Examination of Witnesses (Questions 96
- 99)
MONDAY 1 JUNE 2009
KEITH BRUMFITT,
JANE HAYWOOD,
ROSIE VARLEY
AND MIKE
WARDLE
Q96 Chairman: I welcome Mike
Wardle, Rosie Varley, Jane Haywood and Keith Brumfitt to our deliberations.
I think that you have all seen that we are under pressure today
to squeeze as much information out of you as we possibly can in
the time that we have. We have barely an hour to conduct this
next session, so forgive us if we rattle away at it. I will go
across, as I did with the other panellists. Mike, you heard the
comments of the last group of witnesses and some of the questions
that we will ask you will run on similar themes. We are carrying
out an inquiry. How have you reacted to the evidence that we took
just now?
Mike Wardle: Rosie and I have
worked on preparing an opening statement, which Rosie will deliver
in a minute, if that is okay.
Chairman: As long as it is not too long,
I am very happy for Rosie to do that. So, Rosie, you will get
us started.
Rosie Varley: I will, but given
what has been said I will précis my opening statement.
First, I want to introduce myself and Mike. I am Chairman of the
General Social Care Council, but I have only been the chairman
for a short time. I come from a background in health, most recently
in regulation in health. I was Chair of the Council for Healthcare
Regulatory Excellence, which oversees all health professional
regulation, so I bring some expertise from outside and some comparisons.
Mike is the expert in social care regulation, so that is the partnership.
The GSCC is the professional regulator in social care; we are
not the organisational regulator. To put it simply, we are the
General Teaching Council, the General Medical Council or the Nursing
and Midwifery Council for social care. The other important thing
to say is that we are a relatively new regulator. We were established
in 2001. We began registering social workers in 2003 and we introduced
the degree in 2005. So, to a certain extent we are in our infancy.
We have achieved a lot, but there is no doubt that there is a
lot more for us to do. I would like to say something generally
about regulation. I feel very passionately that regulation is
about the positive promotion of the highest quality standards.
We are not a police force. We work through maintaining a register
and making sure that you can only enter our register and remain
on it if you are competent and have the behavioural features that
you would expect of a professional. We also work very strongly
through our role in education and in approving educational institutions,
not only in undergraduate training—initial training—but
in career-long development. Our conduct powers only come into
play in relation to a very small proportion of social workers
who do not live up to the standards that we would expect. I have
a number of core messages, if you like. I am sorry if I disagree
with Hilary over this, but the first one is that we believe that
there is an urgent need for a common curriculum across the universities.
That is not to say that the content of the curriculum cannot be
delivered in different ways, but we do think that a common curriculum
is essential. We also think that it is extremely important that
there is a national model of work force supply and demand; in
other words, it is essential that demand for the degree is linked
to professional recruitment shortages across the country. At the
moment there is an absence of such a model. We also think that
it is important that there is a national agreed career structure
in social work. In our view, social work education needs to be
dynamic, responsive and ongoing. It is entirely unrealistic to
expect that a new social work graduate should be qualified to
carry out all the duties of a social worker, so we need good undergraduate
training. We need a foundation year during which the knowledge
that an undergraduate has acquired is transferred into fully competent
practice through supervised training in the early years. We then
need agreed routes into specialist training, which are supported
through accredited specialist education and are ultimately, I
would argue, linked to the register, so that people are not only
registered as social workers but are registered to practise within
particular specialist areas of social work and can demonstrate
that they have both the competencies and the experience to carry
out that specialist work. I am not going to say anything more
now; I have probably said enough.
Chairman: Does Mike want to say something
about that?
Mike Wardle: Thank you, Chair—
Rosie Varley: I have told him
that I am new and that he can correct me whenever he wants.
Q97 Chairman: Have you got
rid of any institutions in terms of the training of social workers
in the time that you have existed? Have you barred many people
from practising as social workers?
Rosie Varley: I will take the
first question. We have not got rid of, as you put it, any universities
providing social work courses, but I was told earlier today that
the General Medical Council in its entire history, which is more
than 100 years, has never closed down a medical school. What we
have done is to work very closely with the education providers,
and on many occasions we have said to them, "We have concerns
that you are not meeting our expectations in this or that area.
We want you to put in place remedial measures and we will come
back and have a look at you again next year". So we have
worked with educational institutions to make sure that they satisfy
our requirements. What we have done is to refuse to approve some
new courses with new providers that have come with us, saying,
"At the moment you do not meet our requirements". In
terms of removing people from the register, indeed we have. I
think that it is 70 to date. Is it Mike?
Mike Wardle: Round about, and
we have also refused—
Q98 Chairman: How many?
Mike Wardle: If I may, we will
give the Committee a note on the precise up-to-date numbers.[46]
They change every day. We have also refused entry to the register
to more than 400 people who have applied to become registered
social workers because either their qualifications or something
about their background and character have not persuaded us that
they are the right people to work in the field.
Q99 Chairman: Do you get worried
when leading institutions go out of social work training? We were
reminded that the London School of Economics no longer does social
work and I believe that Reading has gone out of it. Why is that
happening? Have you gently nudged them out?
Mike Wardle: I do not think that
we have been a direct cause of any of those decisions by universities.
Universities will decide for their own strategic purposes to come
in or out of particular areas of training or teaching. What we
are concerned about is that there should be sufficient available
training spread in the right geographical areas to enable students
to participate in courses. Because social work is very much a
mature profession—60% of those coming in to the profession
train as mature students—the students are less geographically
mobile than some. We are not so concerned about the actual institutions
but we are concerned to ensure that there is an adequate supply
of social work places across the whole of the country. Whether
they are provided by this institution or that institution is of
less concern to us, provided the training is high quality and
is there on the ground.
Rosie Varley: What Mike says is
very important. I would add that as an independent regulator—it
is important that as a regulator we maintain our independence—it
would be quite wrong of us to bend to any pressure for the dilution
of educational standards in order to increase the number of social
workers. That I believe would be quite wrong and is not something
that we would do.
Jane Haywood: I am Chief Executive
of the Children's Workforce Development Council. We are an employer-led
organisation, and we are responsible for leading reform across
the whole children and young people's work force. A particular
priority at the moment is our social work programme. Our view
is that we need some systematic change in the way that we train
and support our work force. We are clear that, across the system,
there are good things happening and good pieces of work happening,
but we have not got it working as a proper and effective system.
There are some long-term solutions, but there are some short-term
things that we have under way to underpin it. In the short term,
we talked to the Committee last year about the newly qualified
social worker programme, which was just about to start. It has
kicked off and is being welcomed by our employers and our work
force. We are now developing proposals for early professional
development and advanced practitioner work, so we are starting
to see a framework. It starts with someone coming in to the degree
course, with early work in terms of their induction to the profession
and further development in the early stages,[47]
and then develops further either into the advanced practitioner
stage or into management and leadership. There is a debate to
be had about where the learning takes place for all those stages,
and I think that the newly qualified social worker programme will
help us to understand that. We are clear and our employers are
clear that there needs to be some specialism in the degree, but
it also needs to start as a generic degree because, as we clearly
heard from the HEIs, children and young people live in families.
Many of their problems come from the fact that the family is dysfunctional,
so it is very difficult to pick out what the adult social worker
and the children's social worker should do. When the newly qualified
social worker joins them, our employers need to know that they
understand what it is like to operate as a children's social worker
in the children's services context, understanding the wider integrated
working that is under way. They need to be able to do the reports
and they need to be able to start to do some of the analysis and
some of the casework, because if they cannot do that they will
not learn and will not become the experienced social workers that
we need. The practice placements are a very important part of
the degree, but it is clear that we have not yet got it right.
The relationship between the HEIs and the employers is not working
as it should. Some of that will be about funding, and some of
it will be about strength of personal relationships, but it should
not really rely on that. It comes back to needing a systematic
framework for making it happen, and a clear expectation of who
is doing what in order to ensure that we have high-quality practice
placements. However, for the children's social worker, those practice
placements have to be in front-line children's practice rather
than more general placements.
Keith Brumfitt: I also work at
the Children's Workforce Development Council, and my role is to
lead a large range of our initiatives in social work, all of which
have kicked off in the last year. Essentially, our work picks
up social workers after they have completed their initial training,
so we work mainly with local authority employers but also with
some voluntary and private sector employers, supporting them to
develop further those social workers who work in the children
and families context. There is a large range of initiatives, and
we can talk about them in detail if you wish.
Chairman: Thank you for that warm-up
session. Derek, I shall call you first on the entry routes to
the profession.
46 See Ev 64. Back
47
Note by Witness: The newly qualified social worker programme
starts after someone completes their degree course, with further
development in the early years of employment. Back
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