Today, B.C.'s Representative for Children and Youth (RCY) released a follow-up report to last week's report Don't Look Away. Today's report – No Time to Wait: A review of MCFD's child welfare workforce – focuses on workforce capacity and centres around the survey results from hundreds of BCGEU members who work as social workers and other MCFD staff from across the province. Our union is pleased to have participated in the information gathering for this report. 

The concerns that were raised in this report echo the concerns that our union has been raising for years to the Ministry of Children and Family Development (MCFD), including in our union's Choose Children campaign in 2014 (referenced in the report).

Both our union and the RCY have been sounding the alarm for many years about the impact of heavy workloads, challenges with staff recruitment and retention, the increasing complexity of child protection work, and chronic social worker staffing shortages on our province's child welfare system. 

As far back as the Gove report in 1995, child protection social workers were described as overburdened and having "crippling" caseloads. BCGEU members are not surprised that today's report finds "The evidence is overwhelming that the child welfare services stream of the ministry has had and continues to experience chronic under-staffing and consequent excessive workload."

In the report's survey findings, social workers and team leaders were asked to identify the top issues where there was greatest need for improvement in the child welfare system. Predictably, workload was overwhelmingly the first choice: 55 per cent of survey participants ranked caseload/workload as the number one. 

Recruitment and retention were also recurring trends in the report, with particular attention on worker stress and burnout. In fact, only about half (51%) of the surveyed social workers and team leaders indicated that, when they think several years into the future, they see themselves working at MCFD.

We agree that these current circumstances require urgent attention, and BCGEU members are committed to working with government to make changes that work. We are ready to roll up our sleeves to make the province safer for our society's most vulnerable members: the children of B.C.

While the RCY acknowledges that this report does not include Indigenous agencies, it is essential that the voices of workers at delegated Indigenous agencies be incorporated into the discussions of social work caseload pressures. These agencies provide certain child welfare services to Indigenous communities and are part of an effort to restore the responsibilities of child protection and family support to Indigenous communities. For this reason, the BCGEU is calling for a separate report from the RCY for Indigenous Child and Family Services Agencies (ICFSAs). Such a report would provide context to the workload, be an important step toward overcoming the inequalities in the social work field in Indigenous populations, and explore the specific issues that workers and families in that sector face.

The BCGEU thanks the RCY for their important work highlighting the understaffing and the snowball of effects it has. We look forward to our continued work with the RCY and to the deeper review of survey data that is scheduled to be released in Part Two of the report this fall. 

UWU/MoveUP