Risk, Safeguarding and Personal Budgets: exploring relationships and identifying good practice

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Martin StevensDr Martin Stevens is Senior Research Fellow at the Social Care Workforce Research Unit in the Policy Institute at King’s. (900 words)

Published today are our findings from this timely NIHR-SSCR funded study, which aimed to provide evidence about the impact of using different forms of Personal Budgets on risks of abuse, to explore practice responses to the increased emphasis on using Personal Budgets and the experiences of Personal Budget holders who had been the subject of a safeguarding referral (suspected abuse or neglect). This collaborative research (undertaken by researchers from King’s, the University of York and Coventry University) was driven by our awareness of contradictory perceptions held by practitioners and other researchers. We had heard views that people on Direct Payments (one main form of Personal Budgets) were more at risk of abuse than other social care users, but on the other hand that the increased control offered by Direct Payments was a protective factor. In order to provide some evidence to address these contradictions, we re-analysed national and local data on safeguarding referrals and take-up of the different forms of Personal Budget. Continue reading →

Shifting policy attention to the social care workforce

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Dr Shereen HusseinDr Shereen Hussein is Principal Research Fellow at the Social Care Workforce Research Unit in the Policy Institute at King’s. (956 words)

The year 2014 has seen growing attention given to the social care workforce, with a number of high profile reviews being published, including the Kingsmill Review ‘Taking Care’, the Unison report into home care ‘Time to care’, the Demos review of residential care and, launched today, the Burstow Commission review on the future of the home care workforce, ‘Key to care’.

The question of how to maintain a high quality social care workforce has received academic scrutiny for many years, with research highlighting the lack of career progression, low pay and status, and the inability of the sector to attract young and diverse groups of workers as some of the key issues. There are many reasons why we are in this state of ‘crisis’ but at the core is the assumption that care work is something that can be performed by ‘anyone’—it does not require a vast amount of skills and we can always find a willing worker to do it. While these assumptions go unspoken, they underline how the sector operates and derive from the perception of care work as ‘women’s’ work that comes ‘naturally’; if the family can do it why do we need a skilled professional to do it? Continue reading →

What social care support is provided to family carers? What support do family carers want?

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Jo Moriarty Nov 2014bJo Moriarty is Research Fellow and Deputy Director of the Social Care Workforce Research Unit in the Policy Institute at King’s. This month sees the publication of the Research Findings of a project she led on Social care practice with carers. (736 words)

 

I’ve lost the man that I fell in love with and I now just feel like a full time nurse. (Nicola-Jane, Carer08)

Research about family carers often focuses on the problems they face. However, at a time when increases in social care funding are not enough to meet the additional demand for services and when it is expected that the gap between the number of people needing support and the number of people able to support them is widening, we need to focus not just on problems but on finding better ways to support the six and half million people providing unpaid help to members of their family and friends in the United Kingdom. Continue reading →

Push and pull: doctors deciding to leave the UK for New Zealand

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Stephen MartineauStephen Martineau is a researcher at the Social Care Workforce Research Unit in the Policy Institute at King’s. (670 words)

The Social Care Workforce Research Unit (SCWRU) last week hosted a lecture by Robin Gauld of the University of Otago, New Zealand. Professor Gauld, who is 2014 NZ-UK Link Foundation Visiting Professor, presented new research (done with Dr Simon Horsburgh) on the migration of medical professionals from the UK to New Zealand. Audience members, who included the High Commissioner of New Zealand and the Executive Dean of the Faculty of Social Science and Public Policy at King’s, also heard formal responses from Stephen Bach (Dept of Management at King’s) and Jill Manthorpe, Director of SCWRU. Continue reading →

The challenges of medical workforce migration between the UK and New Zealand

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Prof Robin GauldOn 29 October 2014 the Social Care Workforce Research Unit at King’s hosts a seminar examining workforce migration in health and social care (places still available). Prof Jill Manthorpe, Director of the Unit, is joined by Prof Stephen Bach, Department of Management at King’s: they will be the formal respondents to a presentation given by Professor Robin Gauld who is the 2014 NZ-UK Link Foundation Visiting Professor. Here, Robin Gauld introduces his work, which focuses on health workforce migration between New Zealand and the UK. (531 words)

The week of 6 October saw significant media coverage in the UK of the 2014 State of Medical Education and Practice report by the General Medical Council. This indicated that around half of all migrating doctors are departing for the shores of Australia and New Zealand. One newspaper summed it up as: ‘…They cost us £610,000 to train – but 3,000 a year are leaving us for a life in the sun…‘. Continue reading →

Towards a new national learning disability employment strategy

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Stephen MartineauStephen Martineau is a researcher at the Social Care Workforce Research Unit in the Policy Institute at King’s. (782 words)

There is a flurry of policy activity in the field of learning disabilities and employment at the moment. Last Wednesday’s Summit on the topic, hosted by the British Institute of Learning Disabilities (BILD) in Birmingham, followed close on the heels of a run of associated consultation events. Led by a Department for Work and Pensions (DWP) civil servant, with the Department of Health (DH) also in the room, the focus of the meeting was a new national learning disability employment strategy. This is to be in final draft form by November, with a set of four learning and sharing events to follow, and sign-off by Mark Harper, Minister for Disabled People, expected in January 2015. Other indications that the topic of learning disabilities is ‘hot’ in Whitehall and Westminster, as DWP’s Simon Francis asserted on the day, include: the recent appointment of a Special Educational Needs Tsar (Lee Scott MP); the revamp of the GOV.UK website for potential employers of people with learning disabilities; and, a commitment to put much more of the information in this domain into easy read format.

It is too early to say much about the new employment strategy for people with learning disabilities in detail. The talk is of opening up a new funding stream, but quite what shape this will take (and whether, for example, it will entail new pilots)—this isn’t being discussed openly yet. Continue reading →

An insight into Behavioural Insight – or the evolution of a grudge about nudge

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Dr Mary BaginskyMary Baginsky is Visiting Senior Research Fellow at the Social Care Workforce Research Unit in the Policy Institute at King’s. (830 words)

When the Department for Education published the Behaviour Insight Team’s (BIT) report on decision-making in intake teams in children’s services earlier this year the sharp intake of breath from many social work academics could be heard across the land, followed by a Twitter tirade. What had led to this?

In another place I have railed against the trend for think tanks and the like to label a shallow dip into a subject as ‘research’ and then to go on to make huge claims that are intended to, and sometimes do, influence policy. But in the past I have also been seduced by the ideas that have emerged from BIT, also known as the ‘nudge unit’. Its stated aim is to apply insights from academic research in behavioural economics and psychology to public policy and services. So when the unit advised the HMRC to change the wording on some of their letters, the result was an extra £200 million collected on time; and when it found that it was clearing the rubbish out of lofts that stood in the way of people insulating them they suggested providing a subsidised loft clearance and the rate at which insulation was happening soared. However, my admiration did not stretch to the findings of the report on social workers’ decision-making. Continue reading →

The challenges of mental health for social science and policy

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Guntars Ermansons, student in the Department of Social Science, Health and Medicine, introduces a report on a workshop held earlier this summer. See the full report of the workshop. (309 words)

On 19 June 2014, a workshop on “The Challenges of Mental Health for Social Science and Policy” was held at King’s College London, Waterloo Campus. Supported by the King’s Interdisciplinary Social Science Doctoral Training Centre’s Science & Society initiative and organized by the Department of Social Science, Health and Medicine, in collaboration with the Institute of Psychiatry and Social Care Workforce Research Unit, the workshop hosted a number of distinguished speakers and experts on mental health and involved postgraduate and early career researchers. Continue reading →

Sequeli welcomes the First Annual Report of the National Panel of Independent Experts on Serious Case Reviews

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Sequeli is a social enterprise not-for-profit limited company which provides training for chairs of mental health investigations, domestic homicide reviews, children’s Serious Case Reviews (SCRs) and adult safeguarding SCRs. The First Annual Report of the National Panel of Independent Experts on Serious Case Reviews was published last month. Here, Gillian Downham, Sequeli‘s founder and Director, addresses the issue of the effectiveness of SCRs (and the training associated with them) that is raised in the Report. (652 words)

As Director of Sequeli, I have worked hard for over a year developing courses, seminars and training materials for the Department for Education’s (DfE) ‘Improving the Quality of Serious Case Reviews’ training programme. It has been a pleasure to work with experienced colleagues, among them members of the Social Care Workforce Research Unit at King’s College London, as well as the NSPCC and Action for Children. I have been steeped in the subject. So not surprisingly I have a few comments on the Panel’s first Annual Report.

Firstly, this is a very welcome Report. It is good to see the Expert Panel have been so assertive on the initiation of children’s SCRs (suspecting that alternatives to SCRs are on many occasions ‘proposed as a way of evading publication’) and publication of SCR reports. The need for independence, thoroughness, openness and proportionality has been the bedrock of the Sequeli approach and at the centre of the DfE training. It is heartening to see these mentioned throughout the Annual Report. Continue reading →

Looked after children and offending: reducing risk and promoting resilience

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In this guest post, Gareth Crossman, Executive Director of Policy, Communications and Fundraising at TACT, a fostering and adoption charity, highlights research done with the University of East Anglia on the topic of looked after children and offending. (371 words)

In 2010, TACT and the University of East Anglia’s Centre for Research on the Child and Family were awarded a research grant by the Big Lottery Fund. This funded a major project examining the relationship between children in care and the criminal justice system. One hundred young people, along with local authorities across England and Wales, took part in a series of detailed interviews and surveys. The aim was to investigate the factors that caused young people in care to be at risk of entry into the criminal justice system. And, crucially, what were the factors that could promote resilience and help keep them away from criminalisation.

Young people in care are often stereotyped as likely to become criminals. There is no doubt that statistics about prison populations show disproportionate numbers of people who have experienced being in care. However, nine out of ten young people who go into care will never come into contact with the police. The research bore out what TACT’s own experience told us; that when the care system works well it can prove hugely effective in keeping young people out of the criminal justice system. However, negative experiences can lead to greatly enhanced prospects of criminalisation. Continue reading →