The education select committee report on social work reform should be read alongside speeches in the House of Lords on the children and social work bill. They come to very similar conclusions and urge the government to think again about the proposed costly legislative changes (introduced with little or no consultation) that have the potential (I would say high likelihood) to impact negatively on the social work profession and on those who need social work services.
Each covers the full gamut of the Department for Education’s proposed changes and finds much to be concerned about.
I was invited to give evidence to the committee because of my experience as vice-chair of the former General Social Care Council (GSCC) and as an elected faculty member of the former Collge of Social Work.
In written evidence I spelled out the three functions needed by a professional regulatory and quality assurance and improvement system:
- An independent regulator focusing on public protection
- A professional college, defining quality and being the voice of social work (answerable to the profession but working closely with government and other professions as well as with service users)
- A professional association for social workers
Some will also want to be a member of a trade union, which may or may not be linked to their professional association.
All four should be separate; it is essential that the regulator should be distinct from organisations developing quality standards for the profession or having a support role for individual workers.
In giving oral evidence, I argued that before proceeding down the route of setting up a much expanded (and inevitably more expensive) regulator that incorporated “college-type” functions, the costs to the public purse (nationally and locally) and to individual social work registrants must be spelled out.
This is where my experience of the GSCC and the college, and my reflections on why neither are still with us, comes in. The GSCC was a non-governmental public body that tried to take on some of the quality and improvement functions that the government plans to allocate to its proposed new regulator. It had a low registration fee but a substantial government subsidy.
When its functions were transferred to the Health and Care Professions Council, there was a backlog of conduct hearings. This was one reason for the transfer, but the underlying reason was that the rules for regulators require them to be self-funding from membership fees. The move to HCPC, with a rise in fees from £30 to £70, offered a way forward. So the ambitions of GSCC to be more than a regulator failed when the government subsidy was removed.
At this point, recognising the need for the quality and improvement functions that GSCC had (only partially) assumed for itself, the Munro committee and the social work task force, backed by the then children’s minister, Tim Loughton, successfully argued for the setting up of the College of Social Work. Loughton was familiar with the issues, but had come to the conclusion that the British Association of Social Workers (BASW) was not able to fulfil this role.
The long-term funding of the college via its members, and its relationship with BASW, was never adequately resolved. The college produced some very useful tools for members and made its mark in policy debates and defining quality standards. It had buy-in from senior members of the profession and the social work academy. But as it turned out, the aspiration that social workers would opt to join the college proved ill-founded.
With hindsight, these two basically professionally effective bodies failed (or were allowed to go under) because insufficient attention was paid, from the start, to the necessary balance between government funding and membership fees. The more ambitious the aims (and the government’s aims for its new “in house” expanded regulator are nothing if not ambitious), the more essential is it to answer these sustainability question at the start.
So what does this look into the past tell us about the likely future viability of the government’s plans for a much-expanded regulator incorporating “college” functions? There have been statements that there is no problem in finding government money for the start-up costs but information on what the longer term annual costs might be, and who will pay for them has not been spelled out.
The select committee and those expressing their concerns in the Lords debates come up with similar, but slightly different proposals for the future.
At second reading of the bill, peers pointed to the lack of a cogent argument about why legislative change to the regulator is necessary in these cash-strapped times.
A cross-party amendment has been tabled to the effect that any new regulator will be independent of government and alongside the regulators for the medical, nursing and other professions.
The select committee concludes that, realistically in these times of limited resources, the gap left by the college’s demise (which it regrets) is unlikely to be filled by the proposed DfE executive agency. Committee members urged the government to work with BASW to consider how its aims can be met by a member-led professional body.
We should go down a route similar to that of the College of Occupational Therapists, with BASW taking on a more comprehensive college role and being recognised as the voice of the profession.
In the light of cogently expressed and similar views coming from the select committee, legislators, and from across the social work profession, it is to be hoped that ministers will engage in good faith with the recommendations of this report.
- Prof June Thoburn is emeritus professor of social work at the University of East Anglia
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