Training of Children and Families Social Workers - Children, Schools and Families Committee Contents


Memorandum submitted by the Family Rights Group

1.  ABOUT FAMILY RIGHTS GROUP

  1.1  Family Rights Group is the charity in England and Wales that advises parents and other family members whose children are involved with, or require, social care services. We run a confidential telephone and email advice service for families, staffed by experienced, qualified childcare social workers and lawyers and advocates with an equivalent level of expertise in advising families.

1.2  Established as a registered charity in 1974, we work to increase the voice children and families have in the services they use. We promote policies and practices that assist children to be raised safely and securely within their families, and campaign to ensure that support is available to assist grandparents and other relatives who are raising children who cannot live with their parents.

2.  INTRODUCTION

  2.1  The social work profession is seemingly in disarray since the death of Baby P in Haringey. The role of the childcare social worker is constantly vilified and debated and frequently it appears to be the social worker not the actual person causing harm who is blamed for the death of or injuries to a small child.

2.2  Although there is frequent mention in the press of things going wrong, there is seldom any attention given to the benefits of social work, including successful interventions and early stage support provided by social workers that have prevented problems in families' escalating.

  2.3  Indeed a more preventative refocusing of services underpins the current child welfare agenda set in place by Lord Laming in response to the tragic child death of Victoria Climbie. We welcome the introduction and expansion of facilities for families, such as children's centres and increased childcare provision. Our concern however, is that many of the staff working in these facilities may be inexperienced in dealing with safeguarding concerns and are ill equipped to deal with children and their families who are on the edge of risk. Safeguarding Board training or other equivalent courses for these workers is essential. Moreover, facilities such as children's centres, don't remove the need for or importance of specialist services. Yet high thresholds for accessing such specialist services, mean too many children and families are deprived of the skilled intervention they need until their problems escalate into a child protection or the child has become embroiled in the youth justice system.

  2.4  Amongst the social work profession generally there appears to be confusion over the tasks and roles of the social worker, which has become over bureaucratised and dominated by systems which often aren't fit for purpose, in particular ICS. Staff are often inadequately prepared for these electronic systems and the IT infrastructures have not been developed in a way that assists the social worker in their role. Consequently, social workers are spending too much time at their desk and too little time working directly with children and families.

3.  ENTRY ROUTES TO SOCIAL WORK

  3.1  Confusion as to social work training and subsequent pay doesn't encourage mature entrants into the profession and the current media reporting of the social work profession further acts to inhibit recruitment of suitable applicants. The profile needs to be raised and the government and the profession itself need to take more responsibility to highlight the good practice and preventative work undertaken by children and family social workers, as well as raising issues when mistakes are made or tragedies occur.

3.2  Social work is a skilled professional requiring complex judgements. This should be reflected both in the selection processes for social work courses and in academic standards set by Universities. Qualified social workers should be expected to have good literacy skills, be able to gather, disseminate and analyse findings and present often complex information in appropriate ways to a variety of people in different settings eg families, professionals, courts etc. It is important that social workers can articulate their views drawing upon relevant evidence and research etc. Concerns have been raised in a number of inquiries regarding the poor standard of English of some social workers, for example. We are aware from academics that they can be under intense pressure from their institutions to maximise numbers of entrants to social work courses and not fail students. Our view is that students should not be able to obtain a social work degree until they are able to demonstrate the necessary skills outlined above.

  3.3  Universities should consider BOTH the academic skills of applicants to social work courses and the applicant's own history and motivation in choosing to train as a social worker. In the past applicants to social work training courses have been required to demonstrate appropriate prior experience either in a professional or voluntary capacity which ensured they had some understanding of the reality and complexities of the work. Many parents to our advice line and advocacy clients express concern about their social worker's perceived prejudices or lack of knowledge about issues affecting them.

4.  STRUCTURE AND CONTENT OF SOCIAL WORK TRAINING

  4.1  Children's Services are the lead agency in child protection and social workers need to be able to liaise effectively and communicate with other professionals such as police, medical staff including paediatricians, teachers, legal professionals etc. If social workers are perceived to fall short in their ability to communicate their professional views and lack confidence in their dealings with other professionals then their views will not be respected nor given credibility. This again reinforces an earlier point that the status of the profession that could be assisted by a clarity of expectation.

4.2  Newly qualified social workers (and those with experience) need to be supported by employers, colleagues, and other services to build upon their existing knowledge and training through a range of strategies (many of which are already in place but not necessarily always utilised) such as co-working, joint visits, regular supervision, team meetings, access to research and relevant literature, specialist training courses, some of which could be accredited, etc.

  4.3  We would have some concerns in requiring social work students to have to specialise at an early stage- we believe that there is merit to students experiencing different types of social work on a course. Indeed we fear that by specialising early, the unintended consequence may be a further fracturing and break down in understanding between adult and children's services. We believe there is merit in supporting social workers to specialise post qualification (with appropriate post qualifying training).

  4.4  More emphasis needs to be given by local Safeguarding Boards to the quality of supervision provided by frontline managers and the opportunity this gives to the social worker to question, challenge and reflect. Supervision should provide workers with the space to critically think about his/her intervention, analyse why they are taking or not a particular course of action and the impact on the child, wider family but also on the worker themselves.

  4.5  There should be better integration of the theory taught with the reality of practice on the ground, including a constant movement of practitioners back into universities for continuing professional development. The structure should facilitate rather than act as a barrier to:

    — creating checks and safeguards;

    — dissemination of research and best practice to practitioners;

    — enabling academics to keep up to date with practice issues on the ground;

    — ongoing support from the universities for newly qualified social workers;

    — research opportunities based on data from local practice; and

    — opportunity for trends of good and bad practice to be addressed at a systemic level eg where social workers repeatedly fail to follow the law, such as Southwark LBC v D [2007] 1 FLR 2181.

  Universities should be encouraged to utilise external people with expertise, such as service users, judges, lawyers, voluntary sector organisations etc, to become involved in social work education. This should include support and payment where appropriate, particularly for service users and voluntary organisations to cover their preparation time as well as lecturing/training.

  4.6  There needs to be a greater acceptance that there is a very large applicable body of law, some of which is complex and which is fundamental to the job. This should impact on the level of ability required to access and successfully complete social work training There needs to be adequate time spent studying this in practice scenarios at an appropriate level. It would further assist understanding of the law in social work practice if Children' Services lawyers could be based in social work teams not situated separately in legal departments. In this way law, including the Human Rights Act would be more integrated into practice and legal advice easily on hand to practitioners.

5.  QUALITY AND SUPPLY OF TRAINING AND PQ FRAMEWORK

  5.1  The social work task has become increasingly specialised and bureaucratic but is still essentially about forming relationships with children and family members and knowing the legal basis for intervention. Our advice service demonstrates that this does not consistently happen. More practice guidance from more experienced workers should be provided in post but there are huge problems with the retention of staff meaning that experienced workers are leaving. Consequently front line services are quite often staffed by newly qualified practitioners or overseas practitioners not familiar with UK systems. Practitioners from overseas wishing to practice social work in this country should be required to undertake a conversion course, to enhance their understanding of UK child welfare law and systems, to the benefit of the children and families they serve.

5.2  Our discussions with academics in social work education indicate they know of little regulation from the GSCC in terms of quality. The issue of social work placements is a very thorny one and students in placements can be given too much work and not adequately protected in the current climate of high vacancy levels.

  5.3  There is a shortage of social work students who want to go into children and families frontline work from courses and the crisis with student placements mean they often aren't offered a flavour of this work. This is a problem. Bursaries and grants offered to unqualified staff within departments to become qualified used to be very popular. But we would suggest that further steps are now required. We believe there is merit in considering how lawyers are trained and applying this to social work ie academic study, following by an in-work traineeship during which the trainee is paid, albeit at a lower rate than a qualified social worker.

  5.4  We believe that more could be done to encourage employers to allow for movement across specialisms in children and families work, in order to prevent burn out and enable social workers to increase their expertise whilst remaining in front line practice. This needs to be reinforced through organisational and career/pay structures, so that experienced social workers who stay in front line practice rather than going into management are appropriately rewarded.

  5.5  At the moment it is very loose as to what constitutes PQRTL and there is not an accreditation process as such. There are moves afoot to implement a PQ framework but confusion remains and it's not yet in place. Some social workers complete the PQ pathway through to a Masters but what would very experienced workers do if they did not want to complete a Masters in social work? Other Masters degrees need to be recognised and allowed for. This goes to the heart of employers' support as a lot of social work feedback to training questionnaires is that they are not given enough time to complete training courses, training budgets are squeezed and even when training is available it is often not accessed due to the overwhelming demands on the time of social workers. At the moment—maybe because of the fall out from Baby P—much is being discussed about supervision in training circles. A lot of Safeguarding Boards are providing courses on supervision for the multi-agency audience as the integration agenda moves forward. These courses are too basic and aren't mandatory for social workers, nevertheless some direction is required to address this gap.

May 2009







 
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