The Department of Health is responsible for setting the national number of Social Work Bursaries (SWB) and allocating the bursaries to individual universities and also for setting the Education Support Grant (ESG) rates.he NHSBSA administer bursaries for social work students on behalf of the Department of Health (DH) who introduced the social work bursary as an incentive to train in social work. The DH and the NHSBSA are committed to identifying and tackling all bursary fraud.