Category Archives: Workforce

All change for social work – shifting the pieces but not the problems?

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Dr Mary Baginsky

Dr Mary Baginsky

Dr Mary Baginsky is Visiting Senior Research Fellow at the Social Care Workforce Research Unit. Dr Baginsky, who leads a seminar on 3 December 2013 on Retaining experienced social workers in children’s services, here responds to the comments of the Education Secretary yesterday.

In speaking to the NSPCC on 12 November 2013 Michael Gove MP, the Secretary of State for Education, has pledged to overhaul the child protection system and reform social work training. It is not clear what the former will entail, but there is no mention of the multi-agency approach that has underpinned the system that has come to be known as ‘child protection’. There are references to failing authorities, Birmingham being specifically identified, as well as the success of Hackney. If only everything was so clear-cut. Money was available to achieve the reported transformation of Hackney—a great deal more would be required to do the same in Birmingham and that level of financial support does not seem to be forthcoming at a time when we are told the biggest cuts to council budgets are still to come. In addition we have lost the Children’s Improvement Board just at a time when it is needed to support ‘failing’ and ‘failed’ authorities and facilitate peer support that has been shown to work well.

How many social workers will be saying ‘no more system change for child protection and no more change for initial social work training’? Again it is not clear what is intended for social work training. The Secretary of State says that Step Up has been successful, but not successful enough at recruiting sufficient great people. So would one solution not be to extend the numbers on Step Up instead of supporting another route? But then do we know which people are now being recruited onto courses? Money would be well spent in improving the data sets around social work education so we can move from anecdote and guesswork to a position where we are able to make confident statements.

In the past six years there has been a range of initiatives that have transformed social work education, alongside the recommendations that came from the Social Work Task Force. The money to support many of these has now disappeared, but they have influenced practice and many local authorities are trying to sustain the work. Although based on anecdote it is anecdote that arises from numerous conversations around the country—many local authorities are commenting on the noticeable improvement in the quality of their newly qualified social workers. This is not to say that everything is perfect but we do need to acknowledge the strides that have been made. The really sensible thing would be to try to maintain this improvement and take steps to retain those committed and intelligent entrants who are already coming into the profession. The image that the Secretary of State appears to have of social work education and social work students will not help. Too much listening to the radio programme ‘Clare in the Community’ perhaps—which is so funny because it is so extreme and atypical.

Mary Baginsky is Visiting Senior Research Fellow at the Social Care Workforce Research Unit at King’s College London. She is author, with Claire Teague, of Speaking from Experience: the views of the first cohort of trainees of Step Up to Social Work (Department for Education, June 2013).

Dr Baginsky leads a seminar on 3 December 2013 ‘Retaining experienced social workers in children’s services: the challenge facing local authorities in England’ based on her report of the same title (August 2013)—places still available, attendance is free.

@abbotsky | @scwru

A new approach to social work recruitment in the United States

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Dr Mary Baginsky

Dr Mary Baginsky

Mary Baginsky, Visiting Senior Research Fellow at the Social Care Workforce Research Unit at King’s and an expert on the UK Step Up to Social Work programme, reports on a New York initiative, the Children’s Corps.

I have also come to learn the difference between ‘feeling unsafe and just feeling out of place’. There have been many times when I feel out of place but I am getting over that.—A Children’s Corps Programme member

There is an increasing interest in the United States (US) in trying to ensure that those who are employed in children’s welfare services know what is ahead of them. What have been called ‘realistic job interviews’ attempt to give applicants a deeper insight into what the job entails. They are proving to be reasonably effective where the job is complex or difficult and where there are high turnover rates early on in careers, as well as where aspects of the work may not be fully understood by applicants. By giving them a real idea of the challenges the chances of retaining good staff increase. In the UK many of those recruiting onto social work programmes already do this explicitly or implicitly. We are also seeing some targeting of resources (such as the bursary) at people with prior experience with the idea that this will pay dividends in quality and retention.

The UK Step Up to Social Work programme has now recruited its third cohort. It is targeted at those with a good degree (defined as a first or upper second) as well as significant experience with children and young people. Time will tell what the retention rate is like but the feedback from trainees indicated that their prior experience was invaluable, even if they felt it was not always recognised by the universities or agencies where they were based. On the other side of the Atlantic another similar initiative has also just recruited its third cohort. Once again experience is at the heart of the thinking about how to attract and retain good social workers of the future.

Based in New York, Fostering Change for Children recruits college graduates as well as existing professionals on to the Children’s Corps programme. They all have to be prepared to commit to work in foster care and preventive services in New York City (NYC) for two years. The hope is that many of those who are accepted onto the programme will go on to qualify and practise as social workers. In fact some of those in all three cohorts already have a Bachelors degree in Social Work and see the programme as a way of gaining experience before embarking on a Master’s course. Since 2011, 88 Children’s Corps members have been placed in jobs in foster care agencies and preventive programmes across NYC. The receiving agencies are not expected to provide any additional support and the Corps members are no different from any other employee.

The Children’s Corps programme was inspired by Teach for America and shares its hallmark traits of emphasizing selection, training and support. Its message is that child welfare work is rewarding, but is also complex and demanding; it takes a strong and motivated individual to succeed in the field. The application and recruitment process is rigorous and involves realistic interviewing techniques and resilience testing to try to ensure they get people prepared for tough work in difficult environments. The programme starts with a five-week intensive summer school, but there is no funding to support the participants so they must have or need to find the resources to survive in New York without a stipend. The staff of Fostering Change for Children realise that there is a danger that it will therefore tend to attract those who have enough funds or supportive parents to see them through.

In May I was fortunate enough to be able to spend time with four Corps members while I was in the US as part of my Churchill Fellowship. Two of the four did not fit this profile. One had come to the US from the Caribbean when she was eight and said she had always been encouraged by her mother to give back to the society where they had made their home. She had recently married and the couple was able to live on one salary until she started earning. Another member had borrowed money from her family that she paid back when she started to receive a salary.

While the summer school was said to be excellent they all admitted that they had faced a steep learning curve when they joined their agencies. The average turnover in fostering agencies in NYC is 40 per cent, which meant that those coming towards the end of their second year had seen almost all their original colleagues leave. To say they were dealing with very difficult cases is an understatement and, at times, they had all wondered if they could go on. The quality of the supervision they received in the agencies had varied as this person told me:

For the first nine months of my job when all these workers were leaving it was a very negative work environment – it was not supportive and you were very much on your own. You had seven families assigned to you – I had 19 children assigned as a result. Sometimes I wouldn’t even know what I was supposed to be doing. I had some really old cases that were very hard. I thought about quitting every other day – may be at one point every day. I used to come home late at night after working a 12-hour day and I would cry – I was so exhausted. I did not know how I’d be able to go back the next day. It was very hard.

This person did not quit and is now studying for a MSW. But, as with her colleagues, she attributed her survival to the support she received from Children’s Corps. Not only does each member have a mentor whom they can use as much or as little as they want, the organisation provides monthly training sessions that also offer the opportunity for peer support as well as additional training. The retention level has been good across the early cohorts. Of the four Corps members I met three intended to qualify and practise as social workers and the fourth is deciding between that and going on to become a clinical psychologist, where she admitted she would earn more and probably attract more professional respect. The experience they have gained means that those going into the profession do so with a very realistic expectation of what the work is like. They have also learnt that if they are to stay in the profession they will have to seek out support if it is not immediately available.

Mary Baginsky is Visiting Senior Research Fellow at the Social Care Workforce Research Unit at King’s College London. She is author, with Claire Teague, of Speaking from Experience: the views of the first cohort of trainees of Step Up to Social Work (Department for Education, June 2013). Follow Mary on Twitter: @abbotsky

Go to the Fostering Change for Children website | Children’s Corps blog

Is the care worker perspective still overlooked in disability research?

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Professor Karen Christensen

Professor Karen Christensen

A long time ago – at least as it is defined in the academic world – in the 1990s, the British professor of social policy Clare Ungerson published an article: “Give them the money: Is cash a route to empowerment?” In this article she forecast many of the challenges arising from welfare policies intended to empower disabled people in their everyday lives by means of cash payments. The idea was that instead of letting disabled people receive traditional services such as home help they should receive money to employ their own care workers and this should be “a route to empowerment”. The important contribution that Ungerson made with this early article about these cash payments was to point to the care worker’s perspective within a welfare scheme that aimed at providing services on the user’s terms. If she was critical of disability writers in this and later articles, and she was, so she was subject to criticism herself by disability writers such as Jenny Morris and others.

Since the late 1990s cash-for-care schemes have developed in different ways in many European countries and there is a growing literature investigating this form of welfare. However, this basic tension underpinning the field remains and also, reflecting this tension, the care worker perspective remains the perspective that is under-researched within the disability research field. Although currently ‘multidimensional aspects’ and ‘inter-disciplinary studies’ are keywords for new research projects, many networks and associated research areas are specialized or restricted within limits and this may take some of the research on ‘care’ – actually an unpopular concept within the independent living ideology, which has pushed forward welfare schemes that could empower disabled people – out of disability research. Interestingly, this does not seem to be the case with research on long-term care for older people, where studies about the care of older people are a central part of the research area.

I am currently working on a study about welfare, migration and care work, which is empirically based on life histories of migrant care workers in Norway and the UK, and these questions around disability research arise in the project for two reasons. One is empirical and concerns the life stories: in all of them care work, and particularly personal assistance work for disabled people, plays a role, though the role varies in relation to the different life projects of the migrants. The second reason is that migration is no longer an issue only for countries like the UK with its colonial past and long traditions of bringing migrant workers into the workforce; it has also become an issue in Nordic countries. So here, for example, the health and care sector is one of the main employment areas attracting migrants, in particular women. In the UK, migrants have played a role in the cash-for-care scheme since its start, while this is a more recent phenomenon in Norway. The difference is due to the different timing of the migration waves in the two countries; in the UK starting after the Second World War, while in Norway significant numbers of migrants first started coming after the EU extension in 2004, opening the borders to citizens from several East European countries. In other words: migration is now an issue for the cash-for-care system and for the discussion of disabled people’s empowerment in both countries.

Due to the ageing population in both countries there is a growing need for workers in the health and care sector. However, in the UK, and Norway (as well as the other Nordic countries), this sector is experiencing a recruitment problem, in particular regarding direct care jobs. This type of work is stigmatized as female low status work and, particularly in the UK, is associated with very low wages. Therefore the work is often seen as unattractive to indigenous workers and the shortages caused by this contribute to the explanation as to why the work appeals to migrant workers. Among the multiple motivations for migrants taking up this work are, for example, the lack of recognition of their qualifications and the necessity therefore to take the kind of jobs that are available and the flexibility of these kinds of jobs (part time, no fixed hours, live-in options etc.) which may appeal to their specific life situation. Overall, the structural point of departure, however, is of a reserve workforce situation which raises issues regarding, for example, the risks of developing working conditions which are below the general standards in these countries. Another risk, particularly in the UK, concerns the widespread use of private agencies supporting disabled people in their employer role, but often for a price that reduces the care workers’ wages significantly. Both disabled people and care workers are vulnerable groups under such circumstances.

What I am trying to say is that empowerment for disabled people is not only a disability project, but also still – and maybe even more so now, due to the new groups of workers entering the labour market – a care work issue. Care work is increasingly globalized: labour markets are no longer restricted to localities or countries. New worldwide job seeker web sites have been established and the rapid development of technology makes it possible to keep in contact with families in the home country. Including these changes in the discussion requires paying attention to the ways migrant care workers themselves handle their work situation as part of their lives. The life history perspective affords us a way of understanding this as an ongoing process of balancing individual preferences with the structural conditions set by immigration policies and the way in which the welfare scheme is implemented, as well as enabling us to examine concrete interactions with disabled people about the assistance they need and want to control in their everyday lives. Without knowledge of the care worker side, future discussions on how to empower disabled people will lack insight. These future discussions will benefit from opening the borders between disability and care work.

A version of this piece, together with the photograph of Prof Christensen, was originally posted on the blog of Nordic Network on Disability Research, 12 December 2012.

Karen Christensen, Professor of Sociology at the University of Bergen, is Visiting Research Fellow at the Social Care Workforce Research Unit at King’s College London. Her co-authored report on the marketization of older people’s services in Scandinavia is forthcoming. She took part in the Invisible Communities conference here at King’s. For more of Professor Christensen’s work on the Norwegian context see the Research On Workforce Mobility network, of which she is a member.

On being a boundroid

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by Jill Manthorpe

Boundroid? Why haven’t I heard this term before? Listening to the speakers at the Transforming Adult Social Care Workforce Conference yesterday, this word featured prominently. It was used to describe people whose working lives have spanned social and health care and continue to think about the connections. They may be the future.

Researchers too can be boundroids and that’s what we need to be when thinking about evidence and practice; about policy and implementation; social care and social work; home care and care homes. We need to know a bit about each and a lot about some of these subjects.

The Adult Social Care Workforce Conference is an annual event where the spotlight is not on social care funding or reorganisation alone but on the workforce (1.68 million people according to Skills for Care). This year three themes stood out. There was the confirmation that ‘Leadership’ in social care has been a problem and is now the solution. The L word is used rather than management to emphasise that leadership is everybody’s business. When did this happen and what does it mean? For me this change was captured visually by Debbie Sorkin from the National Skills Academy. She has collected several photos of the social care workforce and remarked on how often the pictures portray staff sitting down and not looking directly to camera. We’ll certainly keep a lookout for such images in our own presentations to see if there are subliminal threads of invisibility.

A second theme that can usually dampen the spirit of any conference was that of integration. How right Andrea Sutcliffe of the Social Care Institute for Excellence is to say that this word can usefully be abandoned for ‘joined up’ in many instances. As researchers we don’t want to be integrated but ‘joining up’, and building mutually informed relationships seems to be the way to go.

This conference heard about the specifics of workforce investment from Glyn Mason of the Department of Health, whose experience in practice and management is always remembered by conference participants who have worked with him in far flung places over the years. With all the media coverage of complexities of the social care funding reforms it is easy to see the Care and Support White Paper as an empty vessel. But there is 60 years’ worth of reform in it and a separate chapter on the workforce is only one place where the workforce features. After all, social care is a ‘doing’ word not an object, as my classroom teachers might have said. Two groups are mentioned in particular – apprentices and care ambassadors. But under every proposal are workforce implications. Who, for example, will work in the expanded housing with care services? Who will carry out the promised carers’ assessments for all? And why was migrant working not really addressed?

Being a boundroid is a characteristic of social care work of any type and style. Maybe the challenge will be to ensure that other sectors see this as a useful attribute too.

Professor Jill Manthorpe is Director of the Social Care Workforce Research Unit, King’s College London.