A recent survey by Community Care reveals qualified social workers are calling for a cap on the maximum number of cases they can have at any one time.

An overwhelming 94 per cent of those in social work jobs responded to Community Care's Caseloads survey, with hundreds of social workers giving detailed responses in which they recognised that creating a caseload cap would be more complex than simply assigning them with a number.

Previous calls for a caseload cap were rejected by the Social Work Task Force who said that the theory would not work in practise, because it was too simplistic. The Task Force also noted that the cap would fail to take into account the different skills, knowledge and experience of social workers and the complexity of some cases being handled.

With an increasing number of social workers reporting high caseloads, local authority bosses may be encouraged to create more social work assistant positions to help ease the workloads of the professionals. With some tasks being able to be delegated to such assistants, social workers will be able to get a better idea of what each case involves and may find they are able to manage more.

Helga Pile, Unison officer for social workers told Community Care: "There is an overwhelming demand from social workers for caseloads to be regulated- through a system which caps cases but also takes account of complexity and the other aspects of workload."

"The employers standard recommended by the Social Work Task Force must bite this bullet and it must have some real teeth through proper enforcement," she added.