Examination of Witnesses (Questions 200
- 219)
WEDNESDAY 10 JUNE 2009
BRUCE CLARK,
ELENI IOANNIDES
AND COUNCILLOR
RITA KRISHNA
Q200 Paul Holmes: Rita, your
director has said—and you have said that you agree with
him—that taking social workers who have been trained by
British universities is not acceptable in Hackney, and that you
want people from Canada or Australia, because they have been trained
properly. That is a fairly stark bit of the blame game, is it
not?
Rita Krishna: I don't know quite
how much he talked to you about the model as it was in Hackney.
We want our consultant social workers, or advanced practitioners,
to exercise their responsibility at that particular level, which
is why we have been recruiting overseas. As a lead member, I was
quite surprised that we were in the position of having to do that.
I suppose that is why I hope that we can make a difference through
this Committee and the Social Work Task Force. We want to delegate
that level of responsibility to the consultant social worker.
The director has probably told you that we have multidisciplinary
teams, and you are thinking about the possibility of recommending
that there should be collective working between social workers
and clinicians, family practitioners and so on, in that sort of
unit form. In answer to your question, it is basically because
we want to be able to devolve that level of responsibility to
the consultant social worker.
Q201 Paul Holmes: So, as employers
with that perspective, have you or your director been to the training
providers in London and asked, "Why aren't you doing this
on your courses?" If so, what do they say?
Rita Krishna: I guess we haven't
so far, but I don't know—I would need to check and come
back to you. I felt some guilt about the question of placements,
and I knew you were interested in it, so I inquired as to how
many we offer and, apparently, we usually say no. However, we
train our own, so people who are already employed by us are put
on to social work courses, or they apply and get on to social
work courses, and we accommodate their placements.
Q202 Paul Holmes: Eleni, you
have worked in a number of different authorities in your career
in both the north and the south. In your experience, do employers,
whether in Nottingham or London, get to work with higher education
and say, "This is what we need on the training courses,"
or are they blocked out?
Eleni Ioannides: I think the difficulty
is that the situation is in pockets. You get some really good,
forward-thinking higher education institutions and authorities
that can really make things happen, but it is left to that accident,
if you like, as to whether they can make those partnerships and
make them strong. That is why I say that we need a little bit
more national prescription and leadership on the whole issue to
take it forward. It can't be left to those local partnerships,
because they won't be standard.
Q203 Paul Holmes: This is
my last question: what should central government prescribe? What
should they say about how social worker training should take place
from the HE perspective? For example, a few years ago, they said
that teachers should spend much more time on placements in schools
and less time in the lecture theatre.
Eleni Ioannides: We are looking
for something that mirrors teacher training and the sort of systems
and structures that are around that. First of all, the Government
should define the tasks of the social worker, because, at the
moment, they do what anybody else does not do, which cannot be
good enough. We have to be really clear about what their unique
contribution to the mix is. So, we should start with that and
then have clarity on the curriculum. We should have some much
clearer quality assurance processes for the people involved and
for the curriculum than currently exist, and we need some clarity
about the commissioning of courses as well. There should be much
closer working on that commissioning, and the funding should be
brought together with the course commissioning.
Q204 Chairman: You are pretty
good at taking on people, are you?
Eleni Ioannides: We try to be.
But, it is a moral obligation on our social work departments to
contribute.
Q205 Chairman: So that has
imbued every authority you have been in, because you have made
that decision?
Eleni Ioannides: I have either
made that decision or it was already in place, which was the case
in most places. I think that it is fairly widespread.
Q206 Chairman: So, you are
very different, because CAFCASS only takes people on after they
are quite experienced, and Hackney only takes people from overseas.
Eleni Ioannides: I understand
that CAFCASS has a particular type of role, but that it takes
students.
Chairman: I know. I heard what Bruce
said, and he rebutted our criticism very well indeed.
Rita Krishna: We do grow our own,
Chair. I did say that.
Q207 Chairman: You did, but
what I am not getting from any of you is whether there is a real
problem in getting these training places.
Eleni Ioannides: There is, because
as Bruce said, there is a growing requirement for them. They place
a great strain on the host team, which at the moment is under
the greatest pressure. Our referral rates since the Baby Peter
case have gone up by about 30%, but I spoke to a colleague who
is London based who told me yesterday that their referral rate
went up 105%. You are having to battle the moral panic and everything
that has come with that and be thinking for the greater good of
the whole system that we need to be bringing these social workers
on and putting some time aside. We need to be giving some case
load relief to some people to do a proper job of student supervision,
but case load relief is really difficult and puts a strain on
the whole team. You start to look at things like whether we can
share the student supervision and oversight between workers. How
can we mange all of that? It is difficult.
Chairman: You are spreading a little
capacity very thinly.
Eleni Ioannides: We are. We have
not talked a lot about resources, but I would not be a director
of children's services if I did not come and say that resourcing
is a major issue.
Chairman: You ought to talk to the HEI
providers about taking too many social workers on to courses and
the fact that the system cannot cope with how many they are turning
out.
Eleni Ioannides: At the moment,
in the way that it is currently conceived, it cannot cope.
Chairman: Right, we are going to move
on. David, you are going to talk about post-qualification development
and we are going back—it might seem strange, but we have
our reasons—to the subject of newly qualified social workers
with Edward.
Q208 Mr Chaytor: First, a
question to Bruce. CAFCASS has been quite critical about the lack
of coherent structure in relation to continuing professional development.
How could it be made more coherent? What is missing; who should
be responsible for it; and what are the next steps?
Bruce Clark: To answer the last
bit first, it is very clear from the proceedings you have had
so far who is offering to fulfil that role for you. Bodies now
exist—the Children's Workforce Development Council and the
General Social Care Council—that previously simply were
not available to central government when providing that sort of
co-ordination. We have switched horses from time to time during
the past 20 years and thus far the PQ attempts that have been
made have proved, by in large, to be false dawns. CAFCASS has
tried to take seriously its commitment to its staff in post-qualifying
awards, but for a variety of reasons—the relevance of the
courses to the specific role fulfilled by CAFCASS is one—the
pressures of front-line practice makes it hard for people to make
that commitment. Even if the employer makes the right noises,
creates the right culture and offers backfill, unless you can
take back your money and turn it into another body to do the work,
it is a nice gesture but it is essentially an empty one. There
are real world factors relating to the difficulties of recruitment
and retention that impact on CAFCASS as much as they do on local
authority employers and make it hard to deliver PQ frameworks.
Eleni has already talked about the fact that the PQ award is not
the currency it would be in some other professions for taking
you forward in terms of continuous professional development. We
were joking outside that if you survive five whole working days
as a social worker, you are probably in the frame to be appointed
as a manager. That is a comment about the casualisation of social
work that has taken place over the past 10 years, linked to the
lack of supply of competent people and the departure from the
trade of those who prefer not to do it any more for various reasons,
which is why we are having these come back to social work attempts,
mimicking what has been quite successful in other areas such as
nursing and teaching. There is a whole range of things that we
need to do. I would not be critical of the quality of the PQ courses
in isolation from the wider context. There are lots of reasons,
some of which are not reflected in the quality of the courses
or of the providers who put on those courses for employers to
second people to attend.
Eleni Ioannides: I also think,
perhaps in relation to practice teaching, that we might need a
stand-alone qualification that is not necessarily linked to PQ.
The module that is about management comes right at the end of
the PQ and it is rather too late. We might need something that
we can bring forward to make sure that the practice teachers are
skilled up. I take on board as well and concur with the point
about continuing professional development. We need a systematic
process for that which currently does not exist in the way that
it does, for example, in the health service where you have to
get so many points a year to keep practising. In social work you
have to do 15 days' development over three years, but what those
15 days can consist of is very loose. You can read some trade
magazines. You can have some discussions at team meetings. It
is not very clear or systematic.
Q209 Mr Chaytor: May I just
pursue that with Eleni. Where is the Association of Directors
of Children's Services? You are the managers of the service, so
what has the ADCS done to bring this greater coherence and give
greater priority to the need for continuing professional development.
Eleni Ioannides: It is a difficult
question. The ADCS is a professional body. It is not a trade union
and it is not an employer body either in the way that the LGA
or the Government are. We will have a stance on it, but it is
not in the gift of ADCS to insist on a level of standard for all
local authorities.
Q210 Mr Chaytor: So what is
your stance on it?
Eleni Ioannides: My stance would
be that we would like to see a clear system of continuing professional
development that is systematic and understood by everybody.
Q211 Mr Chaytor: Do you think
it now needs to be nationally funded—a single national funding
stream absolutely dedicated to CPD?
Eleni Ioannides: We need some
national prescription and some national resources to go with it.
Q212 Mr Chaytor: Which are
the priority areas? What are social workers losing out on most
through this lack of coherence and the fragmentation of post-qualification
development?
Eleni Ioannides: In which areas
of work?
Q213 Mr Chaytor: Which areas
of professional development are not properly covered?
Eleni Ioannides: Part of the difficulty
is that different courses focus on different areas. I am not sure
that there is a single answer. Different social workers I have
spoken to have said, "My course overemphasised this"
or "My course overemphasised that", but it was not necessarily
the same thing. What they regularly said they missed was the sort
of court work that Bruce talked about. They were not ready for
the level of paperwork. They were not ready for some of the intensity
of the work. Somehow we have to build all that into their preparation.
Q214 Mr Chaytor: Is the GSCC's
code of practice relevant to all this? Could it be strengthened
and could it play a stronger role in this, or is that a side issue?
Eleni Ioannides: I think it is
relevant and it is useful, but whether it is sufficient is another
matter. Perhaps we should look some more at what we can do to
strengthen it.
Q215 Mr Chaytor: Finally to
Eleni, and to Rita as well perhaps, what is the impact of the
use of agency staff and the lack of focus on professional development?
Would it be possible for local authorities to take a stronger
role in boosting professional development if they were less dependent
on agency staff? Or is there no relationship?
Chairman: Eleni, that is an interesting
one.
Eleni Ioannides: Yes, it is. In
a sense, if we were not dependent on agency staff it would be
easier to take a stronger role. On the other hand, if you need
a body you are better off with the agency staff. So, there is
no simple answer. We have taken the line that we will not keep
any agency staff long term, because they were getting comfortable
with us, being paid at a higher rate and not moving on. We finish
them after three months, and if they want to work for us they
have to apply. That was a risky decision and it has worked for
us, but it might not have. Not everybody is in a position to do
that. Certainly in London you cannot be in a position to do that;
it is locality based as well. The agencies are very important
to us at the moment, but it is disappointing that they have to
be.
Q216 Chairman: Are the agency
people well trained?
Eleni Ioannides: Some are and
some aren't. It is very hit and miss.
Q217 Chairman: What is the
quality control then?
Eleni Ioannides: Each local authority
probably has its own systems for working with particular agencies
that they trust more, have greater faith in and work in partnership
with. Again, it is down to the individual authority to make those
links, and the more desperate you are, the lower level your quality
assurance process will inevitably be, because some things have
to be done regardless.
Mr Chaytor: Rita, on the question of
agencies, and then I have one more question.
Rita Krishna: It is quite a complicated
question. We are carrying a high number of agency staff, and,
as Eleni says, that is common in London. Locally we see that as
part of our change programme, and will do until we have secured
the model that we want. The intention is that everybody is well
supported by CPD. I cannot really answer the question of whether
or not it is more complicated with agency staff.
Q218 Mr Chaytor: Another question
to the LGA, and perhaps to the whole panel. In terms of the current
arrangements for work force development, we seem to have three
overlapping bodies: the General Social Care Council, the Children's
Workforce Development Council and the Social Care Institute for
Excellence. Is each of you confident that those three organisations
have distinct roles, or are overlapping responsibilities part
of the problem?
Chairman: We will start with you Eleni
because I know that you have only five minutes left with us.
Eleni Ioannides: Yes, I am sorry,
but I will need to go in a minute. As an association we have already
submitted a response to the remit review for the sector skills
councils, and we think that there is a case for better co-ordination
and some merging.
Bruce Clark: I am less concerned
about the Social Care Institute for Excellence, which seems to
have a rather separate role from CWDC and GSCC. Ironically, one
waits for years for co-ordinating bodies to come along and within
a decade three come along at once. There is the opportunity and
the need to create greater clarity about the distinct roles and
functions of all those bodies. I have been impressed by the evidence
that has been put to you by the leaders of CWDC and GSCC, in teasing
out what those possibilities might be.
Rita Krishna: Similarly, I think
that there could be greater clarity. For the LGA, I sat for a
little while on the board of CWDC before it became an executive
non-departmental public body. How I articulated myself was that
we have not really had the Children Act, in its wonderful simplicity
of trying to keep people focused on the needs of children, for
that long, not long enough when what you are trying to do is substantially
change professional cultures and get integrated working. I think
that we have had this multiplicity of bodies because we are in
a process of transition. It may be the time to rationalise that,
or not, depending on how we have progressed along that route,
but it is certainly something to think about.
Q219 Mr Timpson: Before you
go, Eleni, may I take you back to something you mentioned earlier
in your evidence? You said that many newly qualified social workers
were entering the profession and deciding that, because of the
melting pot of pressures, they were not going to stick it out,
but leave. In your written evidence, you state that the "degree
courses do not produce graduates who are immediately ready to
enter the workforce as fully-qualified professionals." Is
that the problem? Is it that they are unprepared for what is ahead
of them? If so, in what ways are they unprepared for the task
ahead?
Eleni Ioannides: That is what
my own social workers are saying to me. They are telling me that
they felt unprepared. They are particularly unprepared for court
work and the statutory end of things, but they are also saying
that they did not get from the course a sense of what the job
was like, so they were not ready for the realities of the role.
That is why I am saying that this is not a blame game. We must
all work together to ensure that social workers know what they
are coming into, and the essence of defining the role and the
tasks much more clearly is part of that, as are training, ensuring
that practice placements deliver, and so on.
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