Examination of Witnesses (Questions 120
- 129)
MONDAY 1 JUNE 2009
KEITH BRUMFITT,
JANE HAYWOOD,
ROSIE VARLEY
AND MIKE
WARDLE
Q120 Mr Heppell: The Chairman
touched earlier on placements. John Barraclough of London Metropolitan
University told us that "as long as there is no compulsion
on statutory social work agencies to provide practice placements,
universities will be in the invidious position of continually
having to persuade, cajole and occasionally beg agencies to provide
student placements ... This makes it impossible to plan placements
well". A number of our previous witnesses have said there
is a real problem with placements. Do people have to have an obligation
to provide placements before it will work? What can the GSCC or
the CWDC do to make it better and provide those extra places?
Is there anything you can do?
Jane Haywood: I am always reluctant
to use compulsion to bring about change, because once you take
your foot off the pedal, you have lost the change. There might
need to be some element of signing up to a code of practice or
things like that, but this is about a culture change. It is about
building the relationship between the HEIs and the employers so
that the employers are confident in their role in helping to train
future professionals. They have the skills and the support from
the HEIs to do that. It has got to go both ways. If you think
that by having the power to say, "You have to do this",
you will get a quality placement, well, you will not. A quality
placement comes from people investing time in it and from the
leadership investing time in it. It is about planning where the
placement will be and about the feedback to the student afterwards.
That has to come from people who want to do it and see that it
is important, not from people who are forced to do it.
Rosie Varley: I think that we
could get more sophisticated in the way we fund placements. At
the moment, the GSCC has responsibility for passing the funding
on to universities, but it has to do so according to a formula
that is numerically based, so it is related to the number of students.
We do not have any power to relate the funding to quality improvement,
so we cannot use funding as a lever. I think that would be a very
important development for us. We simply have a mechanistic formula.
Keith Brumfitt: The issue that
John raises applies to universities on a range of degree courses.
Sometimes we forget that on dozens and dozens of degrees, universities
are seeking placements with local employers. I think sometimes
social work degree colleagues in higher education beat themselves
up unnecessarily because of the difficulties they have. People
running other degree programmes have similar difficulties. Having
said that, it is important that we get it right, and I agree with
Jane that compulsion is probably not the best way of doing it.
When I talk to employers about this, they are keen to be involved,
but they want to be involved in more than just the placement.
They want to be involved in other aspects of the training as well,
so that they feel that they are working on and committing themselves
to a professional training programme, rather than just being the
recipient of a student on a placement. The employers I have spoken
to are looking for more.
Q121 Chairman: But initial
teacher training placements are not compulsory, and they seem
to be doing a lot better job than you.
Keith Brumfitt: My background
is education, so I am an insider and I did rather a lot of time
in initial teacher training at universities. When I was running
placements in a university for teacher training, placing 400 people
a year, we had the same difficulties. It was about relationships
and embedding the universities and the employers or schools in
the same room, spending a lot of time making it work and ironing
out difficulties. That is not to say the people on social work
degrees are not doing that, but it is a common challenge for universities—finding
high-quality placements.
Q122 Chairman: Keith, I put
it to you that we are doing a parallel inquiry into the training
of teachers and we are not getting this constant complaint of
a lack of placements from the training-of-teachers side. We are
getting it from this side, so something is going awry here.
Keith Brumfitt: Indeed.
Q123 Chairman: To push that
further, we are at a critical point in the development of social
work. If among the 150 local authorities in England, there is
another situation comparable to the tragic case of baby Peter,
you know what will happen to that local authority in terms of
jobs and all the rest. So this is of the moment; it is extremely
important that we have a highly qualified social work work force.
With that being of the moment and the fact that we are at last
perhaps going to see Ofsted being more rigorous and hands-on in
its inspection, is this not the opportunity for all of you in
this sector to make the changes and quite dramatically improve
placements?
Keith Brumfitt: I agree that stronger
work on improving the quality of placements is very important,
but with regard to the comparison to the initial training of teachers,
10 or 15 years ago they were in a very similar position, with
real difficulties about placements and the quality of placements.
It has taken a lot of work consistently, predictably, around working
at those relationships and structures. It is tough.
Q124 Chairman: You are giving
me the impression that, compared to the education world, social
work is all a bit sloppy.
Keith Brumfitt: No—
Q125 Chairman: You have not
got around to it; you have not built the relationships—it
has been a second-order priority. But it is in an area where children
die if we do not get it right. It is not like education, where
children might get a pretty awful education. This is a sector
where children die if we get it wrong or end up spending years
in a miserable situation.
Keith Brumfitt: I do not think
that the sector is sloppy at all. I think that there is a lot
of work that the HEIs are doing to build these relationships,
which are difficult relationships. The HEIs are working with a
lot of employers who have significant vacancy levels. Some of
those employers find it difficult to provide the supervision and
support for a student on placement, because of the vacancy situation.
Jane Haywood: Of course the degree
is still quite new, so we are still, if you like, building the
relationships. This is the first year that the first set of candidates
are coming out,[48]
or it may have been last year, so we are still building up and
learning how to deal with this different kind of degree and a
different kind of student.
Rosie Varley: Also, professional
regulation in social work is still very new. I think that we have
to remember that it is still in its infancy. The profession is
still building itself and learning what it means to be accountable
and responsible, and to work to standards. I think that a lot
has been achieved in the last few years, but there is certainly
a long way to go.
Mike Wardle: I want to give one
bit of history, if I may. Under the former diploma in social work,
the requirement was over two years to complete 130 days of practice
education. With the introduction of the degree in 2003, that was
lifted to 200 days. So the sector has had to expand the number
of practice placement days that it can provide by an enormous
amount. First, there is simply that increase from 130 to 200 days
of practice education in each qualification. Secondly, there has
been a 30% increase in the number of students coming through the
qualification. In fact, I think the sector has done an enormously
good job in expanding offers very quickly. We know that there
are problems of getting good-quality placements. I think that
universities, when pressed, would say, "Well, we can get
placements, but we just want a bit more quality". What we
have done, in partnership with CWDC and Skills for Care, which
runs the adult side of workplace development in social work, is
to produce a new tool that we are piloting with both employers
and universities. That new tool is all about the quality of practice
learning, so that we can get a better handle on those things that
are going well and those things that are not. We intend to make
that a compulsory part of the quality assurance regime for practice
placements once we have done that piloting.
Chairman: People are going to get Sue
and Hilary's back up about how long is required. I can see them
nodding or shaking their head at some of these points.
Q126 Mr Heppell: There is
a problem that rolls on from that. People have been put in placements
where there were no qualified social workers there, so, effectively,
it is other professions that are looking at them. I am no expert
in this area but my understanding is that the practice teaching
award, which was brought in with the diploma for social work in
1992, has now been superseded by the introduction of the post-qualifying
framework. John Barraclough from London Metropolitan university
said to us, "That's who you are downgrading", whereas
before you were bringing people on. It was doing what the medical
profession would do; qualified people would train people below
them. The assumption would be that people would be qualified,
but when they were qualified they would be expected to do some
of the training of other people, to make them qualified. He was
saying that he thought that that had been lost. Why has the enrolment
on practice education awards been so poor?
Mike Wardle: It is directly our
responsibility. We inherited the previous system of post-qualification
awards in social work from a predecessor organisation. The reason
why we took the decision to shift the practice teaching element
of the post-qualifying award away from a specialist qualification
in practice teaching was that our evidence showed that most people
who had taken that qualification only ever managed to supervise
one student in their career after they got the qualification.
It was a very good qualification for learning management and for
learning how to supervise staff. It was fantastic for that and
people used it as a stepping stone towards management positions,
but it was not delivering what it was intended to deliver, which
was a cadre of people in the profession who specialised in being
practice teachers and taking on students. Therefore, the direction
that we have taken is that every single specialist post-qualifying
award in our new framework includes a module that is about supervising
and mentoring others, whether they are students or staff, to try
to achieve exactly that goal and so that the whole profession
takes responsibility for supervising and mentoring, and the development
of the future profession of social work. That is the intention.
We are still in the early stages for that new award and we do
not yet have enough evidence to say whether it has been a successful
development. However, we think that it is a step in the right
direction, given what we inherited, which was an award that was
not delivering what it was intended to deliver.
Q127 Mr Heppell: Is there not a problem
because any qualification is likely to lead people to be promoted
out of where you want them to be? Must there not be a mechanism
to require qualified people to spend some of their time ensuring
that others are trained as well?
Keith Brumfitt: As colleagues
said earlier, one of the projects we are developing this year
is a pilot working with 45 local authorities on the idea of the
advanced social work professional. Such people would take on a
more senior role in a front-line job in social work within a local
authority. As Jane mentioned, we will be looking for a pay premium.
As part of that, we will specify explicitly what they are required
to do in the new role. That will of course include support for
student and trainee social workers as well as other less experienced
social workers in the team. That is in addition to the post-qualification
arrangements that Mike described. It will make explicit that more
experienced and senior staff in local authorities have a responsibility
to work with less experienced staff. We can build on what is already
going on in 40 or 50-plus local authorities. There are therefore
other things on top of the qualification.
Q128 Fiona Mactaggart: It
is striking that the evidence about the post-qualification courses
and routes suggests that there is no consensus between different
organisations on the best way of doing it. Everyone says that
it is not good enough at present, but the suggestions we have
received in evidence and proposals do not all point in the same
direction. There seems to be a lot of diversity. I feel that it
would help the Committee hugely if we got a clear steer about
the post-qualification framework. There are obviously complicated
things that need to be done to it. It has been proposed that people
should be enabled to supervise appropriately and that it should
be standard to have people in training. Lots of courses have been
approved and there seems to be little coherence about where they
are geographically and so on. I am wondering what core principles
we should look for in a post-qualification framework. When should
someone be registered to what comes next? I do not think that
I can see clarity in those basic issues.
Chairman: I have time for two quick answers
from two of you. Keith?
Keith Brumfitt: It is an issue
that we have wrestled with in developing our newly qualified social
work programme and our programme of early professional development
in the second and third year of employment. Talking to lots of
employers about how those programmes match or align with the post-qualifying
framework has taken a lot of time. Where we came down to philosophically
was to set, with employers, a series of outcomes that individuals
would be expected to demonstrate at the end of the first year
of employment and then later at the third year of employment.
So, set the outcomes and expectations and then say to employers,
"Please find the most appropriate way to enable your individuals
to meet those outcomes." Some employers have chosen the post-qualifying
framework as the ideal vehicle for achieving those outcomes, but
other local authority employers have chosen internal training
divisions, other arrangements with universities or other bespoke
arrangements. In terms of consistency, we have tried to work with
employers to set clear outcomes at the end of a period of employment
rather than prescribing how people achieve them. That reflected
the range of approaches that local authorities and employers wanted
to take to support their own staff.
Q129 Fiona Mactaggart: It sounds
like a recipe for not getting a coherent profession.
Keith Brumfitt: But the outcomes—[49]
Fiona Mactaggart: I understand why it
has happened.
Mike Wardle: We take the view
that getting a post-qualifying award is an important part of demonstrating
your competence in a specialist practice, whichever area of social
work specialism that is. We have not yet got to the stage of working
that into our requirements of being a registered social worker,
but we have started a process of consultation about the requirements
we make of social workers as part of their registration. We already
require them to undertake a certain amount of continuing education
in each three-year period of registration, to check that and to
renew their registration. There is a serious debate, however,
about whether the first registration period should incorporate
a requirement to meet the newly qualified social worker standards
at the end of year one and whether it should go on to say that
someone should have achieved a post-qualifying award in their
specialist area of practice. It would be quite a big shift for
the profession; we have never had that level of specificity about
the level of qualification needed to practice, except in the area
of specialist mental health work, where there has been that requirement.
However, the profession needs to have that debate and say, "Can
you demonstrate your qualification and competence to undertake
complex work in your specialism?" We think that the PQ framework
provides a way in which to do that, so long as it is valued by
employers. You asked about a point of principle, Chairman. You
said that the PQ framework has to have the support of employers
and be valued by them as something that really adds to the quality
of practice. We know, so far, that employers would say that it
does. I was talking recently with the head of safeguarding at
Suffolk. He said that in teams where his people have post-qualification
awards, the quality of practice is different—it is better.
We have not yet spread that message across the country, but that
is where we need to go.
Chairman: Mike, Rosie, Jane and Keith,
thank you very much for that. We apologise again. We want to get
this report out fast in order to make a difference and to influence
policy, so we are pushing ourselves into these double sessions,
although they do not always suit such talented people, as the
eight of you are. We wish that we could have had longer with you.
However, if, after you have left, you think, "Why didn't
I tell them that?", please add to our store of information.
Only when we pick up the resonance can we write something good,
which we intend to do. Thank you.
48 Note by Witness: This has been the second
year that the first set of candidates are coming out. Back
49
Note by Witness: The outcomes provide the consistency
around expectations. Back
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