Examination of Witnesses (Questions 160
- 179)
WEDNESDAY 10 JUNE 2009
LIZ DAVIES,
DR EILEEN
MUNRO AND
PROFESSOR MICHAEL
PRESTON-SHOOT
Q160 Chairman: You used to
train social workers within two years, didn't you?
Liz Davies: Yes.
Q161 Chairman: You have three
years now and you still say that you can't have more focus and
more specialisation in the third year.
Liz Davies: We have some options
for students in the final year.
Q162 Mr Stuart: The Association
of Directors of Children's Services, who are the consumers of
your product, don't seem to share your rosy view that you are
giving the specialised skills that people need. If they are the
consumers of your product and they don't think that, surely you
need to think again, don't you?
Liz Davies: Within the degree,
there are modules that are specialised. We do mapping across the
whole programme, so we make sure that different modules focus
more on adults or children, and that there is a balance.
Q163 Mr Stuart: Why is the
consumer—as I am calling the ADCS—so unhappy?
Dr Munro: I think that the families
and service users are the consumers, not the directors of children's
services.
Chairman: Graham, do you have one last
question?
Q164 Mr Stuart: Are the people
delivering social work degree courses sufficiently up to date
on the current situation? We have been going on about joint agency
work and over the past few years there has been tremendous change
in children's services and inter-agency working. Are the people
who are teaching those courses, where specialised courses are
taught, capable and up to date enough to do that?
Chairman: Can you all give quick answers
to that.
Professor Preston-Shoot: That
is a major challenge, and not just for the social work profession.
I am the dean of a faculty that also includes health, and I have
health care managers, practitioners and educators asking me the
same question. Many universities are required to major in research,
and it would be very helpful if it were also possible for university
academics to achieve the same kind of standing by making contributions
to practice and to the management of practice in the way that
I do by being an independent chair of two safeguarding boards.
If the same value were put on that as is put on the research assessment
exercise, it would be easier for universities to meet the professional
imperative that you were describing. The converse is that the
organisations that you are calling the consumers of our product
are in fact deliverers of 50% of the product, so they are not
just consumers. The converse of what I have just said in relation
to universities is if we can have a system where children's departments
and adult social care departments also see education and training
as a core part of their business Whether they make that contribution
through joint appointments directly into higher education institutions
or in other ways, they are none the less learning communities
in that sense.
Chairman: That was a long answer, but
a very good one.
Professor Preston-Shoot: I am
sorry that it was long.
Chairman: Eileen, do you want to go on
that?
Dr Munro: Sorry, I've got lost.
Chairman: Eileen has lost the will to
live.
Q165 Mr Stuart: Is the current teaching
work force up to date with current practice and therefore able
to teach people and prepare them for front-line practice?
Dr Munro: I think they are as
up to date as you can be when it is such an evolving scene. Keeping
up to date is difficult even for people in the field.
Q166 Mr Stuart: Is that a
yes or a no?
Dr Munro: It is a they are as
good as they can be.
Chairman: Liz.
Liz Davies: We have a partners
forum; we have 10 partners in London local authorities and we
meet regularly so there is a constant to and fro in terms of sharing
experience and knowledge.
Chairman: We have one more section on
these questions, but I am going to get Derek in.
Q167 Derek Twigg: A number of profound
statements have been made, two of which struck me. One was that
there is too much emphasis on engaging with families and not enough
on being suspicious and challenging, and the other was that we
should look much more at prevention than at protection, so following
on from Graham's point about people getting up-to-date training
and methods, how could that be? If there is too much focus on
engagement and not enough on being suspicious and challenging,
how could there be too much focus on prevention and not enough
on protection? I don't understand that.
Dr Munro: Well, the policy of
Every Child Matters clearly says that. Margaret Hodge made the
statement that they want to shift the focus towards prevention,
but she did not finish the sentence with "and away from protection",
which is the logical consequence. You have ended up with an assessment
framework in which because the old protection model did not look
widely enough at the family's needs, they have unintentionally
gone too far the other way—looking at the family's needs
without looking at it as a child abuse case about the level of
harm.
Q168 Derek Twigg: Who has
gone too far?
Dr Munro: The Government frameworks
have gone too far.
Q169 Derek Twigg: So, something
specifically in the Government framework says that you should
now concentrate more on prevention than protection?
Dr Munro: It has got a single
mindset in it, and I have been saying that you need to switch
from one mindset to the other.
Derek Twigg: I am sorry, I am not quite
understanding you. Where is the wording that says "Concentrate
more on"—
Dr Munro: It is called the "assessment
of need framework", so it is in the title.
Derek Twigg: That says that you should
concentrate more on prevention than protection?
Dr Munro: Yes.
Derek Twigg: It actually says that in
those words?
Dr Munro: Yes, that is the whole
tenor of it.
Q170 Derek Twigg: A final
thing is that, surely, as a social worker, it would be trained
into you that, while, of course, you want to engage with families,
you must be suspicious and challenging. How is that not the case
today?
Dr Munro: You have to remember
the power of the performance indicators. If you are rushing to
get your initial assessment done in seven days and your core assessment
in 35 days, your little worries that would take a long time to
explore become something that you leave aside, because your manager
is nagging you to do something else.
Q171 Derek Twigg: It is a
bit like asking a police officer not to be suspicious, isn't it?
Dr Munro: They have the same problem,
haven't they?
Q172 Derek Twigg: They are
not suspicious then?
Dr Munro: They are spending too
long on paperwork instead of being suspicious and following things.
That is why they are trying to abandon targets in the police force.
Q173 Derek Twigg: You are
basically saying that the training does not instil into new social
workers, at university or elsewhere, the belief that they should
be suspicious?
Dr Munro: The training does it,
but the work culture discourages it. It does not reward it, does
not reinforce it, does not encourage you to go to your manager,
saying, "We have been looking at the family this way; I think
we have got it completely wrong."
Q174 Derek Twigg: The training
is a waste of time then?
Dr Munro: No, you need the training,
but then you need to have the employers reinforcing it. If you
did not have the training in the first place, you would not have
a hope of reinforcing it.
Q175 Derek Twigg: So it is
all down to targets?
Dr Munro: It is one of the aspects
at the moment that all social workers find very destructive. It
is one aspect.
Q176 Mr Chaytor: In all the
information we have received for this inquiry, I do not recall
seeing the statistics on completions in social work degrees, or
on failure rates. Could you give us an indication of what those
figures are?
Professor Preston-Shoot: I cannot
give you an indication off the top of my head. I think I am right
in saying that the annual reports produced by the General Social
Care Council will give completion rates, failure rates and general
attrition rates. Certainly universities, when they report, through
HESA and HESES, to the Quality Assurance Agency and to HEFCE,
will be reporting on completions and non-completions. So the evidence
is out there, even if I cannot reel it off the top of my head
immediately. In my own university, the completion rate for the
three-year degree would be somewhere around 90% of candidates.
We fail people for all sorts of reasons—academic, practice,
unprofessional conduct and so on.
Q177 Mr Chaytor: Do you think
there is any exceptional pressure on social work degree providers
not to fail students, for whatever reason, compared with providers
of other degrees or other forms of professional training?
Professor Preston-Shoot: No, and
I would be very adamant about that. I think all social work educators
are profoundly aware that the ultimate accountability is to the
person who is using the service—the service user, the child,
the parent, the mentally unwell person—and we are very clear
that we have to send people out who are ready to begin practice.
I certainly take very seriously the termination of training procedures,
and so forth, in relation to students whose conduct might be of
concern.
Q178 Chairman: Do you share
that view, Eileen, from your perspective?
Dr Munro: I'm not involved in
undergraduate teaching any longer, so I don't know.
Chairman: You don't have a view on it?
Dr Munro: No. It would only be
anecdotal.
Q179 Chairman: We have heard
evidence that there is a real concern. We had an initial seminar
where we had people from university saying, "Some university
courses are not very good and we are very worried about the quality
of students in some institutions" and that not all are up
to the standard. That is a myth, is it?
Liz Davies: There are obviously
professional issues which come up. Maybe a student could succeed
academically and get through all the university regulations, but
there may be issues that come up on the placement; maybe the practical
assessor says, "This person is not suitable to be a social
worker." However, we then have the GSCC code of conduct,
which we have incorporated with the student misconduct regulations,
so that, specifically for the social work courses, we can address
the professional issues within the academic requirements.
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