National Advisory Forum - Volunteer

The Role

We are now welcoming applications for our National Advisory Forum.

Are you a social work student, a registered social worker, a social work educator, or a person with lived experience of social work? You can use your voice to contribute to our work.

This is a unique opportunity to get involved in social work regulation and to use your voice to contribute to our work.

Join the National Advisory Forum as a volunteer

You can choose whether you would like to be involved as a volunteer or as a worker. This advert is for a volunteer role.

If you are being supported to participate with the forum by your employer during your working hours, then you will need to apply to join the National Advisory Forum as a volunteer. If you are looking to join the forum as a paid worker, please see the worker advert National Advisory Forum - Worker Role - Social Work England.

If you join us as a volunteer, you will not receive pay for the time that you work with us, but we will cover any travel expenses you incur by participating in the National Advisory Forum.

You can let us know whether you would be like to be a volunteer or a worker when you complete your application form.

What is the role of the National Advisory Forum?

Co-production is a guiding principle at Social Work England. We must always listen to, engage with, and co-produce alongside those who are directly impacted by our work.

The National Advisory Forum provides expert advice, support, and challenge to our work and how we achieve our objectives. Members include social workers, people with lived experience of social work, and academics and students. All our members bring a wealth of lived and learned experience to our regulation. They also drive co-production across the organisation, embedding it in our ways of working.

We offer forum members a supportive and inclusive environment, with opportunities to develop personal and professional experience through contributing to workstreams across our organisation. For more information, you can read about the role of the National Advisory Forum.

Who can apply

Building on our current membership, we are looking for:

• social work students,
• registered social workers,
• social work educators, and
• people with lived experience of social work.

Social work students

We are looking to recruit students with more than one year of study remaining. This is open to all qualifying routes such as undergraduate, postgraduate, fast track, and apprenticeships.

Registered social workers

We are looking to recruit registered social workers.

Social work educators

We are also looking to recruit social work educators working in higher education settings, who are interested in supporting practice learning and helping to prepare the next generation of social workers across all qualifying routes.

People with lived experience of social work

We are looking for people with lived experience of social work to become members of our National Advisory Forum.

A person with lived experience of social work is someone who has received support from a social worker at some point in their lives or has supported an immediate family member who has. You could still be receiving that support or have received it previously. This can include (but is not limited to):

• care leavers
• adoptive parents
• carers
• those who have been supported by children and families social work or adults social work including mental health, physical heath or learning disabilities

What does the role involve?

You will be a National Advisory Forum member for 3 years. However, for students, your membership will last through the remainder of your studies and end on completion of your assessed and supported year in employment (ASYE).

There are some criteria you need to meet. For us to consider you, we ask that you are:

• able to attend meetings 6 times a year (1 in-person and 5 online)
• passionate about improving the social work profession
• willing to challenge and offer constructive criticism
• organised and able to work to agreed timescales
• respectful of others
• able to communicate with a diverse range of people
• able to understand the role of regulation
• supportive of our aims and embody our values

Drop-in sessions

We are running informal online drop-in sessions for people who are interested in applying. These will be on:

• Thursday 25 June from 5.30pm to 6.30pm
• Wednesday 1 July from 11am to 12pm

These sessions will give you a chance to speak with current members of the National Advisory Forum and members of our equality, diversity and inclusion and co-production team. Please email EDIandCoproduction@socialworkengland.org.uk to sign up for a drop-in session.

How to apply

To apply, please complete an application form attached. Please email the completed form to EDIandCoproduction@socialworkengland.org.uk. You must do this by midnight on Tuesday 7 July 2026. We won’t consider applications we receive after this deadline.

We will also accept and welcome video applications. We’ll consider these equally alongside written applications.

Unfortunately, we won’t be able to give feedback at the application stage.

If you want to speak to us about the role or need help with your application, contact EDIandCoproduction@socialworkengland.org.uk.

Successful applications

If your application is successful, we will invite you to a recruitment session and a short informal interview. These will take place on the afternoons of Wednesday 22 July and Thursday 23 July.

Both the recruitment session and interview will be done virtually. We use Microsoft Teams. Please email EDIandCoproduction@socialworkengland.org.uk if you need support to attend the recruitment session or interview.