Social Care Gets First Course Of Treatment

A sector lacking confidence, timid in its vision and ambition, poorly understood by the public, and widely considered to provide low-quality and unsafe services.

This blunt verdict on adult social care has been delivered to ministers by Dame Denise Platt, chair of the Commission for Social Care Inspection, who was asked to review the status of the sector and consider how it might be raised. Her recipe: a liberal injection of “imagination, excitement and enthusiasm”.

The first course of such treatment was administered by the care services minister, Ivan Lewis, at last week’s spring seminar of the new Association of Directors of Adult Social Services. Unveiling a five-point action plan, whose centrepiece will be a skills academy called SocialCare21, to help deliver a 21st-century system with excellence at its core, he said: “Dame Denise is right to challenge the sector to raise its game and demonstrate a clear and ambitious vision for the future.”

The action plan confirms much of what Lewis set out in an interview with Society Guardian last autumn: apart from the skills academy, there will be a journal for social care, a new system for identifying and disseminating best practice, consolidation and promotion of awards schemes for social care workers and, significantly, a national social care board to advise ministers and seek more “coherence”.

This last move comes in response to criticism that the sector is hobbled by fragmentation, not least among the social care bodies created by Labour since 1997. Platt, whose organisation is one of them, says in her review: “They do not speak with one voice; it is not clear what their respective contributions are to the reform agenda – they are perceived as competing. There is no common discourse.”

The board will bring together not only social care interests in the public sector, but also those in the private and voluntary sectors, and will ensure that the views of users of services and carers are heard at the highest level. But this is not intended to be a talking shop: Lewis is looking for much greater sharpness of performance by the key players. As he says: “There has been insufficient focus. There has been insufficient clarity about which organisation is responsible for doing what.”

Chief among his targets is the Social Care Institute for Excellence (Scie), which Platt says has disappointed the sector by failing adequately to fulfil its brief to disseminate good practice. “There is widespread agreement that more is required than just making the material available,” she observes, somewhat caustically. Scie, now under new leadership, will be tasked with producing by the end of the year a fresh strategy for identification and dissemination of excellence.

Skills for Care, the sector skills body, can also expect a judicious kick up the rear. The organisation has lodged a bid with the Department for Education and Skills for funding to develop a virtual skills academy, but Platt says there are “concerns across the sector” about the plan as it stands. Lewis intends to intervene personally to drive on the idea of what he has christened SocialCare21, which he says may or may not be virtual and which he expects to open for business as soon as spring next year.

The academy’s work will centre on leadership and commissioning. Platt says its priority should be the directors of adult social services in English local authorities and recommends they should all have completed an accredited training programme within three years of appointment. Consideration, she adds, should be given to making such training a requirement for all future directors before appointment.

Beyond Lewis’s immediate five-point plan, longer-term work is to be undertaken on developing a coherent research strategy for social care. Platt’s review calculates that the Department of Health contributes £10m to social care research, compared to £650m for NHS research and development. The minister says research is vital to developing the all-important evidence base for social care: “We really do need to have the evidence to demonstrate the impact of social care if we are going to make an argument for more resources.”

He is convinced that social care has a good story to tell – if only it could get its act together, find its voice and discover a “narrative” that people can relate to.

“Everybody understands hospitals, schools, the police, but very few people understand social care until it impacts on their lives,” Lewis says. “It has got to be much cleverer – and louder – in the way it sells itself and tells how it makes a better society.”