Social work training reforms: it takes five weeks to create a social worker?
Frontline, the social work training scheme, has been welcomed, but concerns remain that recruits will go too fast, too soon
David Brindle, The Guardian,
Lyn Romeo had no time to celebrate her appointment as England's first chief social worker for adults.
Even as the announcement was made last week, she was dealing with the
deaths of a man who was "known to services" and his wife on Romeo's
patch in Camden, north London.
Social work is tough. The profession is again in the stocks after the conviction of the men involved in the shocking child abuse ring in Oxford, where girls in council care were groomed and abused seemingly at will by local men. But the armchair critics rarely have much idea of what the job entails.
It's a tough challenge and there is concern about the speed at which graduate high flyers and career switchers will be parachuted into the frontline under a new scheme to attract top talent to children's social work. Recruits will go straight into on-the-job training after a summer-school crash course of just five weeks.
Architects of the scheme, which is indeed called Frontline, stress trainees will have full-time supervision by an experienced social worker before they qualify after 12 months. But those wearily familiar with social workers' heavy caseloads know only too well that, in the pressured reality of daily practice, such niceties can be set aside.
Yet there has been a general welcome for Frontline, which is modelled on the Teach First programme to fast track graduates into on-the-job teacher training in challenging schools. While there is no shortage of people wanting to undertake conventional social work training, via (in England) a three-year degree course, their calibre is often questioned.
Talk to anyone who recruits social work graduates and they will readily admit they regard certain university courses with disdain – something that is certain to emerge in a review of training for the Department for Education (DfE) by Sir Martin Narey, the plain-talking former chief executive of children's charity Barnardo's.
The first 100 Frontline recruits will start training in London and Manchester next year. They will be required to do a further 12 months as qualified social workers after their training year, remaining in the same local authority, and will receive a master's degree at the end of the two-year programme. Frontline is being "incubated" by Ark, the international children's charity set up by City financiers, but is receiving £1m upfront from the DfE.
There has been a general welcome, too, for the appointments of Romeo and of Isabelle Trowler as the first chief social worker for children and families. Both women are highly respected "doers" who, perhaps significantly, have risen no higher than assistant director grade in local government.
Trowler co-founded the acclaimed Reclaiming Social Work programme in Hackney, east London, by which small teams operate under consultant social workers with dedicated administrative support. She left Hackney two years ago to set up a consultancy to promote the approach, and, if there is any anxiety about her appointment, it will be how open she is to other thinking. Interviewed for Society Guardian in 2011, Trowler said her programme had to be implemented "with military precision".
A more general anxiety is the binary nature of the social work reforms. The response to the failings exposed by the Baby Peter scandal in 2007 was co-ordinated by a single reform board that led to the creation of a single professional college. Yet we now have two chief social workers; there is talk of a separate Frontline-type scheme for adult services; and Narey's training probe is mirrored on the adult side by another review commissioned by David Croisdale-Appleby, chair of the Skills for Care agency, for the Department of Health.
With about a third of councils now running adult and children's services together, this all seems rather bizarre.
Social work is tough. The profession is again in the stocks after the conviction of the men involved in the shocking child abuse ring in Oxford, where girls in council care were groomed and abused seemingly at will by local men. But the armchair critics rarely have much idea of what the job entails.
It's a tough challenge and there is concern about the speed at which graduate high flyers and career switchers will be parachuted into the frontline under a new scheme to attract top talent to children's social work. Recruits will go straight into on-the-job training after a summer-school crash course of just five weeks.
Architects of the scheme, which is indeed called Frontline, stress trainees will have full-time supervision by an experienced social worker before they qualify after 12 months. But those wearily familiar with social workers' heavy caseloads know only too well that, in the pressured reality of daily practice, such niceties can be set aside.
Yet there has been a general welcome for Frontline, which is modelled on the Teach First programme to fast track graduates into on-the-job teacher training in challenging schools. While there is no shortage of people wanting to undertake conventional social work training, via (in England) a three-year degree course, their calibre is often questioned.
Talk to anyone who recruits social work graduates and they will readily admit they regard certain university courses with disdain – something that is certain to emerge in a review of training for the Department for Education (DfE) by Sir Martin Narey, the plain-talking former chief executive of children's charity Barnardo's.
The first 100 Frontline recruits will start training in London and Manchester next year. They will be required to do a further 12 months as qualified social workers after their training year, remaining in the same local authority, and will receive a master's degree at the end of the two-year programme. Frontline is being "incubated" by Ark, the international children's charity set up by City financiers, but is receiving £1m upfront from the DfE.
There has been a general welcome, too, for the appointments of Romeo and of Isabelle Trowler as the first chief social worker for children and families. Both women are highly respected "doers" who, perhaps significantly, have risen no higher than assistant director grade in local government.
Trowler co-founded the acclaimed Reclaiming Social Work programme in Hackney, east London, by which small teams operate under consultant social workers with dedicated administrative support. She left Hackney two years ago to set up a consultancy to promote the approach, and, if there is any anxiety about her appointment, it will be how open she is to other thinking. Interviewed for Society Guardian in 2011, Trowler said her programme had to be implemented "with military precision".
A more general anxiety is the binary nature of the social work reforms. The response to the failings exposed by the Baby Peter scandal in 2007 was co-ordinated by a single reform board that led to the creation of a single professional college. Yet we now have two chief social workers; there is talk of a separate Frontline-type scheme for adult services; and Narey's training probe is mirrored on the adult side by another review commissioned by David Croisdale-Appleby, chair of the Skills for Care agency, for the Department of Health.
With about a third of councils now running adult and children's services together, this all seems rather bizarre.
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