Memorandum submitted by UNISON
1. UNISON is the UK's largest public sector
union and represents 40,000 social workers in the UK. We
welcome the opportunity to make a contribution to this Inquiry.
2. We believe that in terms of initial training
the biggest priority is to improve the supply and quality of practice
placements. We believe that all student social workers should
be required to undertake a placement in a statutory setting in
order to qualify. This will however require additional resources
to allow local authorities to deliver this to a high quality.
It will also require more support and training and development
for practice teachers.
3. UNISON is strongly opposed to specialisation
in the initial degree. Social work must retain its cohesiveness
as a profession in the face of the current bureaucratic split
between adults and children's services in order to preserve the
ability to respond effectively to the whole family. It has always
been a strength that social workers have exercised mobility across
this interface in the course of their careers, and their initial
training should provide a platform to do so. Specialisation should
occur at post-graduate/post-qualification level and through ongoing
professional development.
4. UNISON believes that there may be unrealistic
expectations about how equipped newly qualified social workers
(NQSWs) can be following initial training. Employers appear to
have unreasonable expectations about how NQSWs can be deployed,
driven by the acute staffing shortages they often face. In a recent
survey by UNISON of members working in children's social work
(copy enclosed)[2]
nearly 60% of our respondents say that staff who do not have a
social work qualification, or are newly qualified, are now more
likely, compared with 2003, to be doing child protection work
for which they are insufficiently trained or experienced.
"Previously child protection cases were
only dealt with by experienced workers. Newly qualified staff
with no previous experience are now taking on these cases."
5. UNISON is very supportive of the concept
of Newly Qualified Social Worker (NQSW) status. Many NQSWs are
thrown into deployment without sufficient support and supervision,
leading to stress, burn-out and loss of social workers to the
profession because of bad early experiences. A guarantee of a
reduced caseload and structured additional supervision would address
this along with opportunities for wider professional support such
as mentoring and NQSW networks.
6. While we welcome the Government's commitment
to rolling this out across the board we are very concerned about
the resourcing implications. The current pilots are revealing
variations in the effectiveness of the programme from the point
of view of the NQSW. Resourcing and support from team managers,
supervisors and senior staff are vital. We are concerned that
the NQSW programme will fail unless local authorities receive
additional funding to resource it properly.
7. UNISON believes that there should be
stronger requirements for employers to fund and support their
staff to complete post-qualifying awards. Too many of our members
say there is a waiting list to do the awards and when they do
them they are often unable to complete because of workload pressures.
This reflects a failure by employers to give them the necessary
release time and support. We believe reduced caseload and protected
time are also needed here.
8. We strongly support the move to give
a revised Code of Practice for Social Care Employers statutory
force, and we believe that employers must be held to account for
how they support, train and develop social workers throughout
their careers.
9. We have concerns about lack of career
progression opportunities, and particularly in multi-agency teams
we are finding that authorities are deleting senior posts and
therefore removing opportunities for social workers to gain seniority
and pay progression as they acquire post qualifying awards and
experience. Access to adequate supervision and support for social
workers in multi-agency teams can also be particularly challenging.
10. UNISON believes that social work has
been relatively successful in introducing greater diversity into
the profession. We are concerned that the current tendency to
portray social workers as people with worse A levels than other
professions is quite unhelpful. A level scores do not tell the
whole story. There are strong arguments for people coming through
into social work from a wider range of educational backgrounds
and with diversity and different types of work experience. Service
user organisations have also stressed the importance to them of
having social workers from diverse backgrounds, and who have direct
experience of the issues service users face. We are very clear
that social workers must through their training be able to achieve
the exacting intellectual standards required, but we do not want
to see a reductive attitude to this debate focusing solely on
A level scores.
11. UNISON has achieved some very successful
outcomes through its partnership with the Open University delivering
part-time work-based social work degree programmes for social
care staff which involve a formal local partnership between employers,
the OU and UNISON to provide enhanced support for students. This
provides a supported route for staff who are experienced in roles
such as care assistant or family support worker to progress and
achieve qualified social worker status. This model can provide
the basis for strong post-qualifying support structures and networks.
12. We believe that as part of any "national
supply strategy" there must be a debate about systems for
modelling how many social workers the country needs. This needs
to look at population data, levels of deprivation and other factors,
and must be informed by agreed norms around acceptable workloads.
This in turn can inform planning for how many university places
are needed.
May 2009
2 Not printed. See www.unison.org.uk/acrobat/B4416.pdf Back
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