Abstract This article is focused on the concern about the retention of child and family social workers in England. Retention of workers is seen as a major issue for the delivery of quality services for service users, stability of workforces and development of social work. The article reviews international studies in relation to retention identifying a gap in relation to studies that have followed up those who indicated they were going to leave child and family social work but were unable to say whether they acted on this intention or not. This study focuses on forty semi-structured interviews with child and family social workers in year 2 of a five-year longitudinal study half of whom had indicated they would remain or leave social work practice and followed them up to as whether they did so or not. The findings indicated that there were major similarities between those who left and those who stayed. However, the importance of the interaction of organisational, job role and individual factors provides organisations with opportunities to mitigate such challenging aspects of children and families social work so that their workers feel supported, and able to respond to these challenges positively. This article focuses on the retention of child and family social workers. Such retention is important as it can impact upon service user experience, potentially result in an inexperienced workforce and in the local authority. This is not only an issue in the England, but also internationally. The article identifies the key issues from these international studies but notes that the intention to ‘stay’ or ‘leave’ has not been followed up to find out whether these intentions were carried out. This study follows up forty social workers who said they would leave or stay one year after this decision those identifying who actually left or stayed and why. In so doing, it provides an insight in key issues for social workers in relation to the culture of their organisation, managers support, supervision, the stress involved in the job and personal issues like caring responsibilities, health issues, reaching the age of retirement and most importantly the impact of the role on their families which can lead to ‘lightbulb moments’. Whilst local authorities cannot manage all these issues, the article argues that there are opportunities for local employers to make it more likely that their workers will remain with them.