Memorandum submitted by Barry Luckock,
Senior Lecturer in Social Work and Social Policy, Director of
the MA in Social Work, University of Sussex
1. EXECUTIVE
SUMMARY
This submission draws the attention of the Committee
to research findings on the teaching, learning and assessment
of communication skills with children and young people on the
social work qualifying degree programme and considers the implications
for the reform of initial education and training in the profession.
Using this evidence of poor progress in curriculum development
in respect of one core component of the qualifying programme the
submission concludes with recommendations for recasting the relationship
between the generic and the specialist elements of social work
training. Current proposals designed to reform social work education
that start with an assumption about the need to separate specialist
roles from generic aspirations are rejected in favour of an integrated
and personalised approach to the transition period of students
to full Registration and effective practice in role.
2. I am a qualified teacher and social worker
with extensive experience in social work practice with children
and families and in social work education and research. I am currently
the Director of the MA in Social Work programme at the University
of Sussex, a long-standing and well-regarded postgraduate qualifying
course. My research and publications address a wide range of subjects
in children's social work policy and practice, and most recently
include an edited text (with a Sussex colleague Michelle Lefevre)
on direct work with children in care (see Luckock, B and Lefevre,
M eds. (2008) Direct Work. Social work with children and young
people in care, London: BAAF). The research on which this
submission is based was undertaken by a team based at the University
of Sussex which included a senior social work practitioner and
colleagues from an independent service and advocacy agency as
well as social work academics. The team additionally consulted
directly with an advisory group of children and young people.
The research was commissioned and funded by the Social Care Institute
of Excellence. The views expressed in the published reports and
papers are those of the authors alone.
3. RESEARCH FINDINGS
3.1 The Committee might want to consult
either the main research report, which is a technical document,
or one or both of the shorter articles produced for a wider audience
as follows:
Main report
Luckock, B, Lefevre, M, Orr, D, Jones, M, Marchant,
R. and Tanner, K. (2006) SCIE Knowledge review 12: Teaching, learning
and assessing communication skills with children and young people
in social work education, London: Social Care Institute for Excellence
http://www.scie.org.uk/publications/knowledgereviews/kr12.asp
Articles
Luckock, B, Lefevre, M and Tanner, K (2007) `Teaching
and learning communication with children and young people: developing
the qualifying social work curriculum in a changing policy context',
Child and Family Social Work, 12, 2, pp 192-201.
Lefevre, M, Tanner, K and Luckock, B (2008) `Developing
Social Work Students' Communication Skills with Children and Young
People: a model for the qualifying level curriculum, in Child
and Family Social Work, 13, pp 166-176.
3.2 The research was undertaken in 2005
and comprised a review of research on the topic and a survey of
programmes. Information was available on 43 of the 91 programmes
offered at 31 Universities approved at that time as providers
of initial social work education and training. Both undergraduate
and postgraduate course were included and the distinction made
no difference to the findings.
3.3 The headline finding is straightforward:
"in England, at least, students can join the Register
on graduation from the new social work award without necessarily
having any experience of or being assessed in direct practice
and communication with children" (Luckock et al 2007,
p 192-193). This conclusion is made more unsettling still by the
fact that the very same findings were reported nearly 20 years
earlier[17]
when similar concerns to those now expressed about the preparedness
of newly qualified social workers for practice with children were
being made.
3.4 In brief, the research found few examples
of modules in which communication skills with children were consistently
taught and fewer still in which such learning was explicitly tested.
In communication skills modules the focus was primarily on adults
and in child care practice modules the focus was on indirect aspects
of practice rather than the direct work role. Observation skills,
which had been a core component on the earlier DipSW programme,
were much less frequently taught. No programme consulted could
guarantee that students would be exposed to direct practice with
a child, still less that they would be assessed prior to qualification.
Attention was drawn to the fact that the National Occupational
Standards for Social Work, which provide the benchmark for practice
assessment, made no reference to "children" at any point.
Instead it was assumed (incorrectly) that the generic assessment
process would apply equally to direct work with children where
students were on placement in children's services and that many
students would experience such a placement.
3.5 The explanations for these findings
were a mix of local contingencies and general structural and cultural
problems associated with the "new" social work degree.
The tension caused for programme providers having to manage changed
curriculum content requirements and extended practice learning
demands with limited resources were not insignificant factors
in explaining the extremely hesitant development of teaching and
assessment in the field of communication with children. However,
it is the underlying difficulties of the restored model of "generic"
initial training that had the most significance for our purposes
here, and it is those that are addressed in this short submission.
3.6 It should be noted that, while the research
took place at a relatively early stage of new programme development,
the core structural reasons for the lack of any guarantee that
students would be adequately prepared for direct social work practice
with children and young people still apply. In essence these were
found to be the lack of any conceptual clarity and professional
consensus about the nature of the communication task itself and
how it should be taught and learned. This was partly the result
of continuing academic and policy debates about the status of
children and the hence to approach to direct work with them (ie
whether they should be defined by reference to their needs or
their rights, or perhaps both). No more is said on this here.
Mainly, though, the failure of courses to provide a guaranteed
preparation for students in direct work with children appeared
to result from continued confusion in the sector about the relationship
between what is generic and what is specialist in social work
and social work education and training. It is the means of solving
this problem that are addressed in the present submission.
4. RECOMMENDATION
Whilst the case is set out in full in Luckock
et al (2007) the argument can be simply made: the current
attempt to deal with the tricky relationship between generic and
specialist aspects of learning by splitting them off from each
other in order to teach and assess them at differing stages of
professional development or even in separate programmes is misplaced.
The aim instead should be to incorporate within a retained unitary
model of social work training the learning and practice of underpinning
knowledge, values, methods and skills in specialist roles from
the very start and do so in a more personalised and developmental
way. Professional development should be seen as a process of moving
from basic to advanced specialist skills within a generic programme,
rather than being understood as a staged move from generic (during
qualification) to specialist skills (post-qualification).
4.1 The case for an enhancement of specialism
in social work education from the very outset of training is
supported by the research findings reported here. However, the
case for some recent methods of achieving this end is not. First,
the Laming Report (2009) appeared to advise the retention of the
unitary degree with the introduction of specialism after a generic
first year. Second, others[18]
have argued for a complete split, in effect subordinating the
generic to the specialist. Neither of these strategies is advised
on the basis of the work of the University of Sussex research
team. In particular, it is argued that any attempt to split social
work training by agency role and setting alone would risk the
further diminution in the status of the social work profession
as a whole. This would be calamitous for recruitment because it
would institutionalise a narrowly functionalist occupational identity
in each case and further reduce the attraction of "social
work" in comparison with holistic professions such as teaching,
law, medicine and the like.
4.2 Instead a third position is indicated
by the research findings and by logic. It is that the generic
and the specialist must indeed be re-aligned but that this can
be achieved at the same time as maintaining a unitary or holistic
professional training and identity. The way to do this is, first,
by making a distinction between social work roles, tasks and practice
contexts on the one hand and social work knowledge, values, methods
and skills on the other. A unitary profession that is increasingly
differentiated by role, task and setting requires a training continuum
that enables students to understand and learn common underpinning
aspects of the academic and practice curriculum through the
eyes of the distinctive roles now inhabited by social workers.
The current system fails to do this. Instead it proceeds as if
there was such a thing as "generic social work" for
which students can be prepared on their initial training programmes,
prior to taking on specialist roles in due course and attending
"specialist" post-qualifying courses to support additional
learning. In fact, in the face of accumulating evidence that initial
training on this model leaves far too many newly qualified social
workers (NQSW) ill-equipped for the role and irritated by their
experience. The aim instead should be to teach and assess core
knowledge, values and skills in role from the very outset.
The current approach to establishing and developing professional
competence and expertise seeks to add the specialist onto the
generic. The Laming approach is more of the same with specialism
simply introduced after one rather than the current two (postgraduate
route) or three (undergraduate degree) years.
Teaching what is core to social work as a unitary
profession through what is distinctive to contrasting social work
roles in contemporary agency settings implies four main changes
to current arrangements:
4.3 First, there should be an end to the
confusion in current arrangements that muddle the focus of
practice (for example, direct work with children in care)
with the level of knowledge and skill in that practice
(for example, moving from effective listening to confident use
of a therapeutic technique). This happens because generic has
been associated unhelpfully with basic competence, and seen as
the preserve of initial training, and specialist with expertise,
and therefore safely to be left to the post-qualifying period.
In reality, the generic and the specialist are combined in
the social work role and task and practice at all levels of skill
as social workers progress from being competent to being expert.
An effective initial training programme is one that exposes a
student to direct work with children in care, for example, on
the assumption that in this specialist role with its distinctive
use of generic communication skills they will demonstrate basic
competence as a platform for subsequent skill and expertise. Instead
at present in the existing curriculum any form of communication
with children tends to be seen as optional especially in relation
to practice learning and assessment as the National Occupational
Standards for Social Work suggest and the research findings demonstrated.
And an effective post-qualifying programme will continue to require
social workers in distinctive roles to be exposed to practice
developments in other fields in their profession in exactly the
same way as they are increasingly expected to do within their
respective integrated workforces, whether in "children's
services", "mental health" or "adult social
care".
4.4 Second, initial training must now ensure
and not just assert that students prior to Registration are exposed
to a representative range of social work roles in practice
across specialist settings and that teaching and assessment
requires them to account for and analyse these experiences. In
this way, for example, it will be possible to guarantee that all
social workers have at least started to develop the (generic)
skill of direct work with children as well as adults. This might
be understood as a process of horizontal integration of learning
across separate domains of practice.
4.5 Third, this process should be personalised
and an individual learning and professional development pathway
negotiated for each student. The case for personalisation
more generally has been made elsewhere and is not repeated here.
It is enough to say that students themselves are now more often
clear in their minds about where they are heading in their professional
careers as jobs become more distinctive and diverse and increasingly
insistent about discussing with tutors and practice educators
how they can use the course and the placement to achieve their
objectives.
4.6 Fourth, the understanding of the learning
and professional development pathway should change. The separation
of initial training from previous experience and future Registered
practice and post-qualifying induction needs to be reconsidered.
Any decision to delay full Registration pending the successful
completion of a probationary year runs the risk of further re-inforcing
an intrinsic divide between an academic and theoretical preparation
for practice and learning and professional development
in practice. The risk could be avoided if initial training courses
are enabled, through improved and properly funded collaborative
arrangements with agencies, to help new recruits to the profession
connect their initial training back to their previous life
and work experience and forward into their first post-Registration
(NQSW) professional role as well as simply concentrating on
current coursework. This might be understood as a process of vertical
integration of learning and practice across the early stage of
a social work career.
4.7 Finally, it is submitted with emphasis,
the acceptance of the argument that there should be a revision
of the generic model exemplified in the current social work qualifying
and post-qualifying curricula must not lead to any further truncation
of the initial period of preparation for professional practice.
Indeed, the case for the extension as well as the formal linkage
of the qualifying award and induction and early career development
periods is now very strong. Few other professions would expect
a novice with three or four years experience to take lead responsibility
for the kind of complex roles and tasks now required of social
workers.
May 2009
17 Ash, E. (1987) Protecting Children: Teaching
Child Care to C.Q.S.W and C.S.S. Students. Central Council
for Education and Training in Social Work, London. Back
18
DCSF Consultation on the Children and Young People's 2020 Workforce
Strategy, Response by the Association of Directors of Children's
Services, March 2009. Back
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