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Supporting organisational development

Standard 3: Safe workloads and case allocation

Safe workloads and case allocation

A series of tools and resources designed to guide improvements and support positive organisational development against this employer standard. Keeping workloads safe and manageable supports good service delivery, social worker wellbeing, and ensures you meet legal and ethical requirements. It's important to manage workloads effectively to ensure that:

  • work is distributed fairly across the team 
  • social workers can focus on each case properly 
  • worker wellbeing is protected, preventing burnout and turnover

Collecting reliable information helps by ensuring: 

  • performance and accountability are transparent 
  • staffing, training, and support decisions are well-informed 
  • the organisation can adapt to changing demand
  • services meet regulatory and ethical standards 

Surveys show that ethnic minority group social workers in the UK report that workloads are unfairly distributed, and that they face barriers to career progression. Systemic bias, unequal access to resources and support, or differences in job roles need addressing in relation to these issues.

For example, biased task assignment and performance assessments can lead to minority group social workers handling more complex cases without extra support. Their work may also be undervalued in performance reviews. When analysing workloads, it’s important to recognise and manage these biases.

Working together to create effective workload systems 

The employer standard recognises the importance of working with social workers and line managers to develop workload systems. It’s important to involve social workers when creating and checking these systems to ensure they work in practice. The standard respects social workers’ professional judgement on how much work they can handle by:

  • highlighting the need for organisations to put processes in place 
  • allowing social workers to give feedback 
  • regularly evaluating these systems

Next page: Understanding caseload and workload approaches

Next page: Understanding caseload and workload approaches

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The resources have been developed by Research in Practice in collaboration with DfE.
Published: 30 October 2024
Last updated: 27 February 2025