Tag Archives: Mary Baginsky

Evaluating the Adult Social Work Apprenticeship Fund: Benefits, Challenges and Lessons

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With adult social care facing ongoing workforce pressures, could additional social work apprenticeships be part of the answer? Nicole Steils, Mary Baginsky, Ian Kessler and Kalpa Kharicha present findings from the evaluation of the Department of Health and Social Care’s Adult Social Work Apprenticeship Fund 2024-2025. Full report (published 7 September 2026) available here | Project page at King’s. (710 words)

Social Work Apprenticeships in Adult Social Care

Adult social care services in England are facing major workforce challenges. There are ongoing difficulties in recruiting and keeping qualified social workers, while demand for services and the complexity of people’s needs continue to expand. Within this context, social work degree apprenticeships have become an increasingly important part of workforce planning. They provide an employment-based route to becoming a qualified social worker, while also aiming to support a sustainable workforce and widen access to the profession.

Social Work Apprenticeship Fund

In January 2024, the Department of Health and Social Care (DHSC) introduced the Adult Social Work Apprenticeship Fund. The Fund aimed to help local authorities increase the number of social work apprenticeships and to expand support for apprentices by covering some costs that were not covered by the Apprenticeship Levy, now known as the Growth and Skills Levy.

The evaluation

Our evaluation looked at how the Fund was used, what helped or hindered the use, and what results it achieved. We examined data from 70 local authorities who received funding, and interviewed staff in 12 different local authorities. Continue reading →

Working with fathers to protect vulnerable babies from harm

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Dr Mary Baginsky,Senior Research Fellow at the NIHR Policy Research Unit in Health and Social Care Workforce. (414 words)

Dr Mary Baginsky

Dr Mary Baginsky

The Child Safeguarding Practice Review Panel’s report The Myth of Invisible Men: Safeguarding children under 1 from non-accidental injury caused by male carers, published in late 2021, examined safeguarding of children under the age of one year from non-accidental injury caused by male carers.  In summary, the data showed that men are more likely to be perpetrators of physical abuse and harm to babies than women. It indicates that birth fathers are much more likely to be the perpetrator than other male figures. Importantly, whilst just over 50 per cent of families were involved with local authority children’s services (either through early help services or children’s social care), this means nearly 50 per cent of the cases considered as part of the review were only ever known to universal services. Continue reading →

Improving professional decision-making in situations of risk and uncertainty: a pilot intervention

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Dr Mary Baginsky

Mary Baginsky

Dr Mary Baginsky,Senior Research Fellow at the NIHR Policy Research Unit in Health and Social Care Workforce, reflects on our seminar led, online, by Professor Cheryl Regehr on 28 September 2021. (763 words)

Professor Cheryl Regehr is Provost and Vice-President for the University of Toronto and former Dean of the Factor-Inwentash Faculty of Social Work. She is also a Visiting Professor at our Unit this term. We were delighted that she agreed to lead a seminar that focused on her recent work. In this she explained how the Social Sciences and Humanities Research Council (SSHRC) of Canada has supported a number of her recent research projects that have examined stress, trauma and decision-making in social work (see examples below). The aim is to develop a new model for improving decision-making in situations of high-risk to reach a better understanding of the factors that drive decision-making in these situations. Professor Regehr and her team piloted a new approach for improving professional decision-making. The researchers examined biological, emotional, cognitive and contextual influences and this involved measuring social workers’ heart rates and recording their reflections on the decisions they had taken at specific times. The participants were able to link their emotional responses to the points at which they had been under physical stress. By raising their awareness to the relationship between their physiological responses and their automatic responses to the decisions they made the intention was to help them move towards more deliberate decision-making. Continue reading →

Signs of Safety: Findings from the second evaluation by King’s College London

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Dr Mary Baginsky

Dr Mary Baginsky is Senior Research Fellow at the NIHR Policy Research Unit in Health and Social Care Workforce. (1,109 words)

The report on the second round of Children’s Social Care Innovation Programme funding for the 10 MTM (Munroe, Turnell and Murphy) Signs of Safety (SofS) pilots has just been published. The strengths-based approach to child protection and safety is widely used around the world, as well as in two-thirds of local authorities in England (Baginsky et al., 2020). The term ‘Signs of Safety’ refers to a model of practice that consists of:

  • principles that privilege relationships with children and their families
  • disciplines in relation to assessments, behaviours and language
  • tools for assessment and planning, as well as for use with children and families.[1]

It is not known to what extent a ‘pure model’ of SofS is in place in English local authorities. The survey that identified its use also showed the variations – and pick and mix approaches – that  were in place.

Back in 2014 when the 10 MTM pilots were recruited the idea was that they worked to the model above which was developed into a whole system design that MTM considered essential to support, monitor and build high-quality SofS practice based on a supportive organisational culture and the commitment of those in senior leadership positions. The first evaluation found that: Continue reading →

Social Austerity – Child Protection and Human Rights

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Dr Mary Baginsky

Dr Mary Baginsky

Senior Research Fellow at HSCWRU, Dr Mary Baginsky, reports from a conference that took place in Komotini, Greece,1-3 November. (456 words)

I spent last week in the small Greek city of Komotini which nestles in the foothills of the Rhodope Mountains near to the borders of Turkey and Bulgaria. It has a minority Muslim population, many of whom came from Turkey originally and formed a protected population under the Treaty of Lausanne. They have mostly chosen to stay in Greece through to recent times.

The Democritus University of Thrace was established in July 1973 and is based in Komotini, Greece, with other campuses in Xanthi, Alexandroupoli and Orestiada. The Social Work Department was established in the 1990s. I was invited to contribute to a conference on Social Austerity – Child Protection and Human Rights. Most of the contributions were in Greek with intermittent simultaneous translation. In addition to finding it difficult to concentrate on the translation when animated presenters were more of a draw, the fact that the written programme was all in Greek meant that the subject of each presentation was a surprise. Continue reading →

Letter from the European Parliament: Promoting Quality Social Services with the ESF Plus

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Mary Baginsky is Senior Research Fellow at the NIHR Health & Social Care Workforce Research Unit at King’s College London. (611 words)

Dr Mary Baginsky

Dr Mary Baginsky

I was invited to attend an event (9 April 2019) at the European Parliament organised by the European Social Network (ESN) to discuss ‘Promoting Quality Social Services with the European Social Fund Plus (ESF+)’. The ESN has over 125 member organisations in 33 European countries and supports the sharing of knowledge, practice and policies between social services across Europe. The event was hosted by Sofia Ribeiro, a Portuguese MEP and member of the Employment and Social Affairs Committee in the European Parliament. The focus was on how the ESF+, amounting to 120 million euros in the coming period, could be put to best use to support the work of social services across Europe. Even though there are UK members of ESN none were present at the meeting. Continue reading →

‘Carelessness does more harm than a want of knowledge’ —Benjamin Franklin

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Dr Mary BaginskyMary Baginsky is Senior Research Fellow at the Social Care Workforce Research Unit at King’s College London. (1,005 words)

I have been conducting research for more years than I am prepared to admit – sometimes to myself. Much of it has been qualitative in nature, although often as part of a mixed approach methodology. So quantitative data have helped to define the issues to be explored in more depth through interviews and focus groups, for example, or qualitative work has been used to help identify the issues that should be explored through a survey. I am used to weighing concepts such as reliability, validity and generalisability when designing and carrying out projects and reporting their findings, whatever their provenance. I am also as fallible as anyone in not seeing an inherent flaw – that is where the wisdom of colleagues and, however imperfect, the peer review process can be invaluable. However, my experiences of the past few years have given me cause for concern. In conducting a review of evidence on an area where I have been working I have been shocked by some of the things I have found. It has led me to wonder if I would find the same level of errors if I looked long enough in other papers, books and articles. Continue reading →

The Prato moment: thinking about leadership in social work education

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Mary Baginsky, Senior Research Fellow at the Social Care Workforce Research Unit, introduces an invited post by Professor Charlotte Williams:

I was fortunate to have attended the second colloquium held at Monash University’s Prato centre. This is the second year that the group has come together to explore social work education. Prior to a more formal summary of proceeding, Professor Charlotte Williams, Professor and Deputy Dean of RMIT’s Social Work in the School of Global, Urban and Social Studies, reflects on the context and culture within which the discussions took place. In so doing she made me realise how much I miss the intensity of the discussions, the opportunity to learn from the experiences of others and the time to talk and disagree.—Mary Baginsky

Professor Charlotte Williams writes:

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Professor Charlotte Williams

There’s a special magic about Prato that is so conducive to commune. The ambition of the Prato Group, a collaboration of Social Work educators, reflects many of the attributes of this ancient and vital textile producing city in which it was inaugurated. The Prato textile enterprise with its yarns, designs, collective and innovative technologies has approached its futures over an 800-year history with enormous creativity, energy and pragmatism in an effort to remain relevant, stable and future-oriented. Through epochs of profound social, economic, political and technological change the ability to anticipate, capture and engage judiciously with disruptive forces and to lead through change has meant a threatened industry thrived largely through the efforts of small and distributed artisans working with common purpose. Continue reading →

Families and children’s services: international perspectives

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Dr Mary BaginskyMary Baginsky is Senior Research Fellow at the Social Care Workforce Research Unit at King’s College London. (565 words)

Early in September I had the privilege of attending the International Conference on ‘New Perspectives for Outcome-Based Evaluation and Research on Families and Children’s Services’. It was held at the Chinese University of Hong Kong and emerged from a collaboration between the University, the International Association for Outcome-based Evaluation and Research on Family and Children’s services (iaOBERfcs) and the Zancan Foundation, based in Padua, Italy. It brought together over 150 participants from 14 countries. The conference opened with children and young people performing traditional Chinese drumming and dragon dances and was followed by opening addresses and presentations. As interesting as the latter were, I was still contemplating how the girls at the back of the dragons had danced for 15 minutes while bent at an angle of 90 degrees. 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 →