Due to the nature of the job it's really difficult to sack one ( a child care social worker anyways), unless it's for gross misconduct, normally they are moved from the high risk/high profile stuff into fostering or adult services ( not mental health or protection of vulnerable adults either).
If a social worker can evidence that they were under pressure( which is not hard any childcare social worker could walk into their gp tomorrow and say i'm stressed and get signed off no questions asked) and were not helped by management ie supervision wasn't held every 4 weeks (bare minimum in childcare social work) or more, no additional supports put in place to assist them when they said they were not coping etc then a very long process begins, which can involve mentoring, reduced case load,additional training, counseling, and if that fails,then it moves down the disciplinary route.
In all fairness though if they have stated they are struggling/not coping with the work load and not assisted with this, then it's probably the managers fault.
In cases like cumbria and the orkneys that was the whole culture of the department not the individual social workers (in general) which is completely differant, so i doubt any would have lost their jobs in respect of that. i doubt that situations like that would arise now, theres too many balances and checks by other agencies not just social services taking the lead and saying 'this is it'.
And all the social workers in eastenders have been pants tbf and do nothing to enhance our reputation with the public, and by god we need positive press.
The best social worker in a soap i've seen was in Shameless and played by Julie Walters, fucking excellent especially when she did a dawn raid to remove a child with the police then double checked the address in a pile of files she was carrying and realised it was the wrong address.
