Examination of Witnesses (Questions 185
- 199)
WEDNESDAY 10 JUNE 2009
BRUCE CLARK,
ELENI IOANNIDES
AND COUNCILLOR
RITA KRISHNA
Q185 Chairman: Can I welcome
the witnesses to this slightly delayed second session. Welcome,
Eleni Ioannides, Bruce Clark and Councillor Rita Krishna, to our
proceedings. You have cheated a bit because you have been sitting
there being warmed up to the style of questions. It wasn't really
cheating—it's good experience. We value the people who come
before our Committee and give evidence, and we have learnt a lot—we
learnt a lot from that first session and we hope to learn as much
from this second session. I know that you have to leave early
to go back to Bury at half-past, Eleni, so we will probably ask
you more questions than others in that period. You know what the
inquiry is about, you have heard some of our concerns and the
evidence. What is your take? Some of the last witnesses said there
is a real crisis and we have do something about it urgently. What
is your view?
Eleni Ioannides: We are in danger
of heading towards a crisis, which is a systemic problem. The
problem is not just in the training institutions or in the organisations.
We have entered into a vicious cycle where we have got a melting
pot of pressures within the work that people are doing that does
not allow them to create the greatest environment within which
to train and nurture students. That in itself does not allow more
people to come through, and it means that people are not staying
in the profession. We are getting a lot of people coming as newly
qualified social workers but they are not staying, so experienced
workers come at a real premium and are difficult to keep hold
of. They are the people we need to nurture and support the next
generation.
Chairman: Bruce, what is your take on
this?
Bruce Clark: That is a big question.
Thinking back 20 years to the triple experience of the Carlile,
Henry and Beckford deaths, it is clear that social work was similarly
problematic at that time. Although things are definitely challenging
currently, the low point was probably around 2002-03, in the period
between the commissioning of the Climbié inquiry and its
report. At that stage, the number of people applying for what
in those days was a diploma in social work did not even match
the number of available spaces, so the threshold at which people
might enter courses was really very low. With the introduction
of the degree course, and with more people applying to enter courses
than there are places, there is a single, small green shoot of
recovery. The organisational context has become more troubling
and difficult. With the Baby Peter case coming in the wake of
Laming's first inquiry, it is a brave decision for a young person
to enter social work, in contrast to 20 or 30 years ago, when
most of the social workers who have appeared before you as witnesses
entered social work. The work that you are doing, and the work
that the Government have initiated with the Social Work Task Force,
gives us the prospect of the transformation that we all agree
is needed. Your work can help inspire that.
Chairman: Thank you, Bruce. Rita.
Rita Krishna: I am the lead member
for children in Hackney and although I am here for the LGA, I
am pleased to see how seriously you are taking the submissions
from Hackney. As a lead member, I do not particularly feel that
we are in a crisis in relation to training, but I welcome the
chance to give it the attention that you and the Social Work Task
Force are giving it, as Bruce has said. We have tried to address
some of these issues locally in Hackney, but we need the national
framework to support that.
Chairman: Right. That gets us started.
We will hand over the questioning on the first section to David
and Graham. Graham, you are in charge.
Q186 Mr Stuart: Thank you,
as ever, Chairman, for your leadership. My first question is what
would be the most effective strategy for increasing the number
of student placements in local authorities?
Bruce Clark: There are various
things that can be done. The GSCC encourages employers to play
their part in providing work placements for students. Of course,
the three-year degree and the doubling of the number of placement
days created an immediate gap, compared with the supply that existed
before that point. The fee levels of £18 and £28 a day
for the statutory and voluntary sectors respectively create some
difficulties. CAFCASS makes a loss from providing student placements,
but we think that it is worth it for various reasons, which I
could go into. Were we to get to 120 or more placements, we would
be able to break even, but, as I have said, there are all sorts
of non-financial benefits to all employers from providing student
placements, and we need to take those into account. That is especially
true of employers in local areas, which local authorities are,
with links to local provider institutions, from whom they can
confidently expect to get a number of their future social workers
and to which a number of their staff will have gone to become
qualified.
Rita Krishna: There is a kind
of circularity to the question. Some of the previous witnesses
have said that you need to secure the quality of the supervision
that people get in placements to make sure that they get what
they need. This investigation is about the quality of training
of social workers. Do you see the circularity that I am trying
to point to?
Q187 Mr Stuart: Yes. I did
a survey of all the institutions—the 79 universities—that
do training, and 86% said that local authority placements were
either good or excellent. They were quite happy with the quality.
However, fewer than a quarter thought that the number of placements
is sufficient. It appears to me from my survey that the big problem
is not so much quality, although there are issues with that, which
I am sure we will tease out, but that there are not enough placements.
We need a strategy, and we hope that you will give us things that
we can stick in our report, that the Government will accept and
that will massively increase the incentives for local authorities
to remove whatever blocks are in the way.
Rita Krishna: Okay. Some of your
colleagues have talked about the possibility of having teaching
practice units. That is something that we are enthusiastic about
in Hackney. I know that you are looking at models from other professions—teaching
schools in the teaching profession and teaching hospitals. You
could have a number of teaching local authorities, for example.
We need to develop the synergies between teacher-training providers
and local authorities. There needs to be a greater degree of mutuality
in that relationship.
Q188 Mr Stuart: We need a
strategy to improve that and are interested in any contributions
that you have to make to that. There is also a question about
how cultural it is—teaching is built into the medical profession.
I do not know how much it has to do with incentives and specific
time for training. The medical profession trains the next generation,
but it seems that social workers do not do that in the same way.
Is it because there is not enough money? Is it because social
workers are overloaded with cases?
Chairman: That is an awful lot of questions
at once.
Eleni Ioannides: Obviously, it
is a bit of all of that. With the incentives, as Bruce has already
pointed out, the level of payment is insufficient to allow someone
to release enough time to do the job properly. There is also the
question of what practice teachers get out of it. There is no
career progress, and it is not seen as part of their career progression
to pick up practice teaching. That is a very big issue; in our
case, they get paid an honorarium for doing it. It is not built-in
as a salary progression, because they have attained the status
of practice teacher. That would be a better model. Teachers receive
responsibility payments for taking on additional work, which would
be a better model for social workers as well. Most teams are glad
to have students, who bring freshness and energy to a team. Most
teams will do their best to give a good experience, but they are
under extreme pressure, which can make things very difficult.
Bruce Clark: Let me assist you
by telling you the ways that you can incentivise local teams.
In CAFCASS, we give a back-filled credit of 3 or 4 hours a week,
because it is expected that students will receive at least one
and a half hours of supervision a week. That creates space and
time. The teams sometimes do not feel that they receive the full
credit of £18, but we pass nearly all of that to them. If
they take students, they have to think about not only the pressure
on their own work load, but the pressure on their fellow team
members as a whole. That is one of the reasons why we are exploring
cluster models of groups of students. You get an economy of scale
and a benefit for the group of students together—there is
a fully fledged student unit with funding support from outside
in the case of Blackburn. That is back-fill and making space,
but the other thing that I want to discuss is incentivisation
within career progression. I am advised by my practice learning
co-ordinator that the enabling learning module is no longer a
core part of the post-qualifying award. The removal of the requirement
to do that module and then have a student as part of one's first
post-qualifying award removes what was previously an incentive.
Q189 Mr Stuart: Do all three
of you agree with that point? It sounds like a practical measure
that we could recommend, if you do.
Rita Krishna: You could recommend
a 10-year programme of investment in the development and training
of social workers, so that it more closely resembles the one for
medicine. That would change the model for social work, so that
it looks more like the ones for teaching and medicine.
Q190 Mr Stuart: How is the
General Social Care Council funding for practice placements actually
used?
Bruce Clark: I think I have given
you some examples of how we use it, but I would make the point
that individual institutions do not always pass the full sum to
the local authority placements. Because we could potentially link-up
with any social work course provider, we find that some of them
are offering us as little as £4 a day rather than £18.
We find ourselves preferring not to accept students from those
institutions, instead preferring those who provide the full sum.
I am sure there are good reasons why smaller sums might be offered—individual
local authorities can offer placements at those lower rates—but
I think money has got something to do with it.
Q191 Chairman: Schools get
£10 a day for teachers on placement, don't they?
Mr Stuart: Rita, from the LGA's point
of view it would seem that there has been a cash grab by local
authorities, who are not using it for what it is there for.
Bruce Clark: Not a cash grab by
the local authorities, but some holding back of moneys by the
social work course providers.
Mr Stuart: Sorry.
Q192 Chairman: Can we drill
down on this? Can we have a straight answer? Is it the money,
or not?
Eleni Ioannides: It is, but it
is not just the money—it is more than that, but the money
obviously helps you to do some of that "more than that".
Chairman: Rita?
Rita Krishna: I don't know. I
have said that what is needed for the transformation of the social
work profession is a 10-year programme of investment. The extent
to which that would need to be directed towards placements is
a moot point.
Chairman: But in 10 years we might have
some awful child protection issues.
Rita Krishna: You are going to
ask some more questions, but something that arose from previous
ones is that—in my view—we need to have a specialised
programme of training for social work. A five-year programme would
need to include a specialism for children, because of the complexity
that some of the previous witnesses brought out surrounding the
challenge for children's social workers of holding empathy and
risk in the same head. That is connected with intellectual capacity,
and there is a need for training in that area. Children's social
workers need that skill, and it needs to be in that "one
head" rather than separated out into different teams.
Q193 Mr Stuart: At the last
evidence session, there was a recommendation that every social
work trainee should have one adult and one child placement. At
the moment a trainee can do two adult placements, if they are
differentiated, and then end up in child protection work. Do you
three think it a good idea that we recommend that the situation
should change, so that every trainee does one adult and one child
placement? Also, do you think that, so as to pick up placements
that are not of sufficient quality, there should be greater specification
of what a placement consists of, to ensure that all placements
are of high quality?
Eleni Ioannides: My association's
view is clear. It is inconceivable to us that somebody can come
into the complexity of child care social work without having a
specialism in that; the landscape is too difficult. We are clear
that on top of a generic foundation, the third year should contain
a specialism. Then, at the end of the newly qualified year, the
trainee would be licensed to practice. In my authority, we will
not employ social workers unless they have had not only a child
care placement, but a statutory child care placement. Otherwise,
we find that they don't stay and we can't use them.
Rita Krishna: I am not going to
answer your question quite directly because I think the profession
needs a wholly new framework for training that would include a
review of study placements. There should be an extended degree
course with long-term placements in front-line services in local
authorities, and the structure of specialism to allow students
to qualify in children, young people and families social work.
There should be a postgraduate programme for advanced study in
placement. Also, the providers of training and social work education
need a thorough inspection regime, which would include practising
social workers.
Q194 Mr Stuart: To be clear,
you have mentioned an extended degree of three to four years.
In New York, caseworkers are trained in eight weeks, which—admittedly—is
fairly astonishing. Are you suggesting that we should have a four-year
degree?
Rita Krishna: We need to recognise
the complexity of what children's social workers are trying to
do. It is not that they cannot do it in terms of risk and empathy,
but they need to be properly trained and have the intellectual
capacity.
Chairman: That is quite a radical view,
particularly as your deputy director told the Committee that he
didn't employ anyone from the UK—he employed people only
from Australia, Canada and so on.
Rita Krishna: Yes, but that is
because, as I understand it, their training is an MA with a specialism
in children's social care.
Q195 Chairman: So you agree
with your deputy director?
Rita Krishna: That is correct.
He could not have embarked on the programme of restructuring or
reclaiming social work without the agreement of the Mayor of Hackney,
Jules Pipe, and me. Of course I am going to agree with him.
Chairman: It wasn't a criticism. We are
just trying to find out the facts.
Bruce Clark: I will answer your
question within its rather narrow confines. I agree with what
Eleni and others have said. Assuming that the generic base is
provided in the first two years, and a specialist placement in
the relevant discipline or aspect of social work in which the
student wishes to focus on beyond their qualification, I don't
think that any employer should employ as a children's social worker
someone who has not had a final placement, not only in a children's
social work setting, but in a statutory children's social work
setting. CAFCASS provides, I think, the most statutory of statutory
placements. We provide them only to final year students. Here
is what one of them said: "This is my final year and if I
hadn't had this placement, I don't think I would have known what
social work was really like." I don't know what that student's
first placement was, but my experience as a social work manager
over many years and in many agencies is that many social work
placements are not in the mainstream and have little concept of
the statutory construct within social work.
Q196 Chairman: That is pretty
depressing. But CAFCASS, when it eventually hires, hires only
people who have three or four years' experience.
Bruce Clark: That is right. During
CAFCASS's short life, it has moved from employing people with
at least five years' post-qualification experience to those with
only three years', amidst, it must be said, accusations of dumbing
down. In practice, the people that we employ tend in the main
to be senior practitioners and team leaders from local authorities
who have substantially more experience than our new lower minimum
of three years.
Q197 Chairman: So you wait
for somebody else to train them up and then take them?
Bruce Clark: That is true, but
I would like to make clear that the contribution that we make
to social work education—194 third-year placements in the
last three years—shows that we are not merely parasitical
robber barons poaching across the border. We are playing our full
part in bringing in the next generation of students, some of whom
we hope will join us in time.
Chairman: Thank you for that, Bruce.
We are going to move on now.
Q198 Paul Holmes: There is
an interesting dichotomy between the first three witnesses today,
who were from higher education. They said that the problems are
that local authorities are not delivering properly, because local
authorities are so obsessed with ticking boxes to meet the Government's
requirements. You are saying, as the written evidence we received
from the employer side said, that the training of social workers
and the higher education institutions are the problem, and that
employers do not get a say on how those courses work. Which is
true? Is the higher education and training at fault, or is your
side at fault?
Eleni Ioannides: We need to get
into partnership on this—it is the only way forward. We
need some national leadership and to grasp the nettle on quality
assurance systems for courses, practice placements and practice
teachers. We need to make a fully understood, clear and credible
system. I agree with Rita that it is not a quick-fix issue. We
might be able to do some quick-fix things in the meantime, but
a long-term investment is needed. It is a whole-system of recruitment
and retention for social workers, and it involves career progression
and everything that goes along with that.
Bruce Clark: Like Eleni, I do
not think that the blame game is a fruitful one to enter into.
There are so many opportunities for improvement that there is
very little point in pointing the finger at one side. As a policy
civil servant in 2002-03 in the Department of Health, I was involved
in the discussion that led to the national occupational standards,
which represented a compromise. My desire as a policy civil servant
for far more of the statute, regulations and guidance to be formally
inserted into the curriculum was not wholly successful. I am fascinated
that it looks like that is what we are going to do this time around.
To be fair to governments of the past eight years, we have seen
them, a little tentatively to start with, mimicking the initiatives
from teaching that began as long ago as 1995. In 2001, we saw
the first national social work recruitment campaign. Until that
point, the view had been taken by governments that the employment
and development of social workers was a matter for the individual
employers, not a matter in which central government had a role.
Increasingly since 2001, and especially this year, as evidenced
by your Committee's interest, you are seeing a key role—with
lots of comparisons being made, even this morning, to what has
gone on in teaching—for Government in driving forward and
leading that process alongside employers.
Q199 Paul Holmes: In teaching
and medicine, there is much more clear input from central government,
and there are more requirements on what training takes place in
higher education and how much of that is on-the-job training in
placements. Are you saying that you need much more of that for
social workers?
Bruce Clark: Yes, I think we need
to do that. The split, in 2003, of adult and children's social
care between the Department of Health and the then Department
for Education and Skills created some new boundaries, but we are
getting over that now. Having read what the GSCC has had to say,
it is clearly putting itself to you as a lovely new car that is
purring in the driveway ready to be loaded up with additional
responsibilities and take forward that role on behalf of government.
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