When Charlotte Pope was finishing her degree in social policy and politics at Edinburgh University, she was interested in a social work career but put off by the prospect of having to stay in higher education to get the necessary postgraduate qualification. So when she discovered there was a new, alternative training option, she jumped at the chance.
Pope was one of the first recruits to Frontline – the controversial, government-backed, fast-track scheme launched in 2013 to attract graduate high-flyers into children’s social work to address the skills deficit in the under-pressure sector. Based loosely on the Teach First model in schools, Frontline trains its recruits largely on the job by placing them in supervised units in partner local councils.
“When I heard about Frontline, that was exactly what I wanted,” says Pope, 23, who obtained her social work qualification at the end of the first 12 months of the two-year course and is now working at the sharp end of the profession in the initial assessment team in Harlow for Essex county council, responding to whatever comes through the front door of the department. Meanwhile, she is due to complete her master’s degree with Frontline by next summer.
“I quite like the fast pace, the unknown of what we are going to do each day,” she says. “And I really feel I make a difference. I don’t think I would be going home with that feeling if I had gone into some of those better-paid, flashier jobs.”
Pope was one of 104 graduates and career-switchers who made up Frontline’s first training cohort last year. After an intensive, five-week residential summer school, they were dispersed to councils in London, Greater Manchester, Essex and Buckinghamshire to work in units under consultant social workers. Five trainees dropped out during the first year, but 99 stayed the course to qualify and are now undertaking their assessed and supported year of employment in regular social work teams while completing their master’s, earning a typical salary of £24,000.
On Wednesday, Frontline advances into the north-east, launching a partnership with eight of the region’s councils that will join the scheme next year. And with endorsement at the highest level – “let’s get our brightest and best to the frontline of social work”, David Cameron told this month’s Conservative conference – the future of the initiative looks assured.
While next year’s 180-strong cohort will be the last under the three-year deal that Frontline brokered with the Department for Education (DfE), a tender document just issued by the department envisages numbers entering fast-track training for children’s social work in England rising to 450 in 2019. Few would bet against Frontline winning this new contract, giving it certainty until potentially 2021.
Josh MacAlister, the scheme’s 28-year-old founder and chief executive, himself a product of Teach First, says: “When you look at the end result, when you consider the people who came through the first year and listen to the way they talk about the work they are doing with families, and how much more confident and determined they are, it makes me very proud. What they are doing is amazing.”
Yet Frontline remains a source of division in the social work world. The ill-feeling it has generated in the academic community, where it is seen as a threat to the traditional model of university-based, generic training for social work with children and adults, shows no signs of abating. There is deep suspicion of the influence of Isabelle Trowler, the DfE’s chief social worker for children and families, whom critics suspect of wanting to divide the profession, and of private-sector interests backing the scheme. Frontline’s founding partners include international children’s charity Ark, which was set up by a group of hedge-fund financiers and runs 34 academy schools, the Boston Consulting Group and the Credit Suisse financial services group. In addition to £3.7m of government funding (£6m if student bursaries are included), it says it has received £1.2m in “support from elsewhere”.
Sam Baron, chair of the Joint University Council’s Social Work Education Committee, says: “One of our chief concerns is that social work education must remain in the public sector where there is accountability and transparency. Frontline is premised on the idea of private funding and that leads to a disparity of resources between the different [training] routes.”
MacAlister concedes that Frontline training is not cheap, putting the cost of the student’s first year at £10,000 plus bursary (about £19,000 plus any London weighting). But he contrasts the 95% qualification and continued engagement rate of the first Frontline cohort with figures for graduates of traditional courses, showing that in 2012-13, six months after completing, just 58% of them were employed in social work.
Ollie Gill, 23, who studied geography at Oxford University, had not considered a social work career. He was passed a flyer for Frontline by a friend whose parents were in the profession and who thought it would suit him. He’s now wholly committed to the job “for the foreseeable future”, saying that he “cannot imagine getting the same kind of satisfaction and challenge from doing anything else”.
Gill, like Pope, works in Harlow, though in a family support and protection team. He reports no friction with colleagues who have had traditional training. “There’s a lot of curiosity about Frontline,” he says. “There’s a natural level of scepticism, but people have been very keen to have conversations about it. Experienced colleagues have been very supportive.”
It seems likely that Frontline will bed in better in this way at a local level than it will nationally. MacAlister sees little prospect of an accord with his critics and while he says he understands their resentment – “it has been a period of massive change for the social work academic community and along comes Frontline, which you could easily perceive as being pushy” – he is in no mood to apologise for the stand-off. “We could have been spending months and months trying to keep people happy, but it would have been for the wrong reasons. It would probably have distracted us from doing something that ultimately will make a lasting difference to child protection.”
The fast-track model for high-flyers is now being copied by the Department of Health’s new Think Ahead programme for mental health social work, which like Frontline requires a 2.1 first degree as a minimum, although its leaders are making strenuous efforts to be more conciliatory towards the academic community. Meanwhile, Baron, who is head of social work at Manchester Metropolitan University, describes relations with Frontline as being “as difficult as ever”. She points out that the DfE’s new tender will close before any evaluation results for the scheme are known – they are not due until next spring – and she fears that all the signs point to an existential threat to generic social work training. “They are training people to do a job,” she says. “We are educating for a profession.”
Such distinctions may mean little to Gill and Pope as they revel in their new roles. Pope recalls working with a family with a little girl who was very anxious and withdrawn. “With the support we were able to offer her mum to change their situation, she started to emerge as this fun, confident and happy child,” she says. “Her smile is something that will stay with me forever. It would be impossible to forget.”
