Examination of Witnesses (Questions 280
- 281)
WEDNESDAY 24 JUNE 2009
CATHY ASHLEY,
SUE BERELOWITZ,
JAMES BROWN
AND ENID
HENDRY
Q280 Fiona Mactaggart: One of the
solutions offered—Enid, you said it was promising—was
the newly qualified social worker programme, but that is not what
we were hearing from newly qualified social workers, frankly.
They were not impressed with the kind of thing being rolled out
at the moment. The thing I got was that where there were strong
team practices with shared direction and leadership in a local
authority, the students felt best prepared and most confident,
and as practitioners you could see they were going somewhere.
It seems to me that we are running down the wrong road. The critical
thing is to centre on the working model. It has small teams where
the way in which decisions are made and responsibility is shared
actually helps the inexperienced member of the team learn in a
safe way and take on the things for which they are responsible.
That is just not happening in many authorities.
Sue Berelowitz: I want to link
that to your earlier question, which was terribly important. If
I may be impolite, I think the profession is bedevilled by the
fact that we had a diploma entry route—it has gone now—into
the profession for a long time. There have been very low thresholds,
people have come in, and the net result is that those who are
practice teachers now—the experienced social workers—have
not been required to go through the same academic rigour, the
same standards and so on. In relation to your earlier question,
we need to stop at some point, have a smaller cohort coming through,
and say, "No more." It is not just about numbers; we
really need to raise the standards and the standing. We also need
to be quite constrained about how we do that in terms of who comes
in before it begins to expand again. I think that that needs very
careful consideration. I link that to your most recent question,
because one way of achieving that—the numbers of children
requiring support will not disappear at the same time—would
be a system in which small teams in locality areas do duty, front-line
work, child protection work and so on, while a highly qualified
social worker heads them up. Underneath them, you would have a
cohort of non-social work qualified people, who might have other
kinds of qualifications. The complex assessment work would be
done by the social worker, but the ongoing, more enduring work
would be done by other people, who are much easier to recruit
and who often stay much longer. They will need to be very closely
managed by the qualified social worker. You can have a highly
qualified social worker, basic qualified social workers and some
assistants, so I think there are some models that are worth looking
at.
Q281 Chairman: It is very interesting
that you seem to be moving social work further and further away
from the pattern that is developing in teaching, which is going
for a more diverse, out-of-teaching experienced work force with
more entry points into the profession. What you have just described
is a highly academic route that is about getting more out of the
highly academic, but you started off by saying that you need more
than just academic qualifications to be a damned good social worker.
Sue Berelowitz: You have to have
both. Those things are not mutually exclusive; you must have a
psychological, emotional and relational capacity to do the work,
as well as an academic capacity. I think we have gone too far
the other way in a desperate attempt to get more and more people
into the profession. The emphasis has been too much on people's
life experiences, which are very important, but they should not
be to the exclusion of people's cognitive and intellectual capacity
to do what is intellectually a very demanding job. The parallel
that I would draw with teaching is that there are now more teaching
assistants in classrooms. A combination of assistants plus social
workers may enable the profession to get to a point—there
needs to be a cut-off somewhere—where it has a sufficient
number of the right people coming in, while still being able to
do work in the intervening period.
Chairman: I have to call an end to the
questions, because we have another session. We could go on for
much longer, because your evidence has been first rate. Will you
remain in contact with the Committee. If there are things that
you should have told us, or that we should have asked you, please
let us know. James, Enid, Cathy and Sue, it has been an excellent
session. I had to drive it through, which was unfair to my colleagues
and to you, but that is my job.
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