Dear colleagues,
First of all can I introduce myself, I am Andrew Brunt and I’m the interim Principal Social Worker for children and families following Vicky White’s retirement.
The role of Principal Social Worker will be advertised soon, but I’m looking forward to meeting with as many social work staff as possible during my tenure.
In the meantime, I wanted to keep you up to date with a couple of areas.
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Following Eileen Munro’s report on social work in 2011 and Martin Narey’s review of social work education, the Government established a task force last year to improve social work skills. Based on the Chief Social Workers and the DfE Social Work Reform Unit recommendations, they are supporting practice development at three levels: approved Children and Family Practitioner, Practice Supervisor and Practice Leader.
This has also involved ‘Skills for Care’ developing the existing ASYE programme to incorporate the Chief Social Workers’ ‘Knowledge and Skills Statement’ published in November 2015. The idea is that this will become part of an assessment and accreditation pathway through which all approved practitioners will have to demonstrate a specific standard of practice.
A consortium, led by KPMG and Leeds University, has been consulting with social workers, clients and employers to establish the new accreditation. The current scheme looks likely to include:
- an employers’ endorsement where employers will undertake direct observations of an individual’s practice in a range of settings and assess the quality of their written work;
- an online multiple choice assessment of a practitioner’s knowledge, administered by the employer and with questions which test the candidate’s level of knowledge of legislation, procedures, child development and mental health;
- a scenario-based online assessment of applied knowledge and skills, assessing critical reasoning and decision-making skills;
- observation in an assessment centre of three ‘controlled interactive simulations of practice’, including a written exercise and a follow up discussion with an assessor about the rationale for their responses.
These arrangements will continue to be trialled this year and further announcements will probably be after May 2016.
The accreditation of Practice Supervisors is likely to be through a similar route but the Practice Leaders accreditation route is not yet known and could be through existing accredited ‘aspirant leader’ programmes.
The Health and Care Professions Council standards of conduct, performance and ethics (SCPE) is the ethical framework within which social workers must work. It is important that you have read and understood this document which states in broad terms expectations about your behaviour and conduct and could be used if someone raises a concern about your practice.
Following a review, the HCPC have made a number of changes, to update the standards and to make them more practical to improve their accessibility, particularly for service users and carers.
The key changes are the addition of new requirements for professionals to report and escalate concerns that they might have about the safety and wellbeing of service users (standard 7.) This makes it clear that this is a duty and also adds an requirement for registrants to support others to raise concerns; to be open and honest with service users if something goes wrong (Standard 8).
This means that we should be open and honest with children, young people and their parents and carers when something has gone wrong with the care or other services we have provided to them. Social Workers are expected to say when they became aware that something has gone wrong and to take action to put matters right wherever possible, including considering making an apology as part of making sure that the service user receives an explanation of what happened. The third change involves strengthening existing responsibilities to use social media appropriately and the HCPC will be publishing social media guidance later this year.
The standards took effect on 26 January and new or renewing applicants for registration or for readmission will be asked to confirm that they have read, understood, meet and will continue to meet the standards of conduct, performance and ethics.
Finally you will all be aware that Coventry has adopted Signs of Safety (SoS) as its core practice framework as part of improving the effectiveness of both children’s assessments and the impact of plans. Many of you may already have completed the initial training and hopefully are starting to use the approach and tools in your work with children and their families.
Whilst I know that we were an early adopter of SoS, it has proved difficult to establish it as a core way of working. We need you to be both the ‘drivers’ and critics to identify what is working well and what is getting in the way of using the method and tools in everyday practice. We’re working with Kay Bell, our SoS consultant, to establish a Practice Leadership network, starting with staff who are attending further training next month and the Professional Social Work Educators. The group will be developing activities across local offices but if you are interested in becoming involved now or in the future please feel free to email me or to talk to your linked Professional Social work Educator.
I look forward to meeting with you and hearing your views over the next few months.
Best wishes,
Andrew Brunt
Practice Development Team contact details
Andrew Brunt - Civic Centre - 07403 276134
Jan Goode - Moat House Leisure Centre - 02476 785568
Dianne Stevenson - Coundon Family Centre - 0247678 5570
Anne Winn - Stretton Avenue - 024 76 785572
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