‘I’d love to come back, but it would have to be different’. Exploring former child protection social workers’ rationale for leaving the English child protection system, and the changes required to consider a return.

England’s children’s social work workforce is in a state of crisis, characterised by record vacancy and agency rates. However, research exploring the factors underpinning this has focussed on current practitioners’ ‘intention to leave’ practice, and there has been a dearth of enquiry that has considered former practitioners’ reasons for leaving social work roles. This remains a critical omission when we consider that former workers provide unique root cause insight in a way that perhaps current workers are not able to. This study considers the experiences of 72 of England’s former child protection social workers through the lens of Job Embeddedness theory. Adopting an iterative mixed method design, the study considered participants’ reasons for leaving child protection work, and the circumstances that might convince them to return. Participants highlighted issues with salary, caseloads, bureaucracy, unpaid overtime and agile working arrangements as factors that had informed their decision to leave child protection. Implications include the need to reform local authority pay scales, prioritise time with children, offer paid overtime, and provide fixed office spaces to enhance the social, psychological and financial bond between workers and the child protection role – with associated positive implications for recruitment and retention within England’s child protection workforce.