Temporary Agency Staff in Children's Services - Freedom of information requests

Title or Description: Temporary Agency Staff in Children's Services
FOI Number: 446
Date Received: 01/05/2022
Type of Request: FOI
Request or Question: 1. How many children's social workers does the council need in total to run its children's service department?2. How many of those roles have remained vacant for each of the last five calendar years (2017-2021)?3. How many temporary agency children's social workers were recruited over the same period to fill those vacancies?
Response: 1. At 18/05/22, the establishment for social workers in Children and Families is 43.58fte.
2. The Council is unable to extract this information from our reporting system therefore this would require a manual search through all records.
Due to the number of records this task would take a considerable amount of time to complete and would exceed the threshold of cost, £600, incurred in responding to an FOI request, and we therefore apply section 12 of FOISA.

3. Scottish Borders does not hold the information requested. Therefore we refer to S17 of FOI(S)A 2002 and declare that the information is not held. Historic information regarding established hours is not held in Business World and only know how many established hours there are versus remaining hours to give a vacancy as at today's date.