More than 100 striking Liverpool social workers are due to return to work today after nearly five months on the picket lines in a bitter dispute over caseload management.
The social workers walked out in August last year, claiming that Liverpool's target-driven culture and unmanageable workloads could be putting children's lives at risk.
They said staff faced pressure from managers to take children off the child protection register in a bid to improve figures - claims hotly denied by Liverpool's executive director of social care, Tony Hunter, who is also president of the Association of Directors of Social Services.
In November, Unison members across the city council voted to ballot for strike action in support of their social work colleagues, in a dispute that had boiled down to the council's refusal to include the word "qualifications" in a caseload management document.
The document specified that case allocation should be on the basis of skills and experience. Hunter argued that adding "qualifications"' could lead to "a monopoly of social work skills, and experience" at the expense of wider health, education or other social care skills.
But strikers said the word was crucial to ensure cases were not inappropriately dumped on under-qualified junior staff - one of the issues that had sparked the dispute.
At one point, the bitter dispute saw young people in the care of the local authority launch a petition to get their social workers back.
A settlement hammered out by Unison officials and council management at the arbitration service, Acas, before Christmas - which introduces the word "registration"' rather than "qualification" - was agreed with some reluctance by a strikers' meeting last week.
Striking social worker Tom Brown (not his real name) said his colleagues would go back to work with their heads held high. "The strikers remained solid right to the end. Management didn't want any reference to qualifications, but they've accepted the word 'registration' will go in. The document will provide principles for ensuring social workers are not burdened with excessive caseloads."
He added: "We still have some worries because you can be registered [as a social care worker], and still not be a qualified social worker. But we could not gain any more from this intransigent management."
Mr Hunter said: "I'm looking forward to working with all the staff on continuing to deliver improvements in children's services. My thanks to all those staff who remained at work and enabled us to provide a service during the dispute."
