Back to nurture

    Ministerial speeches to professional conferences come and go, and
    rarely linger in the mind beyond the evening’s conversations in the
    bar. One speech that did was Sam Galbraith’s 1998 speech to the
    annual conference of the Association of Directors of Social Work.
    Galbraith, then health minister in the Scottish Office, announced
    his seven-point social work modernisation plan to the assembled
    directors. He asked the ADSW to take action to strengthen support
    for front-line staff. The result was the ADSW’s management resource
    pack Supporting Frontline Staff.1


    Following Galbraith’s speech and the ADSW’s response, the Scottish
    executive set up a working party to improve the recruitment and
    retention of staff. In 2002, Cathy Jamieson, then minister for
    education and young people, produced a 12-point action plan, which
    outlined measures to modernise and plan the workforce.2
    One of these was for a post to support staff, which became the
    project co-ordinator for the Supporting Frontline Staff
    initiative.

    The three-year initiative, which started in April, is a unique
    project set up by the Scottish executive and the ADSW. It is unique
    partly because of its scope – it covers violence toward staff,
    recruitment and retention, stress, image, e-government, the new
    degree (due in September 2004), how to share good practice, audit,
    training in leadership, and continuing professional development.

    The initiative is also unique in that the executive is directly
    funding the initiative for £300,000 over three years. This
    funding separates it from anything else in the UK, where
    well-established joint discussions and policy formulation usually
    take place between professional associations and government. “It’s
    a really positive method of demonstrating the relationship,” says
    Orkney director Harry Garland, chairperson of the ADSW’s training
    and development sub-committee.

    It is an ambitious programme, for it will also include staff in the
    statutory, private and voluntary sectors. Project co-ordinator
    Addie Stevenson will be responsible for seeing that the objectives
    and outcomes, which will be announced in August, are implemented.
    But she will also have to draw in parallel initiatives. One of
    these is the Scottish Social Services Council’s appointment of
    Edith Wellwood as learning and development adviser to work on
    workforce planning.

    A series of reference groups will bring together interested
    parties. The core group comprises the Scottish executive, ADSW, the
    Social Work Services Inspectorate and the SSSC. Other satellite
    groups consist of the Care in Scotland Group Forum and front-line
    staff.

    Stevenson says: “A lot of the work is about joining up what is
    already in existence and it is important that front-line staff know
    about that. It’s like crocheting a patchwork blanket and I’m here
    to sew in the parts that join up the squares.”

    As the Supporting Frontline Staff initiative was getting under way,
    the executive announced an action plan for recruitment. It is also
    spending £500,000 on a pilot project with the Convention of
    Scottish Local Authorities to attract graduates to a fast-track
    qualification scheme.

    Duncan MacAulay, ADSW president and director of operations at
    Edinburgh Council, says: “Recruitment and retention need to go
    hand-in-hand. The executive has published its action plan and we
    hope that the work that we can do through this initiative will mean
    that the retention side of things complements recruitment and
    becomes less of a problem.”

    Scotland’s recruitment problems are acute with 400 vacancies – 10
    per cent of social work staff – and 400 new entrants a year. The
    total social care workforce has shrunk by about 4,000 from 38,330
    in 1998. One task will be to gather information about movement of
    staff – why they move and why some authorities have problems and
    others have stable workforces. “More hard data and less anecdote,”
    as MacAulay has put it.

    The scope of the initiative and the number and variety of staff it
    involves beg questions about what can be done in matters like, for
    example, a poor working environment in one place or lack of
    training opportunities in another. The answer, says Garland, is
    “being realistic” and dispensing with the blight of so much present
    day social care “tick box attitudes”.

    1 Association of Directors of
    Social Work, Supporting Frontline Staff, 1999

    2 Scottish executive, Action Plan for the Social
    Services Workforce
    , 2002

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