In a nutshell, we are looking for a place where the shared ambition for children and for services for children and families is well articulated and owned across the organisation. Leaders like the chief executive, the leader and the lead member will know the level of risk which is being carried in relation to child protection. Put simply, who gets early help and how much harm might children experience to be subject to child protection inquiries or a plan? They will have access to a range of information to assure themselves that social workers and wider staff are being well-supported to carry out their roles. So, they will have information on the caseloads being managed across different parts of social care and will have access to data on both timeliness and quality of their work, as well as information to assess the impact on the experiences and progress of children. They should get access to information on the department’s own assessments of the quality of the work; feedback from children and families; learning from audits and case reviews; and should know how these have been fed into continuous improvement planning. It is also important they have a strong grip on how the wider organisation is supporting children’s social care doing its best work: from supporting recruitment and retention of social workers, providing appropriate spaces to meet with children, families and safeguarding partners; through to having the right administrative support and timely legal advice. It is also vital that the corporate and safeguarding partnerships are owned and supported internally as well as externally.
We recently published a report on the impact of COVID-19 and progress since we have been adjusting back from the time of the maximum restrictions. The reduction in the lines of sight on the most vulnerable children has meant later identification and more extensive or enduring harm for some children. The smallest children and teenagers have had the most detrimental impact, particularly those experiencing harm pre-pandemic. Some care leavers felt isolated. Essential family contact was limited for looked after children. It is clear that local areas prioritised those children they already knew were being harmed, as well as ensuring regular contact with looked after children and care leavers. Less frequent face-to-face contact was supplemented by Teams and WhatsApp, with a clear line of sight on the risk assessment and constant reprioritisation of the highest risk children and families. Social workers prioritised home visits over office working. This included making imaginative use of front gardens and speaking to children in open-public spaces. The latter offered a space some children found helpful, walking alongside their social worker rather than sitting across from them at a table. Attendance by partners at, for example, strategy meetings and child protection conferences, was better without the added burden of travel. People made the best of it but we have learned that relationships really need that face-to-face aspect. E-supervision and E-training can supplement but should never replace face-to-face opportunities for reflective practice or support shared learning or provide the best environment to discuss a difficult home visit or court appearance. For newly qualified social workers they were denied the opportunity to see their more experienced colleagues ‘in action’, and benefit from that kind of experiential learning – for many social workers these development needs are only now being addressed. Feedback from staff groups to assess the enduring impact and how they are being supported will continue to be important.
I am often asked for a magic number in terms of caseloads. It is not an exact science and it depends on the nature and complexity of the cases. In my highly theoretical scenario, a child protection team manager has five staff: three very experienced, two much less so. If each team member has 20 cases the manager has to oversee 100 children. They have to allocate cases out to give breadth, balance and reflect the experience of each social worker. Even a very experienced social worker will find two or three cases going through the courts at the same time an absolute challenge. So now you are allocating new work to less experienced team members. Now you have a social worker off sick and their cases still need progressing. And that team is part of a complex eco-system. So, heads of services, team managers, assistant directors and directors need to have the oversight and grip of that whole eco-system. They need to know which teams are under pressure and to take action quickly when intake volumes rise or staffing capacity falls. The oversight we build into social care is not “inefficiency”. It is the capacity to oversee complex risk, to constantly re-prioritise and to support staff who are managing very high levels of actual as well as risk of harm to children. Fostering, adoption, care and care leavers teams all have their caseload and workflow needs too. Don’t expect the same answers across the piece.
What we do know is, when we get it wrong, social workers will not be able to do enough direct work and their record-keeping will suffer, leaving a poor trail for future workers, manager oversight and most importantly for the child. On a personal level, their health may well decline and they might leave the profession entirely. For children, it will mean they do not get the time to build a relationship with their social worker and our collective decision-making will be poor impacting negatively on children’s progress and outcomes.
Whatever services we lead it makes absolute sense to recruit, develop and retain the workforce to do very their best work. So, for social care, where we are asking staff to do difficult work with families, to hold very high levels of partner anxieties and to take difficult life-changing decisions about children’s lives, it is absolutely vital. It makes absolute sense in terms of the positive impact on children and families and it makes economic sense in terms of the cost of agency and recruitment costs generally. Employee wellbeing and a positive workplace culture must never be understated or underestimated in its importance. In the post-pandemic world, we still see more hybrid and remote working which is not all bad – but new ways of working need to have employee wellbeing and workplace culture at the heart of how it operates and delivers for the whole workforce. A leadership team that is visible and approachable and getting regular honest feedback from staff through exit surveys, the annual social worker health check. Wider employee surveys, staff absence, sickness and agency rates is required. These can all be helpful in identifying and enabling action to be taken when staff morale is in decline. It is always good to see local leaders triangulating all the workforce information, and to respond to the annual health check with a clear action plan.
Supervision is absolutely vital in social work and performs a wider range of functions in our environment than many others. Supervision is a key part of social work’s assurance system, as well as providing guidance and support to social workers to help them do their current job to the highest level of confidence and competence and to guide them in their future career development. It is an opportunity for the manager to support the worker developing their analysis, to reflect on research or to consider direct work tools which might assist in a particular case. It is part of the manager’s line of sight into the experiences of individual children and a key component of oversight and assurance. It is an opportunity for both to consider, as part of your assessment, the learning and development needs of your social worker, providing a view into the capacity and pressures on the individual and their team.
Social workers do values and relationship-based work: they need to understand and be able to apply the local practice model in a way which reflects those values and which meets the very specific needs of the communities they serve. They need to be competent and confident practitioners with a detailed understanding of the law, and of good and emerging best practice in all sorts of specific areas from intra-familial sexual abuse to the contextual risks faced by teenagers. They need to understand the impact of poverty and inequality and to be able to meet specific cultural needs, as well as having an understanding of child or parental mental-ill health or meeting the needs of disabled children. They need to be able to lead multi-agency networks in assessing risk and to support good decision-making for children. Competent and confidant workers will be in a stronger position to challenge and be professionally curious and inquisitive on behalf of children. Alongside all that they need to be prepared for their future career path and to potentially be the social care leaders we need for the future.
Councils need to provide a career long strong Continuing Professional Development (CPD) offer, enabling social workers to do their current job with confidence and to prepare for their next role. On a practical basis they need to ensure colleagues have time to do that learning, to attend courses, shadow colleagues, read research and reflect how that will inform and improve their practice. Key to this is a culture which gives conspicuous care to developing and sustaining the very best professional practice and standards.
We have talked about these partnerships in detail in a blog covering our learning from our Joint Targeted Area Inspections. The Safeguarding and Corporate Parenting Boards need to share the vision and ambitions for children and families, to have the right decision-makers on there from all the relevant agencies and their work needs to be informed by the voices and experiences of services users, and in particular the voices of children. They too need a line of sight on the experiences of children and families and on the quality and impact of their individual and collective safeguarding work and their support for children in care and care leavers. I think, at this particular time, they also need to understand their workforce’s strengths and challenges, including sufficiency of placements and services to support children and families and the impact of any shortages, whether that is social workers, health visitors or Child and Adolescent Mental Health Services (CAMHS). They also need to fully understand the communities they serve, and to influence service commissioning to use their individual and collective resources to best effect for children and families.