Examination of Witnesses (Questions 130
- 139)
WEDNESDAY 10 JUNE 2009
LIZ DAVIES,
DR EILEEN
MUNRO AND
PROFESSOR MICHAEL
PRESTON-SHOOT
Q130 Chairman: I welcome Dr
Eileen Munro, Liz Davies and Professor Michael Preston-Shoot to
our proceedings. We are very grateful that you have taken the
time to be with us. This is a very important inquiry for us. We
apologise for the room and its acoustics. We also apologise for
the fact that, because we are trying to get on with this inquiry
in parallel with a major inquiry into the training of teachers,
we have double-banked the evidence. Normally, we would not want
to do that, but we have to do it just to get through the material.
Our apologies if you find us rattling through the questions. I
must also declare an interest because Dr Munro is an old friend
of mine, and she is a governor of the London School of Economics,
as am I. Any other declarations of interest? No. We usually give
you the chance briefly to say something to get us started. You
can say where you think we are on the training of social workers
or you can opt to go straight into questions. Eileen?
Dr Munro: May I just make a statement
about my area of competence? It is specifically around child welfare,
rather than social work in general. On the whole, most of my experience
is in how organisations do risk assessment and the understanding
of organisational factors that make for good or bad reasoning.
Chairman: Could I ask our team to move
the microphones slightly towards the table?
Liz Davies: I teach and train
social workers at London Metropolitan University. I also specialise
in child protection training post-qualification. Until fairly
recently, I was teaching police and social workers about the investigation
of child protection issues and the investigative interviewing
of children. I am very grateful for the opportunity to present
to the Committee, and one thing that I am really keen for it to
address is the lack of post-qualifying training now for joint
investigation between the police and social workers. The courses
rarely run, and this training is absolutely essential to effective
child protection practice, so that is a big concern to me.
Q131 Chairman: Your written
evidence on that was very compelling, Liz. Thank you for that.
Michael, we will go onto first-name terms rather than titles.
Is that all right?
Professor Preston-Shoot: Yes,
please do. My surname is rather long, so it is much easier to
be on first-name terms. I have been a social work academic for
the past 20 years. I was one of the members of the Joint University
Council's Social Work Education Committee, which was involved
with the Department of Health in the development of the social
work degree, in its planning and early implementation stages.
You have had evidence from JUC SWEC in written form and orally.
I qualified as a social worker in the mid-1970s, and I mainly
teach and research the interface between law and professional
practice, which is why the submission that I co-wrote with Roger
Kline has a particular slant to it, which is the legal and ethical
literacy of organisations and individual practitioners within
them.
Chairman: Thank you for that. Derek,
as we did not allocate you a question would you like to open up
the questioning? Do you have a general question?
Derek Twigg: I have no questions.
Chairman: Are you sure? Right, let us
go straight into questioning with Fiona.
Q132 Fiona Mactaggart: Let
us start at the beginning, with the content of the social work
degree course. There is no national common curriculum for social
work degree courses, and in our evidence so far we have heard
a number of comments that the social work degree course in the
UK is not appropriately preparing social workers to deal with
issues of child protection, which are so critical. I wondered
whether you felt that our higher education institutions had a
shared understanding of what should happen on a first degree course,
and whether there ought to be a common curriculum, as opposed
to the outcomes that are supposed to be achieved.
Professor Preston-Shoot: I hesitate
to begin giving evidence by contradicting a Member, but we do
have prescriptions for social work education.
Q133 Fiona Mactaggart: But
prescribed outcomes, not prescribed input.
Professor Preston-Shoot: No, prescribed
content, in the sense that we have the Quality Assurance Agency's
benchmark for social work, which was revised in 2008 and which
very clearly states what social work degree programmes should
contain in relation to values, knowledge bases and skills. The
focus is as much on content as on outcome. There are also the
national occupational standards, which the sector skills councils
produced in 2002, alongside the five prescribed areas that are
in the Department of Health's own requirements for the degree,
so universities in general do have a very clear idea about what
the content of the degree should be. Every approval and reapproval
process conducted within universities, and overseen directly by
the General Social Care Council, should contain a mapping of how
the curriculum as it is proposed to be delivered by a university
with its agency partners maps against the core requirements in
the three documents that I have outlined.
Q134 Fiona Mactaggart: Why
do you think we have had such robust criticism of the outcomes
of the preparation that the degree—not post-qualification
studies—is giving to social workers in relation to child
welfare and protection? The Children and Family Court Advisory
Support Service says that students are not properly able to put
"their learning from universities into practice" because
they lack "confidence in engaging with service users"
and "understanding of risk assessment and child protection
issues", have "a limited understanding of child development
in relation to abuse" and neglect, and lack skill in writing
legal and court reports. The latter may be an appropriate point
to develop later. The Institute of Education says in written evidence
that "social work training is thin on analytic skills"
and "on helping develop reflective practice" and that
there is insufficient "attention given to understanding the
potential of effective interventions". The London borough
of Hackney says that "training courses put a strong emphasis
on values"—I notice the first thing that you note—"but
teach little about evidence-based methodology, and that there
needs to be more emphasis on changing what goes on in families
and not just assessment." That is the critical issue, is
it not? The evidence seems to show that social work education
is, in a way, slightly abstract, and is not professional preparation.
Unless it is professional preparation, newly qualified social
workers will simply be unable to do what is required of them when
they begin their professional life. I see that Eileen is desperate
to intervene.
Dr Munro: There is a horrible
tendency at my age to think back to the good old days, but in
my training I had excellent placements in social work units that
were staffed by highly competent people. One problem is that the
university can only do part of the job; there must also be placements
in statutory agencies where people are able to teach to a high
standard. You need a work force that is allowed to work to a high
standard. At the moment, we have a work force that is very constrained
by a very clumsy performance management system, which does not
put the welfare of the child at the heart of the service.
Q135 Fiona Mactaggart: In
that case, why did the Director of Social Services from Hackney,
for example, say to us that he did not employ UK-educated social
workers and that he only employs them from overseas, because they
can do that?
Chairman: I think he was the assistant
director.
Fiona Mactaggart: Sorry, forgive me.
Dr Munro: I think that it is partly
because the education overseas is at a higher academic standard,
but the assistant director in Hackney has the courage to speak
the truth when others have perhaps been cautious. It is a reality
that the nature of a lot of the practice these days is not good
enough. It is not just that we are failing to pick up cases of
abuse, but I think that a lot of the work, as experienced by families,
is damaging, so that we not only fail to protect children, but
harm the family with clumsy social work.
Q136 Fiona Mactaggart: What
would you do differently in the undergraduate degree to remedy
that?
Dr Munro: I think that you need
a remedial solution, which may become permanent, but you have
to accept that the skill is not in the work force. We need to
create social work student units, have joint appointments, and
create settings with people who have the time and the skill to
do that practice experience with people and not expect those who
have huge case loads and are demoralised and inexperienced themselves
to provide that training.
Chairman: Michael, you were nodding.
Professor Preston-Shoot: I agree
with Eileen that universities can only do so much. Some 50% of
the degree is delivered in practice agencies. Good practice teaching
and good practice assessment, which is legally literate and skilled
and literate in all the knowledge bases around human growth and
development, including child care and safeguarding, is absolutely
fundamental. Certainly, a lot of the research that I have done,
for example, on legal knowledge and the skills in implementing
that knowledge among practice teachers, experienced social workers
and their managers, identified deficits in those areas. I agree
with Eileen, but I would extend her analysis and say that we need
to focus on the quality of the organisations in which students
are placed and in which newly qualified social workers enter at
the end of their degrees. In other words, we need to focus not
only on the quality of the knowledge and the skills of practice
teachers, but on the quality of the organisation as a whole. There
is a wonderful quote by a judge in relation to an Isle of Anglesey
child care judicial review. He referred obiter dicta to viruses
having entered an organisation and infected all of its decision
making. If this inquiry is in part about identifying viruses,
we need to look at organisations as a whole. Although we have
the documents to which I referred earlier, universities, which
deal with the academic part of the curriculum, have to make choices
within the time available. There will therefore be different emphases
across the university sector about what is foregrounded within
the academic part of the curriculum. I am very clear in my university
that what should be foregrounded are the knowledge and skills
relating to safeguarding right across service user groups, because
that is absolutely fundamental, but other universities may make
different choices about what is foregrounded.
Liz Davies: I think the General
Social Care Council requirements have to change, because at the
moment they state that there are 200 day placements, which is
an enormous part of the social work experience, and the placements
must be contrasting. That is not good enough, because it means
that students can do two adult placements—providing they
are different—in mental health, older people and so on.
I am in quite a lot of contact with Maria Ward, who was Baby Peter's
social worker. She did two adult placements on her course, but
her first job was in Haringey and she had no post-qualifying training
in child protection, so she was set up to fail. It is a very important
factor to say that there should be one children's placement and
one adult placement, which is what we insist upon at London Metropolitan
university. The other requirement relates to the statutory placement.
It does not say that you have to do such a placement, only an
aspect of it. For instance, a student could do the first placement
in the voluntary sector and the second placement in a children's
department and not do statutory work, but the component could
be fulfilled by them shadowing a social worker on an assessment
or something like that, which is totally inadequate. I supervise
about 20 students on placements. My other big problem is that
a lot of them are supervised by practice assessors who are not
qualified social workers and do not understand the language that
I am using. They do not even have to complete practice teacher
training. We strongly encourage them to do so, but they do not
have to do it. For the second placement, we insist that, if they
are not actually social work qualified, they have a long arm who
is a qualified social worker, but such qualified social workers
are not on site every day for the detail of the complexities of
practice. I think that the whole placements issue has to be re-examined.
Q137 Fiona Mactaggart: Liz,
when you watch your students on placement—presumably you
go to observe them—do you see them sitting on the floor
with children, or do you see them sitting on chairs talking to
adults?
Liz Davies: Or putting data into
computers perhaps?
Fiona Mactaggart: Or putting data into
computers, indeed. I am trying to get the texture of the placements.
Liz Davies: We don't actually
do that much monitoring. We do an initial three-way visit with
the practice assessor and ensure that it is a suitable placement
and so on. We then do a mid-way visit where the student does a
presentation of a case. That is where I mostly pick up poor practice,
particularly around child protection. I have some recent examples
that are really worrying, where the student gives a wonderful
presentation of a case, but they have not protected a child because
there is a lack of knowledge in the placement from the practice
assessor and the whole framework that they work within. We can
teach the students rigorously at the university about child protection
systems, but when they go on placement, those systems are not
there for them.
Q138 Fiona Mactaggart: But
do you teach them about communicating with children?
Liz Davies: Oh yes, definitely.
We run a whole module on communication with children.
Q139 Fiona Mactaggart: Where
does it start?
Liz Davies: Sorry?
Fiona Mactaggart: I am serious about
this—where does it start? I really mean it about sitting
on the floor. I am shocked by the fact that I don't see social
workers doing that.
Liz Davies: We certainly teach
that. It is a skills-based module. We talk about the detail of
communication in terms of working with interpreters and with disabled
children. We take them through the whole process of a formal investigative
interview and then through therapeutic work and storytelling—it
is a very comprehensive course. We work with service users throughout
the course: they are involved in designing, assessing and delivering
the course, and they monitor student performance. Every single
session is worked through simulations and role plays, and service
users feed back to the students on those role plays.
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