Examination of Witnesses (Questions 39
- 59)
MONDAY 18 MAY 2009
BRIDGET ROBB
AND HEATHER
WAKEFIELD
Chairman: May I have the next group of
witnesses please. I am delighted that Heather Wakefield and Bridget
Robb are in front of the Committee. I cannot detect any Yorkshire
inheritance from Heather's CV, although she bears a proud name.
Heather Wakefield: Absolutely
none.
Chairman: The county town of Wakefield
must be there somewhere.
Heather Wakefield: Irish, Italian
and Scottish, but no Yorkshire.
Q39 Chairman: No Yorkshire? It is
a puzzlement. You have heard most of the first session, and we
will apologise to you as we did to the other team for our session
being short today. It isn't usually this short, but it's really
short today. Heather or Bridget, do you want to say anything to
the Committee before we get into question mode?
Bridget Robb: No, other than to
say that I am pleased to have the opportunity to be able to share
ideas with you. I am a registered social worker. My background
is in local authorities as training manager. I then ran a university
department. I now work for the British Association of Social Workers
and manage our England office where my specialism is work force
development. I do a lot of work as a member of the board of Skills
for Care and a member of the Children's Workforce Development
Council. I chair its joint committee on social work development
with the General Social Care Council.
Q40 Chairman: Are you happy with
how things are? Do you think that this is time for a substantial
change?
Bridget Robb: As there is the
political will to change, there is a great deal of change that
will make a great deal of difference. We spend a lot of time trying
to co-ordinate organisations that have social work as part of
their remit and to support social workers who are working in what
are often fairly hostile environments, so we are looking forward
to the fact that there seems to be the political will to take
a serious look at this. I am pleased to be part of the task force,
as well. We need to capture this moment, which feels fairly unique.
Comment was made earlier about if only this had been done some
years ago and that is right, but we are where we are. At least
there is now the willingness to look at a quite radical change.
Q41 Chairman: Were they right about
the pay? They seemed to be a bit fuzzy about how much social workers
got paid.
Heather Wakefield: Are we worried
about the pay?
Chairman: I am asking Bridget.
Bridget Robb: We are in the sense
that we know that the salaries deter people from coming forward
and that part of the reason for the turnover in people doing the
job is that they have to move around to get extra pay because
employers are not supporting them in extra pay within their job
environments. For things like practice teaching or extra qualifications,
there is no extra pay around so that adds to the churn that is
going on. People are moving around employers, not because the
job is not what they want the job to be, but because that is the
only way to get the financial recognition of what they are trying
to do.
Chairman: That is a common theme that
we found here and when we went for our visit.
Heather Wakefield: I am also a
social worker by background, although I have not practised for
about 30 years—I was a practice supervisor, so I have a
comparison point, I suppose. I come at this from a slightly different
angle in that I am the lead negotiator for the group of local
government workers within which social workers fall, which is
grandly known as the National Joint Council for Local Government
Services. The whole pay structure is in our view undervalued,
and therefore that is true of the social workers within it. There
is clearly a specific issue affecting social workers at this moment
in time, but there are many others within the pay structure who
are also undervalued. I think that you have received the Unison
survey results, and from that you will see that pay is only one
of a number of issues that is causing the current recruitment
and retention difficulties and the general demoralisation in social
work. While we think that pay could and should be improved, it
is not the main issue, and training is obviously key. Also, speaking
in my role as a Unison negotiator, training generally for local
government workers is an issue of great importance. What is very
clear is that resources for work force training and development
in local government are very poor indeed. The average for a local
government worker per annum is around £220, with 90% of that
going on management training. There is very little indeed for
the front-line work force, and of course we also represent the
whole range of social care workers—home care workers, care
assistants and so on. We have growing evidence from our members
that it is increasingly difficult for those in unqualified positions
to gain access to secondment to train as qualified social workers,
and we are being told that they have to resign from their jobs
and apply for bursaries, if that is what they want to do. That
is an issue about the resources available within local government
generally and, therefore, for social workers within that context.
Chairman: Thank you very much for those
opening responses. We are going to rattle through this session,
because we want to get maximum value out of two very expert witnesses.
I think that Annette is starting this one.
Q42 Annette Brooke: We have heard
quite a lot about the relatively low A-level scores for entrance
into the initial degree. What qualities and attributes do you
think that entrants should have? How should that be assessed?
Heather Wakefield: If you talk
to academics, they will tell you that A-level scores are not reliable
predictors of degree results and that what makes the difference
between those who get good degrees and those who do not is attendance
at lectures and working on the course. So, I don't think we should
be overly concerned about A-level scores, although obviously a
sufficiently high degree of general education is important. What
we feel is that it is equally important that the social-work work
force reflects the composition of the population—diversity
is an important issue. There are very many people with relevant
experience who could, and arguably should, be trained as social
workers—they don't have A-levels at all, but would make
excellent social workers. From my own experience, I certainly
know that that is the case. Some of the best social workers and
probation officers are people who have lived and don't necessarily
have A-levels at all.
Q43 Annette Brooke: May I ask Bridget
for her take on that? Should we have national benchmarks?
Bridget Robb: We come at it slightly
differently because I think there is a challenge to us. As we
have highlighted already, social work has traditionally been part
of the adult and children's work forces, where the front-line
staff have initial qualifications—NVQ 2 and NVQ 3. Therefore
those working in social work were seen as exceptionally qualified—right
from the word go, to have a higher education qualification was
exceptional. Therefore employers did not see that it was worth
while investing even more money in those people, because they
were among their highest qualified workers anyway. But, the world
has changed around us. Social work is no longer exceptional, and
to be part of a graduate work force is becoming more of the norm
and an expectation What happened when we did the degree was that
we lowered the age range. That was partly because of the assessment
that the social work force was an ageing work force. There was
a real challenge. The average age of entry was 32 at the time,
and there was thought to be a need to encourage younger people,
who were looking at nursing and teaching as alternatives, to consider
social work as an option—a career. Universities had to wrestle
with A-level grades for the first time. They had not had to do
that before, because older entrants came in normally without any
prerequisite educational requirements. We are learning, and we
have learned, that there are challenges for young people coming
in. Universities see that social work is an incredibly popular
degree. Because there are bursaries and it is a subject matter
in which many people are interested there has been a very high
demand. Therefore universities have seen the subject as a cash
cow. University departments have been under great pressure to
take more and more students. Those involved in social work are
used to taking on non-traditional students, so they have been
very good at supporting people from non-traditional educational
backgrounds and helping them to succeed in getting qualifications.
For universities, it is a win-win situation—more people
are coming in, and they are supported by social work staff to
get their degrees. It ticks all the boxes for university outcomes,
but what is not taken account of is the pressure that that puts
on placements and the question of whether people are then prepared
and ready to enter the work force, which we now need. There is
a real challenge to us, which is why in our submission to you
from BASW we said that we think we should be exploring whether
there should be some sort of national guidance or benchmark statement
about A-level entry. That is particularly the case because we
are now moving to an expectation—particularly on the children's
side—that people should not only be able to get their degree,
but be capable of getting a masters degree. That changes your
entry requirements as well. These are the things that we need
to learn about together and do more analysis about.
Q44 Annette Brooke: This is probably
just the news, but I have the impression that certain universities
at least are closing down their social work departments, which
is slightly at odds with what you have just said.
Bridget Robb: Yes. That is right.
We know of programmes that are closing down, but that is not because
there is not the entry demand; it is because of other economic
factors within universities and the tension on university staff,
who have to put a lot of time into finding placements and running
the inclusive partnership programmes that we require—partnerships
with service users, employers and other members of the community.
We require university lecturers to run a very time-consuming course.
That puts pressures on research and therefore on how economic
these courses are seen to be by universities. Like everyone else,
universities are strapped for cash, and they have to consider
whether social work is coming up to the research ratings that
they need. If social work is not cost-effective, is it a programme
that they want to run? They ask that question not because the
course isn't popular but because of other economic reasons facing
universities.
Q45 Annette Brooke: Right. There
are a lot of matters one could consider when thinking about how
universities should be working with the placements. But, perhaps
I could move more on to the Unison side. There has been a lot
of discussion about students not getting satisfactory placements,
and it has been pointed out that it is a bit wishy-washy to say
there must be a statutory element to the placement, rather than
requiring placements within the statutory system. Will you comment
on the most important things to improve the quality of placements?
Heather Wakefield: It is not possible
to look at the issue of placements outside the general context
of social work. I am sure that you know that there are very high
vacancy rates. There are high levels of agency staff, with even
higher turnover, in most social work departments in most local
authorities across the land. That is a general picture. There
are people out there working under absolutely enormous pressure.
I absolutely agree that there should be a high statutory component
within placements for student social workers, but I think that
to expect departments—given the pressure that many of them
are under—to give the requisite degree of supervision and
adequate time and space to social work students is a very big
ask indeed. I am sure that it is not unwillingness on the part
of local authorities, which are struggling to meet, as we know,
their own statutory commitments. Therefore, to devote the time
necessary is extremely difficult and, until we crack the wider
picture, I don't feel the issue of placements is going to improve
significantly.
Q46 Annette Brooke: So what is the
answer to improve the quality and quantity of placements and to
get the right amount of practice into the initial degree?
Bridget Robb: This has been the
challenge to the Social Work Development Partnership Board. Our
funding through Skills for Care and the Children's Workforce Development
Council has been directly to employers and local authorities to
help them develop their placements, because we are of a mind that
every student should expect a statutory placement. We need to
think about how "statutory" doesn't mean "local
authority"—statutory means a placement where you are
using social work law. Every student should be entitled to that
and expect that as part of their degree, but we are a long way
from that. It was partly because of the recognition that we needed
to train more social workers that when the degree was formed there
was an increase in not only the number of placement days, but
the number of students coming into social work programmes. The
Government then put a lot of money into sending people out to
create placements to meet the need, but they created the placements
by going to all parts of the children's and social care work forces.
We have seen the results of that and have learned about the disadvantages,
so now we are challenged to rethink how we support local authorities.
What Heather has said is absolutely right. Local authorities in
many areas are very stretched and just to put in more students
does not help. We have to find a solution, whether it is through
placement units, which used to exist in some places, or otherwise.
There has to be a mechanism, because students coming off courses
have to have this type of experience.
Q47 Chairman: Isn't your thinking
too narrowly focused, then? We are doing, totally independently,
a panel inquiry into the training of teachers. What has happened
in teaching is that you have broken the mould of just one way
of getting into the teaching profession, through teacher training,
the three-year degree at primary and the degree-plus for secondary.
There are now many more mature people coming through. You have
really changed the nature of the work force. There seems to be
a resistance here; you have gone away from more mature entrants
coming in, as Heather said, at a later stage. Isn't that one of
the problems? I read serious case reviews all the time, and one
of the criticisms is that many young social workers who have been
to university aren't literate—if they write, you can't read
it anyway, because their writing is illegible.
Bridget Robb: Your point about
the routes becoming narrower is correct. That hasn't been by design,
because the Government have been encouraging local authorities
to take on trainees, but local authorities aren't doing it. That
perhaps involves performance indicators, stretching money and—when
you have teams that are under such pressure, they sometimes turn
in on themselves just to cope with the pressures of the day-to-day
job—the feeling that taking students is a burden, rather
than part of the solution. That is the challenge that we are faced
with, which we have to crack. You are quite right that we need
to explore different ways of providing the education and training
model. There isn't just one way.
Chairman: Heather, if you answer my question
when you are talking to Graham, it will make me look good in his
eyes.
Q48 Mr Stuart: One thing that I remember
from our trip to New York is that the commissioner, or deputy
commissioner, there said that the most important single thing
is to get case loads down to 10 to 12 per worker, so that you
stop being dedicated to processing cases and become interested
in supporting families and children. Do you think that the overload
of cases is having a major impact on the ability to support placements?
In other words, even if you put it back in the performance indicators
and give money and status, if you do not get the case load down
it will be impossible to do this work.
Heather Wakefield: I think that
that is absolutely right. All the evidence that we have gathered
from our members says that there is a much greater likelihood
now than in 2003 of unqualified or newly qualified social workers
having very difficult child protection cases on their work load.
Let me quickly answer the Chair's last point. Unison has developed
with the Open University a very interesting course that enables
front-line home care workers, who assist social workers, to undertake
on-the-job and academic training to move into social work. I think
that that is a very important route. One of the things that has
happened is that the separation of children's and adult's social
work, which we have significant reservations about, has divided
people in home care—who used to work alongside social workers
in the home and carry out some very important detective and caring
support work—from social workers. People in home care have
extremely valuable experience, and we need to take a more whole-family
approach to the whole issue. Encouraging those people to enter
social work is something that we very much want to see and are
actively promoting, but there is absolutely no doubt that high
case loads are one of the reasons why people are leaving the profession,
because they are huge stress generators.
Q49 Mr Stuart: You both support the
new, newly qualified social worker status. Why has it not been
more successful?
Bridget Robb: Because it is so
challenging. For some authorities, where they had good supervision
and had a handle on the work loads of people, they could begin
to get their heads around questions such as, "What does a
10% reduction in work load look like?" and "Where do
we get the supervisors from?" But for authorities that are
struggling, just having money does not actually help them to solve
those problems, so that has been part of the challenge. To bring
in external supervisors has a place, but then there is the issue
of whether they are practice-competent and up to the job themselves
to be able to support newly qualified workers. We passionately
believe that this is the way that we have to go, but it isn't
a quick-fix solution. Talking about work loads coming down, there
has been a mindset—this used to concern me as a training
manager—of people saying, "We've got to have work load
relief to be able to do training and take on students." No;
that is part of your work load. The change of mindset involves
saying that doing professional development and taking students
is part of people's work load.
Q50 Mr Stuart: What sort of jobs
should be given to newly qualified social workers? Do we need
stronger rules in order to stop such jobs being inappropriate?
For instance, Unison's survey says that inexperienced people are
more likely now than six years ago to be given acutely difficult
children's cases. Given the backdrop of public concern, that is
scandalous.
Heather Wakefield: I think that
they need fewer cases. They don't necessarily need not to have
complex cases, but they need fewer of them and much better supervision.
Another of the findings of our survey is that the level and nature
of supervision is simply inadequate. They need to have a protected
case load.
Q51 Mr Stuart: How do you think supervision
could best be improved?
Bridget Robb: Front-line managers
are themselves often in a difficult position. Some of them have
been promoted very quickly, and they do not have an adequate history
of supervision. They do not have the modelling to know what it
is that they are meant to be offering their staff. That says something
about how we prepare front-line managers, and how we support them
in that role. Too often, however, the assumption is that once
you are a front-line manager, you stop being a practitioner. That
is the bit that we want to challenge; advanced practitioner status
is just as important for front-line managers as it is for those
who are not front-line managers. We need our front-line managers
to be expert practitioners. They need to be able to know how to
work the cases; they need to be able to work alongside their staff;
and they need to be able to work in case conferences and so on.
They need to be able to model that on front-line practice. There
is a real challenge for those front-line managers, and that is
difficult in a local authority culture—this is particular
but not exclusive to local authorities—where targets are
the name of the game. We hear from front-line staff and managers
that, putting it crudely, their job is to complete the computer
information, because it gives the performance indicators, which
give the stars, which give the money, which gives the jobs. As
long as that mindset is there, it makes it really hard for managers
to resist that, as well as supporting their front-line staff in
doing the front-line job. It is really important how we support
managers in being expert practitioners, as well as just giving
them management training to take them away from the front line.
Q52 Mr Stuart: I'm sorry, what does
that mean? You say it's important to support them. I want to turn
that into something that we can include in our report.
Bridget Robb: For me, expert practitioner
development isn't an alternative to managers; managers also need
to be expert practitioners. That advanced status, qualification
or role—however we develop it—needs to be the expectation
for both roles.
Q53 Mr Stuart: My expectation is
that people who come up through social work are probably quite
good practitioners. Although they may be quite good practitioners—this
is what we heard in New York—no one has taught them how
to supervise. They don't have the management skills; they get
moved up because they are good practitioners. You seem to suggest
that there might be some who have neither skill.
Bridget Robb: In organisations
where the work force is stretched—that is one thing that
has come out of the research by the Children's Workforce Development
Council. There are supervisors who are a couple of years into
practice, which puts enormous stresses and strains on them as
supervisors. The danger is that once they are identified as managers,
they are put into centrally run local authority management schemes.
That does not help them build on their social-work skills, or
to know what is different about supervising in social work as
opposed to libraries or public health.
Q54 Mr Stuart: Are you saying we
need specialist social work supervision training rather than generic
local authority training in management?
Bridget Robb: People need both.
I would never dismiss general management training, because there
is a role for it. That crossover and cross-fertilisation can be
really important, but it doesn't negate the fact that people need
to be able to supervise social work and build on their social
work practice.
Mr Stuart: Do you agree with that, Heather?
Heather Wakefield: I do, but I
return to the point that I made earlier about the absence of resources
for training in local government generally. Very few people have
access to training—25% of the work force has no access to
training at all—so the resources are very scarce.
Q55 Mr Stuart: Is that general, or
is it variable? Are there some authorities where they do?
Heather Wakefield: Some are undoubtedly
better than others, and obviously not all local authorities are
social services authorities, as you know, but resources are few.
I fear that they will get fewer, for reasons that we all know
well.
Q56 Mr Stuart: Bridget, you have
proposed that students should complete their newly qualified social
worker year with the same employer with whom they did their practice
placement at the end of their final year. What would be the advantages
and pitfalls of such a requirement?
Bridget Robb: There are a number
of issues. One is the quality of that final statutory placement.
How do we engage employers fully in taking ownership of that and
get a better relationship between universities and local authority
or statutory employers around that? It is also that the newly
qualified social worker year—that crossover and transfer—is
so crucial. We know that that is where people really struggle,
even if they have had good experiences as students. It is really
important when they first go into that year. At the moment, the
way that it is set up, it is not quality assured either. The expansion
into all newly qualified social workers means that it will be
even less quality assured unless we try to do something about
it. It was trying to think through, "Well, this could be
a powerful lever for establishing a really good final experience
for students and a really good experience in their first period
in work." It goes back to the point you were making about
how we can loosen up some of the models and whether there is another
way of thinking about this relationship, because the—
Q57 Mr Stuart: A huge number of the
people who take a social work degree do not go on to practice,
so in a sense, if commitment is required on both sides, would
they not be obliging themselves? Obviously, they could walk away,
but in some way they would be obliging themselves to have a placement
and then work there. Is that realistic?
Bridget Robb: I don't know, but
I think there are a number of challenges. Challenging students
will have to be part of the agenda as well, but we were also suggesting
that universities might like to think about how they run non-professional
programmes. We have always said that there should be clear exit
routes out of the professional programme for those who do not
want to carry on to be social workers, either because they are
deemed not to be competent or because they have made the career
choice that being a social worker is not for them. At the moment,
there are not always routes out for people, and we are very clear
that there should always be routes out for people. At the moment,
the issue is the pressure on placements. In five years, we have
more than doubled the requirement for placement days in England.
It is a nonsense; it is out of control, because nobody can say
stop. How do we pull it back and say that statutory placements
are a scarce resource? If we are going to require all students
to do one, we have got to know that they will actually follow
it through and go into the work force.
Q58 Mr Stuart: Should the Government
limit the number of degrees? Medical degrees are limited by the
Government. They dictate exactly how many people can do a medical
degree each year.
Bridget Robb: I think that we
are in such a stage of change and development in the work force
that we are not quite able to do that at the moment, but our thinking
was that if you said to employers, "How many newly qualified
social workers are you going to need in two years' time?"
and say that that bit should be the statutory placement requirement,
it will begin to give you a mechanism at least a couple of years
ahead as to how many social workers we are actually going to want.
We are all looking for mechanisms to pull tighter the relationship
between employers, universities and the student experience.
Q59 Chairman: Has anyone compared
your profession with others? There are other professions where
places are scarce: I am thinking of law, for example. It is dreadfully
difficult, especially in the present situation, to get a placement
with a law firm when you have finished your initial training.
There is a different way of meeting that demand. People defer
or work in an aligned profession for a year or so. There are other
ways of doing something about this. Graham is quite right. Should
there be a God-given right to take on as many social workers as
there are people who pitch up at the university door to do social
work courses?
Bridget Robb: There should be.
| 
