Sadie Frost, Michelle Ryan, Goldie and Samantha Morton are among the celebrities who have today helped launch a government recruitment campaign to tackle the chronic shortages of social workers across England.
The £58m recruitment drive, Help Give Them A Voice, aims to persuade 5,000 people to take up a career in social care. The sector is notorious for staff shortages and has recently been badly affected by the Baby P scandal.
Earlier this year Personnel Today’s sister title Community Care revealed that one in nine social care positions went unfilled, and a quarter of workers were unaware of valid career paths.
Each of the celebrities taking part in the campaign plays the role of a child or adult in need of support in a series of video advertisements that have already been shown on the internet. The six films will today be run as a 40-second television advert.
The stories are based on real-life case studies, and the campaign website shows how social workers helped in each case, before inviting people to register their interest in entering or returning to the profession.
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Children’s secretary Ed Balls, who is leading on the campaign for the government, said: “The success stories of the nation’s social workers are rarely heard and research shows that many people don’t even know what social workers really do. This hard-hitting campaign will mean a big step towards raising the profile of their work and showing what social workers deal with every day.”
In May the Department of Health launched a series of measures to improve social care recruitment, including a pilot national management training programme for 20 recent graduates from any discipline, which will offer each person a £20,000 ‘golden hello’ to take the course.
