Exploring workforce retention in child and family social work

Child and family social work in the United Kingdom is facing a staff recruitment and retention crisis in many areas. Occupational stress, burnout, heavy workloads and insufficient resources combine to make the social work role highly demanding and unattractive to prospective recruits. This paper explores one approach to the problem which synthesises Giddens’ philosophical ideas on discursive consciousness, Habermas’ precepts on moral discourse, Boal’s use of empowering theatre and Lewin’s rendition of the action research cycle. These theoretical, philosophical and methodological components, when combined, offer a radically different approach to staff retention strategies within child welfare organisations by centring on the transformative power of human agency. It is concluded that the approach described can be extrapolated to the management of other human service professions experiencing similar recruitment and retention difficulties