Training gap, cuts and paperwork damaging personalisation, warn social workers

Your training concerns

“We are having much more in-house training and our training staff don’t know how to pitch it. There are a lot of people who provide training who seem to be a bit detached and don’t understand the culture of social work.”

The gaps in support and training were accompanied by shortfalls in the skills practitioners felt they needed to deliver on personalisation. Forty two per cent said they needed substantially more training in helping service users build personal and community networks, while a further 35% needed a little more training in this area.

Providing social workers with these community development skills is seen as important by government to help develop resilience and independence among older and disabled people, reducing their need for care. In its care White Paper last year, it promised to “work with The College of Social Work to ensure that community development is built into future practice”.

A majority of survey respondents also said they needed at least a little more training in understanding the availability of local care and support services for personal budget users and local sources of support to manage personal budgets; most also wanted some more training in helping service users think creatively about managing their budget and in helping them understand and manage risks.

Training ‘patchy and varied across the country’

“Local authorities have to prioritise this type of training despite reduced budgets and necessary cuts,” said Ali Gardner, author of The College of Social Work’s curriculum guide on personalisation. “Unlike other areas of practice in social work, the personalisation approach is notably different from the approach that many of the current social workers trained under and therefore requires dedicated time to explore the ideological and practical implications of practice.

“Unfortunately training has been patchy across the country and varied in its content, amount and quality,” added Gardner, senior lecturer in social work at Manchester Metropolitan University.

Councils received a dedicated grant from 2008-11, worth £520m, to support the implementation of personalisation, some of which was allocated to training. But from 2011-14, 20% will have been taken out of council adult social care budgets, putting resources for training under pressure.

“Some degree of the pressures on budgets may mean that some councils have reduced money for training,” said Sandie Keene, president of the Association of Directors of Adult Social Services. “That wouldn’t surprise me. Every local authority will invest in continuing professional development and any local authority will have that as part of their core offer for training and development of staff. The issue that has come out of the survey is whether it’s sufficient.”

Keene said that while off-the-job training may have been cut back, budget pressures should not be impacting on the “core function” of supervision.

Bureaucracy

Respondents identified the bureaucracy involved in assessments and resource allocation systems (RAS) as among the chief barriers to delivering personal budgets effectively – but said councils were failing to tackle the problem.

The need to fill in lengthy forms, the use of separate forms for assessment, resource allocation and support planning, the need to revise inadequate indicative budgets generated by the RAS, and cumbersome panel processes for signing off personal budgets were all cited as sources of red tape.  

Three in five respondents (59%) said they did not have enough time to effectively support service users through the assessment process, while just 12% said social workers were trusted to sign off personal budgets up to a certain value without having to refer them to managers or panels.

One social worker told Community Care that higher-value personal budgets in his area could still be referred to panels for approval even after they had been signed off by three layers of management.

“There must be mechanisms for effective budget monitoring and allocation that still allow social workers to [sign-off personal budgets],” said Bernard Walker, chair of The College of Social Workers’ adults faculty. “The implication [of the survey results] is that it could be a fairly low level of [personal budget] expenditure that is going to managers or panels. That’s not something we’d want to encourage.”

Starkly, 9% of practitioners said their RAS was easy for service users and carers to understand, and only 22% said it was easy for professionals to understand.

“[This means] you’ve got a limited amount of time with someone to explain a process [to service users] that you don’t really understand yourself,” said British Association of Social Workers England manager Ruth Cartwright. “That’s a bit worrying.”

Lack of council action to cut red tape

Yet despite these issues having been raised repeatedly by Think Local Act Personal (TLAP), the sector coalition tasked with supporting the delivery of personalisation, and by the last three Community Care surveys, practitioners said councils had failed to resolve the situation. Just 10% agreed their council had reduced the level of bureaucracy involved in the personal budgets process in the past year, while 78% disagreed.

Sam Bennett, programme manager at TLAP, said the apparent lack of council action to tackle excess bureaucracy was “disappointing”. “It seems very difficult for councils to trust that people will make cost-effective choices that lead to better outcomes,” he said. “That points to a cultural issue was well as to bureaucracy.”

Practitioners’ time with service users was also being squeezed by assessment targets driven by current budget pressures, said some respondents.

“The overwhelming message from management is to raise throughput of assessments, including through assessment targets,” said Helga Pile, national officer for social services at Unison. “It’s just getting the volume through. There are growing waiting lists for assessments, which is leading to more pressure from management.”

 “Trying to help someone with communication difficulties requires more time,” said Cartwright. “But there seems to be an emphasis for many people on churning out the assessments.”