A Growth Sector

Care Appointments Scotland spoke with Jennifer Davidson, Director of the Scottish Institute for Residential Child Care…

What do you consider to be the biggest single challenge facing recruiters in the residential child care sector at present and why?

“The image of residential child care portrayed in the media is primarily a negative one, particular in terms of young people being ‘bad’ and staff as ‘abusers’. Recruiters face the challenge of communicating the positive aspects of working with young people to potential staff members – the value of developing empowering and healing relationships – in what can be a highly rewarding and personally satisfying context of residential care.”

What can be done to stimulate recruitment into the sector and in terms of retaining good quality, highly dedicated staff members?

“There are several important components to the retention of staff, not the least of which is the provision of good quality, regular professional supervision, and support for staff members’ ongoing professional development. This enables individuals to continue to grow and be challenged in new ways, and brings in new ideas, questions old ways of engaging with young people and maintains people’s commitment to development of themselves and the service.

“Naturally, pay and conditions also play a critical role in the capacity for trained staff to remain in the sector. This will need to be recognised by funding providers.”

What message would you give to anyone considering moving from another area of the care sector into the residential child care field?

“Residential child care provides the opportunity to work with young people in intensive ways, and develop professional relationships with them that have the potential to substantially change their lives for the better. The residential child care staff member takes on a multifaceted role, teaching and role modelling to young people the life skills they require to live healthy and satisfying lives, and providing a safe and nurturing environment to support their process of resolving past troubles and looking optimistically toward future opportunities. {mospagebreak}

“When we asked unit managers at an event last year what it was that made them positive about their work, most of their responses fell into these five categories:

1. Making a difference in people’s lives

2. Direct and interesting work with young people

3. Challenge, achievement and job satisfaction

4. The variety and diversity of the work involved

5. Being part of a team

“People are very often drawn into the care sector in order to ‘make a difference’ in people’s lives, and yet they find that many of the care roles they find themselves in are unduly administrative and lack the personal contact that they had hoped would bring satisfaction. I would suggest that residential child care is one of the few care sector roles in which the relationships that staff build with young people are still the key component of the work. As a result, residential child care has the potential to be a highly challenging and rewarding job.

“Residential child care is at a time of transition as a sector right now, as staff and managers are working to achieve the necessary qualifications to register with the SSSC. This requirement of the SSSC – that eventually all staff and managers will need to be registered in order to practice in residential child care – is a significant step towards the professionalisation of the workforce. I anticipate that this will work to improve the status, as well as the salary scales in residential child care, as the highly complex challenges that residential child care offers.”

Thinking about training, development and CPD for a moment, what initiatives are SIRCC currently involved in promoting?

“Across Scotland, SIRCC offers various short courses on specific topics ranging from SVQ underpinning knowledge courses to advanced continuing professional development. SIRCC also provides a range of education programs in flexible formats which all have a specific residential child care focus across several continuing education colleges, Robert Gordon University and the Glasgow School of Social Work. These include the HNC Social Care, BA Honours in Social Work and MSc in Advanced Residential Child Care. We are committed to supporting residential child care staff who want to develop their skills, and to employers in their efforts to provide professional development opportunities to their staff and managers.

“Over the next few years, the residential child care sector will be working furiously to ensure all staff are registered with the SSSC. This will require many individuals to embark in formal learning for the first time in a long time. To support individuals who do not have the requirements to begin the HNC Social Care, SIRCC offers a Core Skills Appraisal Project which enables staff to identify if they have any learner support requirements, and helps employers to ensure these needs are met prior to starting the HNC. This helps staff to undertake a successful HNC experience.”{mospagebreak}

In the next 5 to ten years what would you like to see happen in terms of workforce development within the sector?

“In 1992, the Skinner Report, ‘Another Kind of Home’ identified the need for 30% of staff to be educated to degree level and after thirteen years, and we have still not advanced sufficiently towards this goal. Clearly, this achieving this will be an incremental process, and the SSSC registration is a critical facilitator.

“I anticipate that within the next 5 years we will see a good proportion of the workforce registered with the SSSC at the minimum level of HNC/ SVQ3, as well as an increasing number of staff educated to degree level in a related field.

“With support from the Executive, funders and employers, this increasing level of professionalism will continue, and reach the situation where the level of education and training of all staff in residential child care adequately prepares them for the challenging tasks and complex needs of the children and young people they care for.”

Extract from SIRCC’s  Qualifications Audit (2004):

SIRCC has proposed a long term ‘stepwise strategy’ for ensuring a qualified workforce. This incremental approach begins with an interim framework for new entrants and existing staff, which supports the combination of both the HNC and SVQ3 as a baseline qualification for the field. It requires training awards similar to those in the current SSSC qualifications framework for residential child care. We continue to maintain that the HNC Social Care should be a required pre-entry qualification, and recommended the SVQ3 award be achieved within a tight post-entry timescale. This interim framework was proposed as an important step toward an optimum framework for residential child care. We not only recommend maintaining the required qualifications as a baseline at the present educational levels, but we continue to suggest that this current qualifications framework should remain only in the interim. As stated in the 2001 audit:

We consider that it would be responsible and entirely justifiable…that the only recognised residential child care qualification, in most settings, would be at degree/diploma level, be 3-4 years full-time or equivalent part-time, have a substantial, dedicated residential child care curriculum, have relevant, well-assessed practice placements, and flexible but robust APEL arrangements to allow workers with other qualifications to enter the workforce.

Recently the complexities and challenging nature of fieldwork was acknowledged in a new way, by requiring fieldwork social workers to become qualified with a four-year undergraduate honours degree. This clearly supports the preservation of this residential child care optimum framework as a long-term goal for the residential child care field, given the shared challenges of both sectors. In the words of A. Skinner in Another Kind of Home:

“Residential child care establishments are faced with meeting needs which are amongst the most complex and challenging of any social work service…It is generally accepted that field social workers should be fully qualified, and it is far from clear that they have more demanding or complex responsibilities.

“The challenges currently facing the sector are many; however, the complexities of the needs of the children and young people being served in residential care are equally challenging, and these individuals both require and have a right to effective, well-equipped and qualified professionals to care for their needs. We would suggest that aiming for anything short of the optimum framework in the long term does not do justice to these children and young people.”