Oral evidence: Social work reform, HC 690Wednesday 20 April 2016

Oral evidence, 20 April 2016.

Witnesses

Dr Ruth Allen, Chief Executive, British Association of Social Workers, Annie Hudson, former Chief Executive, The College of Social Work, Marc Seale, Chief Executive and Registrar, Health and Care Professions Council, and June Thoburn, Emeritus Professor of Social Work, University of East Anglia, gave evidence.

Chair

Good morning, Marc, Annie, Ruth and June. Welcome to this second session. You have been in the earlier one as spectators, so you will know the direction of travel that we are in, but if you could say who you are and what you represent for the purposes of those listening from afar. Marc?

Marc Seale

Good morning. My name is Marc Seale and I am the Chief Executive of the Health and Care Professions Council.

Annie Hudson

Good morning. I am Annie Hudson, former Chief Executive of The College of Social Work, which now no longer exists, and I am also a former Director at Children’s Services.

Dr Allen

Ruth Allen, Chief Executive of the British Association of Social Workers.

June Thoburn

June Thoburn. I am also a former Vice Chair of GSCC, a member of the College of Social Work Faculty and a researcher, but I am particularly interested at the moment in the voluntary sector.

Chair

There is nothing wrong with being former provided you bring experience, judgment and good value to this Committee, which I am sure you will, so thank you. Catherine, you are going to kick off with recruitment and retention.

Catherine McKinnell

Yes. Good morning, thank you for coming. There was a very timely report on the BBC about retention and we have obviously explored the issue with the previous panel. I thought it would be helpful to start off—obviously not repeating each other, and if you do agree then say so—with what do you see are the main reasons why there seems to be so many social workers leaving the profession?

Dr Allen

We know that there are many, many pressures working in social work at the moment. As a professional association we provide member advice and representation, so we have a lot of day to day information about that coming through about the changing workforce conditions. Many of the points that were made earlier are very important: about the nature of the work, about the workplace, about working conditions, about the support to staff, about whether when people are coming in new to the profession they are getting the right support in those early years. The ASYE scheme, which was mentioned earlier, was there to offer some protection and to offer that stepping stone into the profession. We are finding that it is being undermined, I think, in some ways by financial pressures but also by the pressures on local authorities and other employers. It is not enabling our social workers to find their feet in the way that the reform board was hoping would be the case. The other thing is we are losing experienced staff as well. People are not coming, consolidating and staying. They are also leaving, often because they are picking up work that is coming their way because other staff have gone off sick, there are high levels of stress and there is quite a lot of evidence of that as well. What was also interesting in the BBC report that came out today is there is a lot of variation. There are some authorities—and this is about local authorities—that are having success in providing good conditions, in having good recruitment campaigns, and perhaps growing their own and in keeping their staff and others are not. There is a lot of variation there, and I think we need to learn from local authorities and other employers who are achieving retention and able to recruit. Just one last thing is that we also know from the association that people are moving out of conventional types of employment arrangements. They are moving out of conventional types of employment arrangements. They are moving out of staying in one authority or one organisation long-term. They might be moving between authorities to find better places to work and that is important and something for employers to learn from. They are also going into independent practice and they are going into agency working, which has some benefits perhaps for those individuals in many ways but changes the nature of the workforce landscape. It is sometimes very hard for employers to recruit permanently because the employment opportunities with agencies and independently now outstrip what can be offered or what is being offered in a very pressed public sector.

June Thoburn

Can I just come in about recruitment and retention? They do go together. I think retention is far more important than recruitment and I would like to say something about value for money and Moira’s last comment about change. Any change needs to be justified at this point in time, when we know we are desperately short of cash for all the things that we want to happen in local authorities and in the voluntary sector. We have to make best use of whatever money is available. That is an overarching comment. I totally agree with Josh’s last comment. I would love to see a Government recruitment campaign, not just for Frontline but for the whole of social work, as the Government has done for nursing and teaching, into all the routes. I would like to see us going into the schools with recruitment. I used to work for a social work education recruitment agency a long time ago, and we used to go into schools. We do need to keep the undergraduate route, the postgraduate mainstream route and fast-track routes. Getting the balance between those three is a really interesting question. How much of each do we need at the recruitment stage? We can go into the schools. Frontline has been very good at going into the universities. Let us go into the schools and say, “Social work is a really exciting job”. Let us do it regionally. Let all the courses go in together and say, “You want to help people? You might want to be a nurse, you might want to be a social worker or you might want to be a teacher”. There are exciting ways of doing that. On retention, if I can quickly add to what Ruth has said, there are too few experienced social workers out there now. That is one of the reasons why people are leaving. They are not getting the support. There is not the wisdom around when they have these team meetings or group meetings. They feel unsupported. You have to have a balance among the 50 year-olds, the 30 year-olds and the new recruits. You have to have new recruits who are older and experienced already, life experience. Just quickly on the PCF, the value of PCF is that it is a framework. Knowledge and skills are a curriculum. We can add curricula to frameworks. We have a framework. It allows the social worker to plot their way through, perhaps ending up as an educator, perhaps as a manager, perhaps as a policy-maker or perhaps as a commissioner, an important new role. The PCF is a framework for plotting your way through. It gives power to the individual worker to say, “That is the route I want to take. That is the module I need to take. That is the place I want to do it”. If I want to be a social worker with the deaf, I am not going to go to the University of East Anglia. I am going to go to a specialist university that does that.

Annie Hudson

Three slightly separate points. First of all—I think reference was made by Brigid earlier on—the organisational context, the organisational climate within which people are working is absolutely crucial, but what has not been explicitly mentioned this morning is the importance of leadership. That is not just the managerial leadership, the leadership from politicians and chief officers and so on, but it is also about professional leadership. We do now have the role of Principal Social Worker, which the College previously supported and BASW is now, and that is a real opportunity that we need to build on. It is about somebody within the organisation who has a particular role and priority of focus on determining, shaping and defining good practice. The second thing is around professional development but also the team in which people are working. There was reference—I think from Josh—to the importance of first line managers and I absolutely would endorse that. The quality of practice is absolutely determined by the quality of your frontline managers, because they are the ones who every day take oversight of and sometimes make the very crucial decisions about children and families. We need to invest more in that cadre of practitioners. They are a bit like consultants in a medical world. Thirdly, this whole issue about the public’s understanding about social work. While I agree a Government-sponsored recruitment campaign could have some value, we do need to remember it was done before by the previous Government. As important is helping the public to understand what social work is about, particularly in the context of child abuse tragedies. It is really giving the truth about what social workers can and cannot do. Some years ago in Bristol, when I was Director there, we had the BBC come in and do what was a very successful series about child protection work. The thing that was most astonishing to us and indeed the producers was how poor the understanding of the public was about what social workers really do. They have a very stereotypical, prejudiced image and we need to do much more to help people understand what social workers do. Everybody knows what teachers do and everybody knows what doctors do, because we all have teachers and we all have doctors. Not many people have social workers, and particularly childcare social workers. That is a really important way in which we can help to give some pride back to the profession and an understanding of it.

Marc Seale

Yes, I would reiterate that the working environment, particularly in child and family social work, is absolutely critical in trying to resolve this problem. However, it is very interesting to look at the rest of the UK in Northern Ireland, Scotland and Wales, where we do not have this sort of problem. Comparisons need to be made between the four systems.

Catherine McKinnell

One of the issues is whether Frontline and Step Up will help in terms of recruitment and retention. I don’t know if anyone wants to comment briefly on that.

Marc Seale

From the perspective of a regulator, we should be facilitating different routes into the profession, whether it is part-time people coming in, mature candidates, international applicants, and people on short programmes, NSCs or BSCs. We need a variety of routes onto the register. That is very beneficial. At the same time, when we are looking at that, we have to balance the cost of training those individuals and, more importantly, what the impact is if those individuals only stay in the profession a very short time. Not only does it drive up the cost of those individuals but it also has a big impact on the university system in that you have to have a bigger capacity because people do not remain in the profession a very long time. Again, it is another one that collectively we need to resolve.

Dr Allen

I absolutely agree that we need innovation in education. We need different opportunities to bring different groups of students into the profession. Anything that raises the attractiveness of social work to a more diverse group of potential applicants and people with different kinds of high-level skills, academic achievement and so on, is good. We need to be talking about how we support the rest of the system. Support has been worked through quite a lot already in the presentations earlier. It is about showing confidence in the quality of the more traditional or the mainstream programmes. The evaluation of Frontline was really interesting and it did show certain aspects where the Frontline students came out well. Skill acquisition was clearly happening in those areas. It was not a full comparison of all of the benefits of doing a three-year degree or a two-year Masters course, in a more conventional sense, against Frontline. It did not evaluate that. That is really important. We need to talk about what the value is for students to go onto those more mainstream courses and, through that, build the confidence of those students who are coming in through any route. What we do not want are students who are coming through the new routes feeling confident that they have the right package and people coming through the other routes feeling that they have not, where there are a lot of different kinds of value in perhaps doing a longer course or a more mainstream MA.

Annie Hudson

Yes, I would endorse that. One of things in what is quite a febrile debate at times about the different kinds of programmes is that we need to clear that we learn from the best. For example, I observed one of the days when Frontline was recruiting participants and I was very impressed with the rigour of that. I know that other courses have similarly rigorous ways of selecting people but there is something there about sharing that evidence, how you select the right people to go onto the programmes. The second thing is there is this risk of decoupling the production of research and the generating of knowledge from the delivery of social work programmes. I am going to slightly embarrass one of your advisors here who is a professor at Bristol, which of course was my local university when I was DCS. One of the things about programmes that have a lot of researchers and people who have written and looked in depth at issues over time teaching social work trainees is that they then develop a really good understanding about the importance of evidence-informed practice. I am not saying Frontline does not do that but we do need to have a bit of concern about the decoupling, as I say, of the production of knowledge and research from the delivery of training.

June Thoburn

Can I reinforce that point about the evidence base? I have elsewhere said that the big problem for Frontline and indeed Step Up is selling good people short for a long-term career in social work. The knowledge base is hugely important. Frontline is very good on skills and indeed on empathy—we have seen from the evidence—but a big part of the social work role is decision-making: deciding whether a child should be placed for adoption, deciding whether this child should be removed into care or deciding whether huge amounts of resources should be given to a family with a disabled child. In order to make that decision, you have to balance the evidence. Balancing evidence means starting off with a broad base of knowledge, which the traditional courses have. I would like to see how many of the Frontline and Step Up people go on to do the Masters part of the course, because they can go off after the 13 months with their certificate, go somewhere else and they are qualified social workers. They do not have to do what I think is absolutely essential in year 2, which is making sense of research and knowing how to use it. One of the things in my career that I have been most proud is Making Research Count, which is a way of local HEIs and their local partners trying to help people to make sense of research. Indeed, practitioners are hungry for research evidence. You sometimes hear, “They are not interested”. Of course they are. They need the time to do it. Basically, I would like to see whichever route is being used not undervalue the role of the knowledge base. That goes on into what I hope we will talk about, teaching partnerships.

Catherine McKinnell

I am conscious we are going to run out of time. I can tell the Chair is about to come in and tell us to be a bit more smart. One of the things that everybody seems to have mentioned in all of the evidence given this morning is that the image of social work needs to be elevated. Could you say what the most important thing is the Government could do to try to make social work look more attractive? Everyone agrees it needs to be done. There are very few suggestions on how it can be done, as far as I can see.

Annie Hudson

Part of the difficulty is that a lot of the discourse about social work is delivered through the lens of when things go wrong, whether that is child deaths, whether that is scandals in children’s home or whether that is whatever—the death of an adult. It is something about trying to get a view across about social work and what it achieves. It is not easily measurable sometimes. It is not like you can present a whole set of fantastic GCSE results or A-level results, or reductions in death from cardiac disease. It is much harder to get the evidence of impact. One of the things that we really have to do is to work harder at finding ways—this is not just the Government’s problem, I recognise—of talking up the achievements of social workers, of individual social worker and of the profession, and indeed of children’s services departments at voluntary organisations. That has become even more difficult, partly because we have had a much more rigorous Ofsted regime, which in some ways is better because it is more focused on what the experience of children and families is in a way it was not in the past. It is about looking at the value added by social work and talking about that.

Marc Seale

Yes. Based on my experience with the other 16 professions that we regulate, the missing player in this picture is that we do not have a particularly strong and vibrant professional body. It is making great strides but I think it would be worth considering giving it very targeted, very quite mean grants to build up its expertise in terms of its body of knowledge and its relationships with students. We have to have a professional body that is the go-to organisation when you are talking about standards, when you are—

Chair

We will come on to that subject in a short while. Ruth, you are going to be answering my questions later on that subject so you do not need to answer now.

Catherine McKinnell

Ruth, I was going to ask you the next question anyway so if you were able to include very briefly a short suggestion on what the Government could do, that would be helpful. I know that the Association has suggested that we need to control and limit the hours and workloads of social workers. Can you say how the Government could do that or what the Government could do to achieve that?

Dr Allen

This is about how Government is working with the employers, with Adass, with ADCS and with other employers, and about expectations of the work conditions. The Employers Standards document and framework that came out of the social work reform process was intended to help bridge that and there is little accountability for organisations in using that now. There is something like that framework that Government might use in conjunction with the employers and their employer bodies, LGA and so on. Maybe to resurrect that in a new form would be important. If the ASYE programme was indeed mandatory—and the conditions for newly-qualified staff within that to have reduced caseloads was mandatory—those sorts of frameworks would come into play. If there are going to be new regulatory arrangements and if we are going to have a new CPD framework for social work, within that we need to be thinking about what time for CPD social workers can be expected to have from their employers. That will then have a knock-on effect on how their workload is managed because they will need to have that time for that professional development. Those are some of the ideas.

Chair

Good answer. Thank you very much.

Catherine McKinnell

Just one final. Do any of you have any suggestions on how former social workers could be tempted to come back into the profession?

June Thoburn

Regional working together is important, for instance going back to the role of HEIs in running training courses and day conferences, drawing in their former students, who do hang around. That is one way. In other words, the regions and the localities are really important. I do think DfE is doing too much micromanaging at the moment. Putting much more planning of all of this into the localities, the HEIs, the partnerships—we have been very good at partnerships in the past and they will have some very good ideas about how to do that.

Chair

Thank you very much, June. Thank you. That is excellent. Thank you, Catherine. We are going to have to move on to the next bit, which is Marion, who is going to be talking about workforce planning.

Marion Fellows

Apparently very quickly.

Chair

Yes.

Marion Fellows

Can I just ask, without any preamble, who you think should be responsible for workforce planning for social workers and what role you think the Government should play? Marc, do you want to start?

Marc Seale

Central Government has a very important role to play. That is based on my understanding of how the system runs in health. It needs to be centrally co-ordinated but it needs absolute support from the employers, the educators, the regulator and the professional bodies to make sure they have the right data. We as the regulator hold a lot of data in terms of historic information and we do a lot of forecasting for university programmes and things like that. Again, we are always happy and willing to share that information.

Annie Hudson

I would agree. It is a partnership. The employers have a huge interest in this. Government has a responsibility; the professional associations, the regulator and so on. We have not done good workforce planning. Dame Moira said this earlier on. It has been rather haphazard, a bit ad hoc. What is also quite difficult, particularly in children’s social work, is that the definition of what is needed shifts and changes hugely. You can have an authority that has had quite a stable workforce and if they get hit with an “inadequate” Ofsted suddenly they are looking at 40% vacancies, 40% agency staff and so on. We have to get much smarter at it as a profession and there needs to be some investment in some good-quality workforce planning that is based on the needs of regions. I remember one of the things that was in Sir Martin Narey’s report about social work education two or three years ago was how the supply of qualifying social work students varied enormously from region to region, so that in one area you had two or three times the number of people being produced as were needed to be employed and in another area there were not enough. That is where June’s point about regional partnerships is so very, very crucial because we know this is very localised, as indeed I think it is in health and teaching.

Dr Allen

I would like to draw attention to the fact that we have been talking a lot about children’s social work. It is one profession. It is regulated as one profession. One of the issues with some of the training programmes that have come on-stream, the fast-tracks, is that they are part of seeing that split. If you are talking about workforce planning going forward, we need a social work workforce. There are 90,000 registered social workers—I think that is about right, in the last count—in England. It is a big profession; it is not a small profession. You need people to be able to move between different parts of the profession. That is about full workforce flexibility and it is also about the knowledge and skill base and the real needs of people. People are children, then they are adults and then they are in families. All generations of people are interconnected. In terms of professional practice we are losing some of that clarity—that this about the whole of people and it is a whole, one profession, with specialisms in it—and we are also losing workforce flexibility in that as well.

Marion Fellows

This is a subject we have heard before. Could I ask how you think a social work supply model would work in practice?

June Thoburn

Just a quick point about choice and specialism. While I totally agree that we need to start as a generic profession and I am very keen on regional planning, nevertheless there are some people who want something special. I think of the deaf, I think of forensic social work. We have to allow for some specialisms within the HEIs so that people can make those choices, which tend to be on more of a national basis. While it is generally regional planning, let us not forget national issues, specialist issues.

Marion Fellows

Thank you. How do you think the availability of high-quality social work placements can be improved? Do you think teaching partnerships are the answer?

June Thoburn

I do. Start with that. It is the most productive of the Government’s proposals. What I am not sure is the way it is being rolled out as a sort of competition. You have to fill in the form and get the right answers and then you will get it or you will not. I speak as somebody from East Anglia. I do not want the whole of East Anglia to be without a teaching partnership just because we got our questions wrong or filled in our form wrongly. Having said that, I do think we have always had partnership working. I am concerned about the various uses of funding but given I have already said that, let us think about how best to use whatever is available. Putting some funding into these teaching partnerships, both for the qualifying and post-qualifying, and placement, feels to me like the best way forward so long as it is done carefully and across the country.

Chair

Does anybody have a specific answer to that question?

Dr Allen

Just that we need to think about where these placements are and not have this narrowed too much to only local authorities. We need to think about integrated services and social work placements within the NHS, and whether they are covered adequately within the teaching partnership arrangements as we go forward with more integrated care.

Annie Hudson

It is not just about supply, it is about the quality of practice education when they get there. It is absolutely crucial that people have good experiences working in statutory contexts when they are in qualifying programmes and they have access to really good-quality supervision. You only get that when you have strong, robust relationships between the employers and the providers in the universities.

Marc Seale

I very much support those three points. Teaching partnerships is an excellent idea. It works very well in health. Secondly, it is about the qualities of those placements. There is a problem in the sector with not enough good-quality practice placements and if you do not get those, you will not get good-quality social workers.

Chair

Okay. Well, Mark, you are going to be in the spotlight now because Suella is going to be asking about regulation. You can ask the others.

Suella Fernandes

Yes. I think it is mainly focused on Mark.

Chair

You can only add if you have something really valuable to say because you are the one to check.

Suella Fernandes

The Professional Standards Authority issued a very damning report about the HCPC last year saying that the regulation was not fit for purpose, that it was outdated and incoherent. The Narey Review has been critical in the assessment of courses. The Law Commission also issued a report asserting that the HCPC had been breaching the human rights of its social workers and radical overhaul has been recommended. What do you think?

Marc Seale

Fortunately I have absolutely no idea what you are talking about. The PSA has given us very good reports from its conception. We meet all the standards of the PSA. The Law Commission work is about all regulation. The Government is moving forward, I believe, in consultation. I am sorry; I am completely dumbfounded in terms of where you got that information from.

Suella Fernandes

There is a report from the Professional Standards Authority about the regulation of social work and it is a damning report that says that there is a need for overhaul. We also have the Narey Review, which says that the assessment of courses is generic and insufficient.

Marc Seale

Again, I cannot answer that question because I am very familiar with the PCSO. We work with them on a very close basis, I met their new chair just a few days ago and there are no problems with HCPC in relation to the PSA. I notice a number of your colleagues at the back looking at each other. Could you tell me which report you are referring to?

Suella Fernandes

Yes. I am referring to Community Care, a website that has referred to the Professional Standards Authority last year in a 2015 report, which has criticised the HCPC.

Marc Seale

I know there is a journalist from Community Care behind me. There is a report from the PSA that was published a number of months ago looking at the whole of the concept of professional regulation. It was not about us, it was about regulation in total and it very much threw up a range of suggestions. I think you might be referring to that but it is not about the HCPC in particular.

Chair

It does say that HCPC met all 24 of the standards for good regulation in 2014-15. They said, “We do not believe that improving education standards across the board should be confused with the primary role of regulation, which is to protect the public by ensuring that the standards are being met”. That is what it said and that is what Suella is referring to.

Suella Fernandes

Yes, it said that but it has also recommended an overhaul of the regulation of social work because there are shortcomings. We obviously disagree on this.

Marc Seale

No, I am just dumbfounded. Again, I know the PSA has very strongly recommended that the regulation of all professionals in health and social work should be looked at and that has been fed into the Department of Health consultation, which is coming out in October. Should we move on?

Suella Fernandes

Sure. I am happy to move on to another aspect of criticism with the HCPC. I want to put these points to you.

Marc Seale

Of course.

Suella Fernandes

Sir Martin Narey in his review assessed the way that courses are assessed and he found that the assessment set a low standard, that the standards were generic and not specific to social work, that it did not provide value for money or reassurance to Ministers or the public that these courses were being accredited sufficiently. Again, do you agree with those findings and that there is a need for reform at the heart of assessment of courses?

Marc Seale

If there is a criticism of the quality of any particular programme that we are responsible for, we as a statutory regulator need to do something about it as soon as possible. We have very strong powers. We can have directed visits. Whenever there is a concern that we can identify, we would go and visit those university programmes. What Narey said has been raised a number of times and we have very specifically—and also with the Department for Education—gone back to these authors and said, “Right. Could we have the names of the programmes you are referring to? I will organise a directed visit within the next 24 hours”. We have repeatedly asked that question and every time we have asked we have been told, “We do not have that information”. Where are these examples? The second thing is that we have just completed a thorough review of all the programmes for social workers in England and roughly 26% of those programmes that we inherited from the GSEC are no longer in operation. In addition, we are currently embarking on a review of the standards for social work. Again, we are very much looking forward to people like Narey or the Department for Education responding to that consultation to tell us where those standards should be improved. We can then implement them fairly rapidly. We keep on getting these vagaries and as a regulator we go back to people and say, “Tell us which university you are referring to. We will do that. That is our job”. They will not tell us.

Chair

June was going to make a comment.

June Thoburn

A very quick point. As the former vice-chair of the GSEC I know why it was moved to the HCPC. I was opposed to it. I have rung around and people now feel pretty satisfied with HCPC. I do not know whether the issue is around just accreditation of social work education or whether the plan—it is all terribly vague—is to take over the whole of regulation, fitness for practice and conduct, in which case it will be very expensive. I know that from my experience at GSEC. I am not sure that I would be thinking that this is the best use of scarce resources at this time.

Chair

Would you like to say something?

Annie Hudson

There is a bit of irony that what is being proposed seems to be a reinvention of the GSEC. However, I probably will differ from Marc on this in that I think social work has to have its own regulator. It has very large numbers of people. It needs to have very specific and explicit standards that people know about, understand and abide by. The difficulty of being in a much more generic regulatory body is that that can get lost and the specific needs are not fully adhered to. The other thing I would say is that in this business about regulation of social work, there are at the moment a lot of kids on the block. There was previously the College—no longer—and in terms of social work education providers, we had a voluntary endorsement scheme. Sometimes we would be doing visits at the same time as the regulator was doing theirs. We did not always come to same conclusions about courses. I need to say that. There is a need to sharpen and tighten up the regulatory framework for social work.

Chair

We need to be more forensic and more purposeful in assessing courses. That is what you are saying?

Annie Hudson

Yes. Indeed around the whole individual regulation stuff, there is a very strong argument for social work having its own body, notwithstanding some of the costs and notwithstanding that we did use to have the GSEC.

Chair

Yes, point taken. Any further questions, Suella?

Suella Fernandes

What do you think would be the right balance and work in terms of a new regulatory model?

Annie Hudson

In terms of what it would be regulating?

Suella Fernandes

Yes, and what kind of standards? There is a need to drive up standards. How should that be facilitated through regulation?

Annie Hudson

I think Josh was saying earlier on there is not a consensus about what makes a good social work practice and the things that go along with that, like supervision, organisational support and so on. All of the parties—in the way that did happen through the Social Work Reform Board and the Social Work Task Force—need to develop some collaborative consensus about what those practice standards should be. Then it is for the regulator to uphold those standards, whether that is about social work education providers, whether that is about individuals or whether that is about organisations. Ruth made this point about the health check—sorry.

Chair

We are getting a bit pressed for time at the moment so, Ruth, it has to be quick.

Dr Allen

Yes. There has to be collaboration with the professional association and with the profession around what these standards are. We are not going from a blank sheet of paper. It is not that we do not have clear ideas about what good standards are within the profession. It must be worked out with the profession, otherwise there is going to be completely unnecessary tension between the Government system of regulation and public accountability, and the profession. That will continue and that is not necessary.

Marc Seale

What I would just like is that the day after the announcement was made we received a joint letter from the Department of Health and the Department for Education confirming there were no issues with us as a regulator. This decision was not related to our performance as a regulator, which is a clear indication that we are an efficient and effective regulator.

Chair

I think the question is more what you are regulating, rather than whether you are regulating it well enough. That is the point we have to rest on.

Marc Seale

This is an important misunderstanding between the College and what it was trying to do. The key thing is that if you do not have consensus and you try to be conscious perhaps that those standards will not work.

Chair

Right. We are going to move on to that question. Suella, I take it you have concluded your interesting line of questioning. I am going to ask the question, and this is really directed to Annie first. College of Social Work, no longer with us. Does the Government’s proposal meet your expectations and requirements?

Annie Hudson

It is very clear that the proposal—I think it is not fully fleshed out yet—is not about reinventing a college. It is about an arm’s-length regulator. That is needed and there is some reform needed in that direction. The College set out to be something very different. It set out to be a College of Social Work in the way that you have medical colleges and clearly we were not successful in establishing that in a sustainable way.

Chair

You have said several times in this session that you want some kind of professional body.

Annie Hudson

Absolutely.

Chair

If it is not something like the College because that did not succeed and it is not going to be a revamped regulator because that is not what you think is correct, what do you think we should have?

Annie Hudson

BASW is the British Association of Social Workers—

Chair

Yes. It is the first time I have heard it pronounced quite like that but we will go with it.

Annie Hudson

They have taken on some of the functions that we had, including ownership of the professional capabilities framework and the support to the PSWs network. They have taken on some of the functions. It will be interesting and important to see how they evolve and change over time and whether they can or will want to take on some of the functions that the Social Work had about being a professional college, which is about being a centre of excellence and upholder of professional standards. If there is a new regulator then my understanding is that they may well take on the responsibilities we would have liked to have had and I think we should have had, which is about post-qualifying training and endorsement of post-qualifying training. That is what most medical colleges do and other health professionals do. That moment has passed so we now have to be quite pragmatic and be clear about what a regulator does and what a professional association does. That is a debate for the profession.

Chair

Okay. Ruth, you are in a good position to comment on that briefly.

Dr Allen

Yes. The Association has been growing in numbers in the last few years. Since the closure of the College it has grown more but its upward trajectory was already steep. We are now in a position to say that we do have direct membership of a considerable proportion of social workers across the whole of the UK, and we of course work across the whole of the UK, which gives us an advantage in understanding some of the differences and the learning from across the different countries of the UK. I was also very involved with the College and I worked very closely with Anne when I was working, in a voluntary capacity, as a member there. There is an awful lot of learning from what happened within the College. Although the College has failed as an institution, an awful lot of its work is continuing, and BASW has been now in the position of taking on some of that work, not PSW networks but the CPD scheme, the PCF, the work of the faculties, and so the intellectual property that was developed within the College. A lot of that has come over into BASW and we have some good programmes going forward to develop that. What we want to do is establish the Association’s position in this landscape in a different way. What is the Association’s role going to be in the future in—

Chair

Can I interrupt you there and ask you this question? Do you see the Association effectively replicating most or at least some of the College’s function?

Dr Allen

The Association can certainly replicate some of the functions. It is constituted differently and its purpose is different. It has other functions that the College did not have and it actually a bigger enterprise in a sense because it is UK-wide. A lot of the professional standard, professional definition, research, policy, consultation and collaboration activities of the College, the Association can definitely do and is already doing, actually.

Chair

Right. I get the sense that you want and perhaps we all want a professional body but we have not yet rested on the solution. What I would invite you to do is write to us with some thoughts on that, because we really want to get this right. One of the key recommendations I hope we will be able to make is what kind of body would replace or reflect the objectives of the College, first and foremost, but also how the Association might evolve. That would be a very useful contribution and we do not have time to listen. You have to do this justice because this is the moment when you can really set out your stalls. My last question on this subject, which does require a clear answer, is that there is an assumption that the College did not succeed because of its business model. What was wrong with its business model, in a word or two?

Marc Seale

Can I jump in on that? Looking at the other professional bodies that we engage with in the health area, the professional body has to be owned, driven, the heart of the profession. It needs to be built up from grassroots. In my view the College was doomed from day one because it was given a sack-load of money, it was never really supported by the individual members and it went off and did its own thing. If you look at other professions that have gone through the same problems, paramedics would be a good example. Basically it was four or five people in a kitchen. They got it together very slowly, they built up the membership and now essentially when you go to university you join that professional body. Unless it is built up from the grassroots as BASW has been—we have a solution. We support BASW and that becomes the centre of the body of knowledge for the profession. It is the one that is helping with the standards. We have a solution, we do not need to create any more bodies and if Government goes and does another version it will end up with the same waste of taxpayers’ money.

Chair

If you were to write to this Committee, you would be talking about building up the Association.

Marc Seale

Support BASW. It is doing a great job. It is a bit like a child on a bicycle. They are heading off, we need to give it a good shove and they will do a good job.

Chair

Right. When do you think the stabilisers can come off? It was your metaphor.

Marc Seale

I think they are already removed, actually. I took them down to Oxfam.

Chair

Right. We will have to move on, I am afraid.

Annie Hudson

Can I just—

Chair

It has to be quick, Annie.

Annie Hudson

I do not disagree with all of those points but I do think part of the problem, the root cause is that there was never a really clear mandate from Government, from employers and from the profession about what the College should be about. There was a contest, really, about what it should be doing and that was hugely—

Chair

Right. Look, we want to be reading your letters, lengthy letters with a bit of evidence, a bit of vision and a bit of real thinking. Okay? Michelle, you are going to have to be quick.

Michelle Donelan

Thank you. Very quickly, will the new assessment and accreditation scheme overall, do you think, improve career progression for children’s social workers?

June Thoburn

Not on its own. There is something about formative assessment and summative assessment. This is about summative assessment. That is a test. The thing that improves practice is the assessment that goes in day out, the supervision and the formative assessment, yes, with some assignment. If I think of what HEIs do, you have assignments, you give the student help in putting them together, you read them and then you discuss them. That is formative assessment. We need both. I fear that there is perhaps too much emphasis on this test that people sit. It is making sure that that happens, but also that all of that is done cost-effectively. We are very short of resources, both money and skilled social workers. We must use them as best we can in the way we go forward.

Dr Allen

It has to fit with how employers are employing, developing and progressing their staff. Employers have to find this useful so that they use it as a way to embed good practice, to motivate their staff and to deal with staff who perhaps struggle to get through. What are we going to do? What is that approach? It is only going to be as good as the employers’ attention to progression, support and career opportunities for staff. You cannot divorce it from that.

Annie Hudson

I agree with everything everybody has said. Two additional points: first of all, it has to be strongly rooted in a coherent and national CPD post-qualifying framework. Secondly, this accreditation system is about working in children’s social care, it is not about adults. There is the point Ruth made earlier, that we are one profession.

Michelle Donelan

Secondly, the knowledge and skill statements. Do you think they include everything or do you think there are still huge gaps in that that need tackling?

Marc Seale

Could I briefly come back to the previous question? When you are looking at those you really need to divide it up into two sections. There is the whole concept of post-registration qualifications, that if you are working in a higher-risk area you should only do that if you have that qualification. We do it in the current professions that we regulate. There is a second issue about lifelong learning. The heart of professionalism is the concept that you continue to learn, but you also have to work in an environment where that concept and that professionalism is supported. Setting a test like that is confusing because it is not saying this is a post-registration qualification that you have to have and at the same time, it is not a supportive culture to say to professionals, “This is how to commit to making sure you retain your skills and knowledge”, and then build them up. I think it is the wrong solution.

Dr Allen

One of the tasks of BASW is to develop the PCF. We hold it. We own it. We hold it on behalf of the profession. It was developed with the profession. How do we go forward with it? We are still getting a lot of messaging from the sector that it is found to be useful, and actually it can be used as a workforce development tool as well as a professional development tool. The KSS is not about that. To my mind, the KSS is a bit of a curriculum that you think you might need to teach. There may be good reason for many elements of that at a point in a career, and maybe to ask for it for that. The PCF is trying to do what Mark was referring to. It is part of what that that was referring to. It is about how you progress through a career, deepening your practice, including the decision-making within complex situations, which is a matter of maturity, reflection over time and learning over time, as I think June was referring to earlier.

Annie Hudson

Yes. No, I will not. It has been said. Sorry.

Michelle Donelan

Then lastly, because we are short on time, a question directly to Ruth. BASW inherited several key functions of the College of Social Work. How is it taking these forward?

Dr Allen

We have posts that are in process for the ongoing development of the PCF. There is work going on with a PCF group from the College within BASW about how we further develop the PCF, because it is not necessarily a static thing, but also how we show support for it, enable organisations to continue to use it and test its relevance. We have to keep testing its relevance, given that the landscape keeps changing. There is the CPD scheme that we have also inherited, which we are working on to bring fully into BASW so that providers of training can be accredited. One of the major areas has been ensuring that the work of the faculties in the College can continue, joining up with the structures that were already there in BASW and bringing all of the talents together. That works a long way down the line, joining up those very active members in the College. Some of it very much is about bringing the ethos, the intellectual capital and the experiences of what was achieved in the College into BASW. We are along the line with those things.

Chair

Right. Thank you very much, Michelle, and thank you all very much. I am looking forward to receiving your letters. I think you will all want to write one on the way in which a body should be formed, supported, promoted and effectively led in order to answer some of the questions that we have posed. That, from your vantage point too, as the regulator, is an important question. Thank you very much. Oral evidence: Social work reform, HC 690 2