‘Social Work Needs To Regain Its Vision And Purpose’

The chief inspector of Scotland’s social work departments has warned them that they still have much to do if they want to prove their worth.

In the second annual report of the Social Work Inspection Agency (SWIA), Alexis Jay also draws attention to widespread inconsistency in terms of how risk is managed in areas such as the support of vulnerable children and the monitoring of sex offenders.

Meanwhile, morale problems remain in some social work teams – often going hand-in-hand with a department which is unclear about the role or purpose it serves.
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Concerns about morale were raised in the first SWIA annual report last year, when after carrying out formal visits at 12 councils, inspectors noted that 38% of frontline staff did not feel valued by their managers in the local authorities that employ them.

Jay seems more sanguine about the issue this year. Another 11 reports have been completed, but on different councils, she points out, so it is hard to measure any change in morale. Still, she argues that private sector companies would consider morale levels in social work to be good if it were their own workforce.

Instead, she is calling for councils to set out something akin to a mission statement for social workers.

While it is easy to satirise such aspirational statements about vision and purpose, she says, it is striking that councils who have a coherent idea of what they are trying to achieve are the ones which perform better. “Our evidence is that staff want and need this sense of vision and purpose.”

She adds: “This is not like the mission statement you see on the wall in McDonalds. But a clear vision, a sense of social and moral purpose, matters and seems to affect morale.”

Notably, outsiders from other agencies such as police or voluntary agencies can clearly detect the presence or absence of such an attitude in a social work team, she says.

The other key factor influencing the performance of social work is leadership. Of 22 published reports on the SWIA website, four councils rated weak or unsatisfactory, and another five were only adequate.

That means 41% are “below the line”, as Jay puts it – rating less than “good” for leadership. Summing up, she says that overall leadership in the sector is good, “but it isn’t sufficiently aspirational to excellence”.

While leadership of people is good, perhaps because those kind of skills are emphasised in social work training, leadership of change is less impressive. This is problematic at a time when social work policy and practice is developing rapidly, both as a result of initiatives like the national social work review Changing Lives, and due to changes in the way services are delivered: through the Scottish government’s new concordat with local authorities and the single outcome agreements on which it depends.

Outcomes too are a problem for social work, it turns out. While not questioning the beneficial impact of social work on people’s lives – and she says recipients of social work services confirm it – Jay says workers and the councils which employ them remain poor at measuring the difference they make.

“It is not enough to say you have provided five hours of home care a day for an older person because that doesn’t tell you what that has achieved.”

Improving systems to demonstrate the impact social work is having is the most common recommendation from inspectors, the annual report notes. “Performance information … is not sufficiently comprehensive, does not always sit within a coherent framework and often is too complicated.”

Social work can’t improve if there is no way of knowing what is working and what is not. The issue may sound trivial but is not when the nature of some of the issues being wrestled with by social work is considered, the report says: “The costs of getting the wrong or bad results can be huge – not just for the taxpayer but sometimes also at an individual level for the person using the service.”

That matters particularly in the third area where inspectors have concerns: risk assessment. Assessing risks – for example, that of a sex offender re-offending, or the benefits and dangers of leaving a child with a drug-using mother – is a huge part of the job of any social worker. But councils are inconsistent about the way it is done, using different professional tools to do it, and in different ways in different parts of the country, and sometimes even in different departments of the same authority.

Jay points out that risk assessment is complex and may be about protecting staff or care workers from risky situations as well as the public. No worker should simply be relying on a risk assessment tool anyway, she says.

However there is “no doubt it needs to be improved,” she confirms and adds of Scotland’s social work teams “they may be making people safe, but they certainly can’t demonstrate it to us”.

Jay declines to comment in detail on the state of social work in Edinburgh, where Unison and the British Association of Social Workers (BASW) have had angry exchanges with the council over plans to restructure children and families work, including the removal of 12 managers through redundancy or redeployment.

The Chief Inspector argues that reorganising services doesn’t in itself tend to improve or damage services. The SWIA report on Edinburgh earlier this year drew attention to evidence of a significant overspend on children and families work in the council, without equivalent evidence of better outcomes for children in the capital from such work than in other authorities.

However Ruth Stark of BASW says she was “deeply concerned” about the plans passed by the council’s Education, Children and Families committee last week.

The managers likely to lose their jobs are among the council’s most experiences staff, she said, and are involved in day-to-day work with families.

Stark says: “Lord Laming, in his report on the fate of Victoria Climbie, highlighted the importance of the support and guidance needed by frontline child protection staff from senior managers and practitioners. These are not people who sit behind desks pushing paper but experienced social workers who will often be that second pair of eyes in a child protection investigation and in the work with adults to help prevent child abuse,” she says.

“Their skill and expertise is vital in keeping our children safe. Given the similar findings of the Caleb Ness Inquiry in Edinburgh, it is extremely short-sighted of the Councillors in the City of Edinburgh to be discarding this high level skill and expertise in child protection work and leaving their frontline staff in a very exposed situation.”

Unison’s Tom Connolly adds: “Many of these staff carry some of the most complex cases. It is astonishing that the council is saying it wants to allocate all the cases that are on waiting lists, and to do this it is cutting staff.”

Edinburgh Council insists that child protection remains its top priority and says the move will allow more than 170 young people in care who have currently not got a social worker to be allocated one.

Fact File: The Social Work Inspection Agency
# SWIA is headed by Alexis Jay, former director of social work at West Dunbartonshire Council and past president of the Association of Directors of Social Work.

# It was set up in 2005 with a remit to inspect every social work department in Scotland over the subsequent three years.

# So far it has delivered performance inspections across 20 councils with the remaining 12 already under way and planned to conclude in 2008/9.

# Inspectors have also carried out a series of inspections of criminal justice social work and participated in joint inspections of services for people with learning disabilities, addiction services and services for older people.