Generation gap advice
I was delighted to read Peter White's article about generation gaps and how they can cause problems when elderly parents and adult children live together.
I have been frustrated for some time by my mum and me living our lives at a different pace - she worries that I am always busy, but at this stage in my life I like being busy!
When she moved in, I organised three things which have helped us live together (she did not think they needed to be formally arranged).
The first is a clear financial agreement. The second is her own separate phone line. I strongly recommend this: she enjoys chatting to her friends and does not complain about my teenage daughters who are always on the phone; also, we do not answer each other's phones, which reduces feelings of having your privacy invaded.
Thirdly, I arranged for her to go to a day centre once a week (I am not a social worker for nothing) and although initially she was reluctant, it is now the highlight of her week.
I hope these ideas may help others. It is an issue which is not talked about enough.
Name and address withheld
Diary of despair
What a desperately sad and negative diary article from the deputy head of care at a residential school for deaf children!
Not a word about the challenges those deaf children have to face and overcome on a daily basis. Not a word about the pleasures of childhood and pupil successes. Not a word about the challenges of teaching children who have very often missed out on early language or for whom the British sign language is probably their first language.
No wonder the care field has such difficulty in recruiting staff.
Sue Wilding
Head of operations,
The National Society for Mental Health and Deafness
No pay, no gain
I fear that your wish for "joined-up thinking" does not extend far enough. While the problems of recruitment and retention may be more acute in London, this is a national problem and includes not just social services but the health service, education and the police, to name just the agencies I am most used to working with.
In a field as labour intensive as the public services, where there is a continual reformulation of the process by which services are delivered, there has been an irresponsible lack of focus on the means by which these services will be delivered by those on the front line.
Many in locality teams have been diverted into more specialised posts, or into the gathering army of those who check on the beleaguered people who directly deliver the services.
In my view it is no surprise that there is difficulty in recruiting or retaining front-line staff or those directly managing them. The only way of improving services when there is limited finance is to increase the pressure on those staff to "produce more". Clearly, those people are beginning to doubt that they want to do these jobs.
If the public is not prepared to pay for services no amount of dressing them up is going to lead to the improvements we would all wish for.
Andy West
Hillingdon,
Middlesex
Second best again
The article on the star system by chief inspector of social services Denise Platt was sensible in many respects, but was strangely silent on one problem that clearly is affecting the performance of social services departments, the recruitment crisis.
Children's teams in particular struggle on heroically, carrying vacancies and being heavily reliant on agency staff who come and go. The government will go on talking up the little it is doing on recruitment, but the truth is that conditions for social workers lag behind those of other public professions. It has fallen behind nursing and teaching on pay, it is second best to them on recruitment - the government has produced newspaper rather than television advertising - and it is second best on training, with no training allowances for those wanting to become social workers, again in stark contrast to teaching and nursing.
Perhaps as a follow up to Denise Platt's article, the minister would like to outline how these inequalities are to be addressed. A well-managed service also needs enough high-quality social workers.
Bob Clark
Coventry
Qualifying qualifications
Contrary to a possible reading of your report on qualification requirements for care home managers, we understand that registered managers of homes must have both a practitioner qualification, such as care NVQ4, social work or nursing, and a management qualification, the latter being either a "general" management NVQ or the new level 4 for registered managers (adults).
It is not our job to interpret the national minimum standards (managers should obtain their own copies of those), but we can help the regulatory authorities and employers to meet the 2005 training targets, by pointing out that qualifications already held can give credit towards new ones, and by persuading the funding structures for care training to properly reflect the requirements of new regulations.
Kevin Thomas
Communications manager,
TOPSS England
