen slightly since theintroduction of the degree, it still remains comparatively low and is cer-tainly comparable with other students in higher education (NationalAudit Office, 2007). What may be more crucial is that, once qualified, pre-vious work has revealed that the social worker does not remain in the pro-fession for as long as other professionals (Curtis et al., 2009). With anexpected working life of only 7.7 years compared to twenty-five years fora doctor and sixteen years for nurses, social workers have to be trained ata faster rate than doctors and nurses in order to maintain the requisitenumber of qualified social workers. Average vacancy and turnover ratesin local authorities are around 10 per cent (Local Authority WorkforceIntelligence Group, 2007a, 2007b), seemingly much higher than for teachingand nursing (Moriarty, 2010). As a result, many local authorities have relied

The Costs of Qualifying a Social Worker 707

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heavily on social workers trained outside the UK (Hussein et al., 2010). Thissituation has far-reaching consequences for financial and workforce plan-ners, resulting in staff shortages and also an overall increase in the cost oftraining the workforce.

As a result, social work retention difficulties have been a priority in localgovernment for many years, with local authorities introducing various strat-egies in order to retain social workers for longer and to avoid having torecruit new staff (Local Government Analysis and Research, 2009).Although successful retention strategies will reduce the cost of recruitmentto local authorities, in times of financial restraint, it is important not only toconsider the costs faced by individual employers, but to consider the widerresource costs borne by society.

The most important contributor to ensuring the workforce has the appro-priate skills is the process of education and training, both pre and post edu-cation. If we are to target our resources most effectively, we need tounderstand the full resource implications of training social workers and,ideally, to be able to integrate this in economic evaluation of policies, inter-ventions and alternative approaches to delivering social work in a way thatallows us to make best use of the limited qualified social care workforce. Ineconomic evaluation, we use ‘unit costs’, which draw together the fullresource implications of a unit of activity (such as an hour of social worktime), including salaries, support costs and so on. An approach to includingthe investment costs of training into the unit costs has been developed for avariety of healthcare professionals (Netten and Knight, 1999; Curtis andNetten, 2005, 2007). If applied to social workers, this type of informationshould assist us in addressing questions such as how much money couldbe saved if social workers were to remain in the profession for longer andhow we should target the limited stock of professional expertise (orhuman capital). With skill mix initiatives being debated in Europe andthe emphasis now on delivering health and social care in partnership, it isimportant, too, that we appreciate all the costs involved if changes weremade to the professional mix and social care staff were given the opportu-nity to extend their roles into those of other professionals.

In this paper, we describe an approach to estimating the full opportunitycosts of qualifying a social worker. We discuss how the results of a surveycarried out in England are used in order to estimate the full societal cost ofthe social work degree including the practice learning placements under-taken by all social work degree students. By taking into consideration thenumber of years the social worker is expected to use his/her qualification,these costs can be treated in the same way as physical capital for thepurpose of estimating the annual cost, as their value is not used up in theprocess of producing the service. In doing this, we draw on previous workusing a method of annuitisation developed for health professionals inwhich the annual opportunity cost of the investment in ‘human capital’reflects the period over which the benefits are delivered

708 Lesley Curtis et al.

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(Netten and Knight, 1999). We also investigate the impact of including thisinvestment on the unit costs (such as cost per hour) of providing a socialworker and examine whether this increase compares with that of healthprofessionals.

Method

Here, we discuss the components of a social worker’s education and train-ing and the sources of information used to calculate these costs, including asurvey undertaken specifically for this purpose. In health economics, it isgood practice to value resources based on the notion of ‘opportunitycost’. The principle of opportunity costs is to ensure that all the resourcesused to provide an output, in this case to qualify a professional, arevalued rather than just those relevant to the public funders and local auth-orities. They represent the cost of using resources for a purpose, measuredas their value in their next best alternative use and are particularly impor-tant when valuing the benefits forgone in order to complete the training.

We describe how the total cost of education and training is annuitised andhow costs incurred over a period of longer than one year are discounted toproduce an annual cost of education and training, thereby making it poss-ible to add it to other annual cost components of a social worker, such assalary and overhead costs.

Education and training

The main qualification route for social work is currently the three-yearundergraduate degree with the option of a two-year postgraduate qualify-ing option for those with a first degree in another subject, with the excep-tion of a small group of students undertaking ‘fast track’ entry routes intothe profession such as the ‘Step Up to Social Work’ programme. Bothdegrees currently require the student to undertake 200 days of assessedpractice, giving them experience in at least two practice settings with atleast two user groups. For the undergraduate programme, the placementsare either completed in two years or they are spread over the three yearsof the course. For those students on the postgraduate programme, the pla-cement is spread over the two years.

The components of the cost of training social workers are therefore thecosts of tuition, infrastructure costs of support (such as libraries), livingexpenses or loss of earnings by the individual during the period of trainingand also the costs or benefits from the practice learning placement.


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Tuition and infrastructure costs

Ideally, the costs of the tuition of social service professionals and any infra-structure costs would be estimated on the basis of resource inputs requiredfor each course. However, to establish the cost of any one course wouldrequire an in-depth analysis of the training process and financial data andto establish the average cost nationally would also require financial datafrom each university. The potential for this type of approach was exploredbut proved impractical within the remits of the current study. The objectivetherefore was to provide reasonable estimates for social work studentsbased on the amounts allocated per student by the Higher EducationFunding Council for England (HEFCE) and the tuition fees per full-timeequivalent (FTE) student. HEFCE currently provide a block grant toeach institution providing the course based on the previous year’s studentnumbers and Higher Education Institutions usually assign the social workdegree to a combination of two cost centres, one of which is for subjectswith a fieldwork element and one of which is for all other ‘social studies’subjects.

To calculate a cost per student, therefore, we used the amounts allocatedfor subjects with a fieldwork element and also for all other social studiessubjects (£5,153 and £3,964, respectively) and weighted them to reflectthe allocations of one university that was able to assist in the study(75 per cent at the higher amount and 25 per cent at the lower amount).The additional funds for programme providers based in London allocatedby HEFCE was then applied to 15 per cent of students based on thepremise that around 15 per cent of social work students are studying inLondon (Evaluation of New Social Work Degree Qualification inEngland, 2008). Assuming that these students are equally dividedbetween those studying in inner and outer London, we applied the weight-ing of 8 and 5 per cent that is allocated to course providers in inner andouter London, respectively (HEFCE, 2004). Although a bursary is paidto students by the NHS Business Authority, an organisation that adminis-ters bursaries for social work students on behalf of the Department ofHealth to assist students with the cost of the tuition, in order to avoiddouble counting, this has not been included in the estimate of tuition costs.

Living expenses

In order to get a fully comprehensive estimate of the cost of training, weneed to take into account the costs borne by the students. Although an esti-mate of loss of earnings would be appropriate for this purpose, this wouldrequire assumptions about students’ employment before the course.Living expenses have therefore been used as a proxy, as these would


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otherwise be funded by working. These are based on information providedby the National Union of Students for expenses on books, stationery, travel,rent and other essential items of expenditure during the period of study.

A bursary is paid to students by the NHS Business Authority and grantsare made available by the Local Authority for the social work qualifyingprogramme to assist the students to meet the additional living costs theyincur. As with the bursary’s contribution to tuition costs, this funding,however, has not been included in the analysis in order to avoid anydouble counting. We have, however, included the amount of funding allo-cated for student travel to placements provided by the NHS Business Ser-vices Authority, as this additional cost would not have been factored intothe amount quoted by the National Union of Students for living costs.Although the agency offering the placement is also expected to contributetowards the travel costs incurred while carrying out placement duties, thisamount has not been included, as policies for the reimbursement of studentsvary from agency to agency (Jigs, 2010) and have not been researched forthis study.

Student loans are also taken out by some students to cover their costs,which they currently repay once they are earning over £15,000. Inevitably,interest payments on these loans escalate over time and represent a cost tothe student. As these costs will vary from student to student, in this paper,they have been excluded from the overall costs, as no information is avail-able on loans taken out by social work students. This approach is consistentwith that taken for other professionals.

Practice learning placements

As mentioned earlier, all social work qualifying programmes (undergradu-ate and postgraduate) require that the student must successfully complete200 days in at least two practice settings with at least two user groupsand, in the case of the undergraduate degree, these days are completedeither over two or three years. Nationally, there is evidence that the mostcommon option is 100 days in years 2 and 3; however, some universitiesoffer the placement in other combinations over the three-year durationof the course, such as in combinations of 40/80/80 or 40/60/100. Postgradu-ates complete 100 days of assessed practice in each of years 1 and 2 of theprogramme.

Courses with practice learning placements attract higher funding fromHEFCE than courses without placements in recognition of the costs tothe higher education establishment for organising and supervising the pla-cement. This portion of funding has therefore been included above undertuition costs. Additional funding is also provided by the GSCC for thedesign and delivery of social work degree courses and to cover the costsincurred by the universities for the administration, planning and


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distribution of the placements as well as the costs incurred by the serviceproviders for holding the placement.

We also need to ensure that we cover the full cost of the time incurred inorder to supervise and prepare for the placement and to offset this by thebenefits that having the student brings. To estimate this, we undertook asurvey of Practice Educators (PEs) (on-site and off-site supervisors) withthe aim of costing all the time spent in preparing for and supervising the pla-cements and the time provided by the students that would benefit theorganisation. A questionnaire was first piloted with one university beforesending the questionnaire out more widely together with an accompanyingletter to describe the aims of the survey and how the information would beused. This was sent via the Joint University Council Social Work EducationCommittee (JUC SWEC), which has access to all the social work qualifyingprogrammes in the UK and who forwarded it to their seventy-one plusmember universities running the course in England. Although the precisenumber of universities taking part in the research is not known, it is esti-mated that around eighteen universities forwarded the questionnaire onto their placement co-ordinators to respond.

Formal ethical approval was not sought for this survey, given the natureof the information requested and the absence of any risk to the participants.The survey was completed on a voluntary basis, with any personal infor-mation such as salaries provided in ranges to avoid being too specific.

As well as salary ranges of the on-site and off-site PEs, information onplacement settings, duration and year of placement and type of degree pro-gramme was requested and also information on how much time the PEs andothers in the organisation spent preparing for and supervising the student.This includes formal and informal supervision time, induction and assess-ment time, time spent in meetings to discuss the placement and time prepar-ing reports. In the case of the off-site supervisors, travel time was requested.For the purpose of costing the benefits the student brought to the organis-ation, the on-site PEs were asked how much time the student spent carryingout the duties of a social worker or other members of staff without directoversight from anyone else in the organisation (either a social worker orsocial work assistant/administrator) so that the costs of the placementcould be offset by these benefits.

With this information, we were able to calculate the cost of the time spentpreparing for and supervising the student by calculating a unit cost per hourbased on the midpoint of the salary band provided by the PEs and multiply-ing this by the average amount of time spent on these activities. In this cal-culation, care was taken to apportion the amount of time provided by thePE according to the number of students being supervised. To calculatethe cost of the time spent by others in the organisation involved in trainingand supervising the student, we multiplied the average amount of time bythe average unit cost of an hour of a PE’s time for those supervising inthe placement organisation. The cost of an off-site PE was added to the


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appropriate number of placements that reported having off-site supervisorsin 2007 (27.7 per cent). An insufficient number of questionnaires werereceived from off-site PEs to provide a breakdown by setting, but anaverage has been taken for years 2 and 3 of the undergraduate programmeand for the two years of the postgraduate programme.

This total cost of supervision and preparation was then offset by thebenefits provided by the student. The benefits that the student providedto the placement organisation were based on the amount of time thestudent performed the duties of a social worker or another member ofstaff, which was usually a social work assistant or an administrator. Theunit cost of a newly qualified social worker and an unqualified assistant,£18 and £15 per hour, respectively (British Association of SocialWorkers, 2009), were used to estimate the value of this contribution. Theamount of time spent supervising, preparing and travelling to and fromthe placements was calculated by multiplying the amount of time spenton these activities by an average unit cost of £32, which was based on themid-point salary of those participating in the study.

Clearly, the resulting estimates are based on salaries provided by the PEstaking part in the study and on assumptions that have been made about thesalaries of the social workers and others who are being replaced in theorganisation. It is important therefore that we recognise the increasedsalary levels in London. Using the salary information from the Local Gov-ernment Earnings Association Analysis and Research (2009), a socialworker working in London can earn an average of 18 per cent higherthan the mean for England (excluding London). In order to estimate thecost of a placement taking place in London, we have therefore inflatedthe cost provided by the PEs in the survey by this amount and also haveincreased the benefits provided by a newly qualified social worker andsocial work assistant by the same weighting. As before, the cost of theoff-site assessor (now inflated by the London weighting) has been addedto the appropriate number of placements (27.7 per cent) in order toreflect the national picture.

Total investment costs

When estimating costs, we need to ensure that all have been identified andthat double counting has been avoided. The costs of the postgraduate andundergraduate programmes were first calculated separately by totallingthe tuition costs, placement costs and living expenses. To produce aweighted total for both programmes, these sums were then adjusted toreflect the proportion of students qualifying through each programme(72.5 per cent for the undergraduate route and 27.5 per cent for the post-graduate route) (GSCC, 2010).


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Calculating the annual cost

The resources tied up in delivering social care through a social workerconsist of their salary and associated oncosts, direct and indirect overheads,capital overheads and the investment costs of training. In terms of esti-mation, ongoing opportunity cost is for the most part measured by theexpenditure associated with identified activities. The annual opportunitycost of an investment in either physical or human capital, however,should reflect the period over which the benefits are delivered andshould allow for the distribution of the costs over time, thereby takingaccount of the lower value that is put on future costs and outcomes. Theperiod over which the benefits are delivered is the number of years a pro-fessional is expected to work, taking into account periods of exit from theworkforce. This estimate for a social worker has been calculated usingLabour Force data and is reported in detail in previous work (Curtiset al., 2009). In order to allow for the distribution of the costs over time,the estimated costs of each year are multiplied by the appropriate discountfactor (currently 3.5 per cent per annum as recommended by HM Treas-ury), which reflects the time preference rate and the number of yearsfrom the base year that the cost will be incurred. The precise method canbe found in previous work (Netten and Knight, 1999).

Annual training costs were then added to the other cost components of asocial worker already reported in previous work (Curtis, 2009) and unitcosts were calculated both with and without training costs.

Results

Here, we provide the breakdown of costs as discussed above. We thenreport the annual equivalent cost and the cost per hour of a social worker.

Tuition and infrastructure

The average amount allocated by HEFCE per FTE social work studenttaking account of those studying in London was £4,903 at 2008/09 prices.Tuition fees have been based on the standard fee per FTE student (homeand EU) for 2008/09 and the median tuition fee charged by forty-three uni-versities providing the social work postgraduate course in 2008/09 (Guar-dian, 2009). They are £3,145 and £3,419, respectively. Based on theproportion of students qualifying via the undergraduate and postgraduateroutes in 2007/08 (GSCC, 2009), the weighted annual fee was £3,197.


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Living expenses

Estimated living expenses were £9,755, based on 2007/08 prices andup-rated to 2008/09 prices using the Retail Price Index, and adjusted toaccount for the 9 per cent of students studying in London (Evaluation ofSocial Work Degree Qualification in England Team, 2008). A fixed contri-bution towards placement travel expenses of £575 for full-time undergradu-ate courses and £862.50 for students on a full-time postgraduate course arecovered by the student bursary and added to living expenses for the purposeof this analysis.

Practice placement

Seventy-two PEs or supervisors responded to the online/postal survey dis-tributed by JUC SWEC, of whom 76 per cent were on-site PEs and 24 percent were off-site PEs. Off-site PEs are usually employed by the universityor agency to undertake the role of PE who partner a practice supervisorwho is on-site. Ninety per cent of questionnaires were received fromthose supervising the undergraduate degree and 10 per cent were receivedfrom PEs supervising the postgraduate programme. The majority were full-time placements (86 per cent) and 14 per cent were part-time.Twenty-nine per cent were year 1 placements, 42 per cent were year 2and 29 per cent were year 3 placements.

Questionnaires were returned from PEs supervising placements in avariety of settings from course providers in England, with the majority ofquestionnaires being received from PEs within Children and Families(39 per cent) and the next largest category being from Mental Health(24 per cent). Eleven per cent of questionnaires were received from super-visors working in either Adult or Older People settings and the remainder(26 per cent) of the questionnaires were from other settings, namely pallia-tive care, adoption, substance misuse, youth offending, learning disabilitiesand physical disabilities.

Table 1 shows the number of hours provided in supervision and thenumber of hours received from the student for a 100-day placement. Asidentified above, there were sufficient data to provide a breakdown bysetting for the undergraduate placement but not for the postgraduate place-ment. As not all placements have an off-site assessor, this time has beenadded separately and is appropriate for 27.7 per cent of placementsnationally.

Table 1 shows that supervision and preparation time ranges from148 hours (222 hours including off-site PE) for Children and Families to191 hours (265 hours including off-site PE) for Adult/Older People for100 days of the placement. Supervision and preparation time for 100 days


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Table 1 Costs and benefits (in hours) for a 100-day student placement

Undergraduate hours Postgraduate hours

Mental health Children and Families Adult/Older People All other settings

Supervision time—on-site, PEs 108 88 99 91 71Preparation time—on-site PEs 39 32 55 36 24Supervision time—others in the organisation 28 28 37 32 50Supervision and preparation time—off-site PEs 74 74 74 74 74Total supervision and preparation—without off-site 175 148 191 159 145—with off-site 249 222 265 233 219Benefits—social worker 102 112 180 187 209Benefits—other staff 70 55 16 55 56Total benefits 172 167 196 242 265

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of the postgraduate placement was 145 hours (219 hours with the off-sitePE). Estimates concerning the amount of time the PE recorded that stu-dents carried out duties of a social worker or a social work assistant/admin-istrator ranged from 167 hours for Children and Families to 242 hours for allother categories for an undergraduate placement and 265 days for a post-graduate placement.

Table 2 shows that the total cost for 100 days of all undergraduate place-ments, after taking into account the benefits provided by the students,ranged from £1,625 to £3,178, with a weighted average cost for all settingsof £2,334. In placements in which there were off-site PEs as well ason-site supervisors, the placements ranged from £5,100 to £6,652, with aweighted average cost for all settings of £5,809 (includes 100 per cent ofoff-site cost). Adults/Older pwas the least costly setting and MentalHealth the most costly.

The average cost of the off-site PE for 100 days was £3,475. Of total costs,52 per cent were associated with supervision, 35 per cent with preparationand travel costs accounted for 13 per cent.

If the 40/80/80 combination of placement were completed by thestudent, Adult/Older people would still be the least costly at £1,731(£4,977 with off-site costs) and Mental Health would be the most costlyat £3,067 (£6,312 with off-site costs), with a weighted average cost of£2,433 (£5,678 with off-site costs) for 100 days of the placement. The costof the off-site PE would be £3,245.

Table 3 provides the comparative costs of a full 200-day placement for theundergraduate and postgraduate degree for out-of-London students andthose studying in London. It also provides a weighted average cost ofboth placements to reflect the proportion qualifying through each route.In this table, the cost of the off-site assessor has been adjusted to reflectthe appropriate number of placements (27.7 per cent).

Total costs

Table 4 provides the total costs of the undergraduate and postgraduate pro-gramme separately and combined, when adjusted to account for the pro-portion of students qualifying through each programme (72.5 and27.5 per cent, respectively) (GSCC, 2010). Included in this table is themoney the GSCC provide to support the engagement of service users andcarers involved in the design and delivery of the degree. This was£850,000 in 2008/09, which, when divided by the number of students quali-fying in 2007/08 (4,555) (GSCC, 2008), was £187 per student. The totalamount is subject to variation every year.

Table 4 also shows the total investment after allowing for the distributionof the costs over time to give the total investment incurred during theworking life of the social worker and also the expected annual cost to


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Table 2 Breakdown of the costs for a 100-day practice placement

MentalHealth

Children andFamilies

Adult Services/OlderPeople

Allother

undergraduatecost weighted bysetting

Postgraduate

Costs Supervision—on-site PE £4,024 £3,710 £3,175 £3,273 £3,590 £2,295Preparation—on-site PE £1,333 £1,448 £1,494 £1,258 £1,430 £735Supervision from Others £700 £718 £510 £759 £658 £1,625Supervision and preparation—

off-site PE£3,475 £3,475 £3,475 £3,475 £3,475 £974

Total Costs—with off-site £9,532 £9,351 £8,655 £8,764 £9,153 £5,629—without off-site £6,057 £5,876 £5,180 £5,290 £5,678 £4,655

Benefits Student replacing social worker £1,730 £2,055 £2,430 £3,038 £2,158 £2,408Student replacing another

member of staff£1,150 £1,298 £1,125 £615 £1,185 £1,013

Total benefits £2,880 £3,353 £3,555 £3,653 £3,343 £3,421Costs minus

benefits—with off-site £6,652 £5,998 £5,100 £5,111 £5,809 £2,208—without off-site £3,178 £2,523 £1,625 £1,636 £2,334 £1,234

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Table 3 Estimated cost of a 200-day London placement compared to actual costs based on sample

Undergraduatedegree based onsample

Undergraduate degreewith Londonweighting

Postgraduatedegree based onsample

Postgraduate withLondon weighting

Weighted average of under-graduate and postgraduatedegree based on sample

Undergraduate and post-graduate degree withLondon weighting

Total costs £13,281 £15,672 £11,256 £13,283 £12,724 £15,015Total

benefits£6,687 £7,891 £6,842 £8,073 £6,729 £7,941

Costsminusbenefits

£6,594 £7,781 £4,414 £5,209 £5,994 £7,074

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reflect the returns on the investment over time. The total cost of the under-graduate course was £58,587 and the total cost of the postgraduate pro-gramme was £41,902 at 2008/09 prices. When adjusted to take intoaccount the proportions qualifying as graduates or post graduates, thetotal cost was £54,012. Nearly half of the costs (undergraduate and post-graduate) relate to students’ living expenses (59 per cent), 10.5 per centfor the practice placement and 40.5 per cent relate to tuition costs.

We estimated that, after taking into account the expected working life ofa social worker and its distribution over time, the equivalent annual cost ofthe investment training was £20,097. The undergraduate course incurredannual costs of £21,800 and postgraduate qualifying routes £15,248. Whenadded to the main cost components (salary and overheads) of a qualifiedsocial worker, which have been identified in previous work (Curtis et al.,2009), the annual cost increased by 45 per cent, from £44,505 at 2008/09prices to £64,602. This resulted in an increase in the cost per hour of£29.20 to £42.30.

Discussion

Resources are becoming increasingly scarce, and it is important that we usethem to best effect. To do so, we need a good understanding of the full costsof alternative approaches to improving recruitment, retention and use ofsocial work staff. Human capital costs are a fundamental but often neg-lected element of this. In this paper, we have used a method of annuitisationdeveloped for health professionals in which the annual opportunity cost ofthe investment in social workers reflects the period over which the benefitsare delivered. Incorporating the costs of education into estimates of the unitcosts of social workers has required information both about the initialinvestment costs and about the length and distribution of the expectedworking lives of social workers. These both affect the costs, as the returnon the investment is fundamentally dependent on social workers’ patternsof employment.

This paper has shown that the investment costs of education and traininga social worker raise the overall annual level of investment in a socialworker substantially, increasing the unit cost by 45 per cent and theoverall annual investment from £44,505 to £64,602. Despite a social

Table 4 Total cost split by cost component to qualify a social worker

Tuition Practice placement Living expenses Total Annual cost

Undergraduate 23,824 6,298 28,465 58,587 21,800Postgraduate 16,366 4,351 20,876 41,802 15,248Both 21,983 5,763 26,266 54,012 20,097


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worker having very similar total opportunity costs of education and trainingto other professionals for which this work has been carried out, such asnurses and physiotherapists (£54,012 compared with £59,415 and £55,015,respectively), when annuitised and discounted over time, the unit costs ofthese health professionals increased by only 18 and 14 per cent, respectively(Curtis and Netten, 2005, 2007; Curtis et al., 2009). The reason for this dis-crepancy is that the expected working lives of these professionals are a lotlonger (sixteen years for nurses and twenty-four for physiotherapists) com-pared with less than eight years for a social worker. This has implications forthe equivalent annual cost of qualifying the professionals, which, at £20,097for a social worker, is substantially higher than that of a nurse (£6,518) andphysiotherapist (£4,501) (Curtis, 2009). Given the level of investmentnecessary to train social workers, this suggests it may be preferable toinvest resources in policies to retain current (rather than recruit and trainnew) social workers.

The practice placement

The results of the practice placement survey can be used to inform thedebate about the way in which universities and agencies can deliver effec-tive partnerships in the delivery of social work education. Our estimatesreflect the experiences of PEs who identified supervision time spent byothers in the organisation as well as their own time supervising and prepar-ing for the placement and allow for the benefits gained from the placement.

The relative value of the cost components (tuition, living expenses andpractice placement) of education and training have also been highlightedin this paper, with living expenses accounting for nearly half of the totalcosts. It is possible that the changes proposed by the Browne Review (Inde-pendent Review of Higher Education Funding and Student Finance, 2010)will create pressures for accelerated qualifying programmes such as theStep Up to Social Work Initiative or the controversial two-year qualifyingprogramme in probation. If these changes were implemented, it should beborne in mind that, with a more intensive programme, tuition costs mayrise, but these costs would be offset by lower living costs.

We have noted above that practice placements for the undergraduatedegree are carried out in various combinations, with 100 days in years 2and 3 being the most commonly accepted option. Although we found asmall cost differential between the options, no evidence is yet available interms of outcomes for students as to which is the better option. We alsoidentified differences in the costs of different settings, with mental healthsettings being the most costly. The reasons why costs of supervision varybetween settings is outside the scope of this study and it is not knownwhether they relate to differing supervision practices in different settingsor differences in caseload and caseload complexity.


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Limitations of the study

All cost studies require assumptions, and this is no exception. Moreover,although care has been taken to check our sources, including the estimatesprovided by PEs, some caution should be taken when interpreting theresults. For example, some PEs were very specific about time spent ondifferent activities, whilst others tended to provide more of a rough esti-mate and possibly to round up the time. Furthermore, when taking intoaccount the benefits provided by the students in terms of how much timethe students performed the duties of a social worker or another memberof staff (either a social work assistant or an administrator), the estimatesprovided by the PEs were inevitably subjective. Whilst some PEs mightvalue certain administrative tasks, it is possible that others might not, there-fore omitting them from their estimates.

PEs from only eighteen of a possible seventy-one universities took partand the indirect approach used to recruiting PEs means that we cannotbe clear about reasons for non-response. Furthermore, the replies fromPEs were unevenly distributed between the different universities and thisshould be borne in mind, particularly when drawing conclusions betweenthe costs of the different settings.

It should be noted, too, that there are many problems associated with pre-dicting future employment patterns based on historical information and thisis particularly relevant when drawing conclusions about the expectedworking life of professionals. Although our pragmatic approach based onthe data provided by the Labour Force Survey (Curtis et al., 2009) givesus a good approximation of the likely return, it should be borne in mindthat the data are historical and possibly not representative of the socialworkforce of today or of the future.

Conclusion

This paper has used the same approach taken for health professionals ofincluding the costs of maintaining a skilled workforce explicitly into theunit costs of social workers. In doing so, the effects of working life on theannual costs of education and training have been demonstrated, highlight-ing the importance of investing resources in policies to retain current(rather than recruiting and training new) social workers. For such policiesto be well founded, clearly it is important to establish the causes of socialwork attrition, which is a problem both for male and female socialworkers (Curtis et al., 2009).

Burnout is a well-known phenomenon in the field of social work and itscauses have been well documented. However, in the last few years, positivesteps have been taken to address the reputation of the profession and it is


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hoped that these changes will provide social work with an opportunity toregain focus (GSCC, 2008).

Of course, by gradually changing the nature of social work, it is hopedthat, once trained, social workers will remain for longer in the profession,thereby increasing their expected working life and reducing the annualinvestment. Ideally, therefore, any changes to the expected working lifeshould be monitored and future work should rework the calculations inthis paper with the new expected working life. By doing this, policymakers will be better equipped to make decisions about whether toinvest in policies to retain existing staff rather than recruit and train newsocial workers.

Acknowledgements

We should like to thank Helen Wenman (GSCC) for all her valuable com-ments on this article. This study was funded by the Department of Healthunder the Costs Quality and Outcomes Programme. Responsibility forthis article is the authors’ alone and the views expressed do not necessarilyreflect those of the Department of Health.

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Documents

The Costs of Qualifying a Social Worker