Exclusive Community Care research shows that struggling
councils also often have the highest use of agency staff. Andrew
Mickel investigates the relationship between performance and
staffing arrangements
Which comes first: poor performance in a struggling council or a
high use of agency staff? If poor performance comes first, the
argument goes, then the conditions which create those low standards
- poor management, large and difficult caseloads - will make
permanent staff leave, causing higher vacancy rates and a greater
need for agency workers to be parachuted in to plug the holes left
behind. But an alternative view says that a council which is
reliant on agency staff who won't stay for long will be unable to
provide a quality service.
Andrew Thorne, chair of trade organisation the Association of
Social Work Employment Businesses (Asweb), says that agency workers
have a lot to offer struggling departments. "Historically, whenever
there's a horrible death, people always look for the scapegoat," he
says. "It's easy to say that it's the agency staff - they may be a
symptom of it, but if a department doesn't have people who want to
work there permanently then there's a reason for it.
"The reality is that if you have high staff turnover it's not
good for anyone, but those are vacancies that need to be filled.
Agency staff come in with good ideas, they are very target driven
Team morale
However, one former team manager for adults services is wary of
using expensive agency workers for fear of what it can do to team
morale. "The most negative side is the destabilising effect it has
on the team," she says. "What if you spend a lot of time inducting
someone into the service, explaining how the team works, and then
that person finds somewhere else to go?"
She says that continuity is essential for some service users and
agency workers often won't provide that. "With learning
disabilities you are talking about someone with complex history and
needs," she says.
Whichever comes first, the use of agency staff often goes
hand-in-hand with lower performance levels. Exclusive Community
Care research shows that on 31 January, 26% of Doncaster Council's
children's social worker posts were held by agency or temporary
workers, as were 30% of those at Haringey Council. Children's
services at both have been severely - and very publicly -
criticised in recent months.
But then there is Lambeth Council. Like many London boroughs,
Lambeth has high vacancy rates (34%) and use of agency and
temporary staff (33%) - but has a good rating. (article continues
below case study)
Staff turnover
Jo Cleary, head of adults and community services at Lambeth,
argues that rate of staff turnover is more important than what kind
of staff she employs: "We use agency staff, but many have been with
us a long time. They have chosen to remain with us. They are doing
an excellent job in some of the hospital discharge teams, which is
similar to child protection - high volume and high pace work."
Greater use of agency staff can be a pointer of high churn in a
team. That churn itself can become a vicious circle: without enough
experienced long-term staff, it is difficult for complex cases to
be tackled or offer adequate supervision to take place within a
team. Bill McKitterick, former social services director and now a
children's services social work adviser, says: "If you have got a
team with lots of agency staff you might not have an experienced
colleague to be a mentor."
Such a situation can become so bad that a department may
eventually be unable to take on and adequately support new staff.
Helga Pile, national officer for social care at Unison, says that
there is anecdotal evidence that newly qualified social workers are
having difficulty finding placements, which she says could be
because of a reliance on agency workers which can block the natural
take-up of fresh staff.
That is an extreme example of how the normal recruitment and
retention processes can break down. When things are really bad, the
reputation of a council can stop staff - both permanent and agency
- from taking up jobs there. And at that stage, it will only be
changes to management, culture and workloads that will cultivate
long-term change, says Cleary.
"You have to have leadership at every level of your department,"
she says. "Culture takes years to turn around. One of the things I
say in my department is that I'm there to support them, but that
the work is a high-risk environment. I don't want them to hide
Good advice?
That is good advice for those in charge of turning around a
struggling department, but is of little help to an agency worker
going into one now. For people in that position, it is going to be
nigh-on impossible for them to challenge engrained bad
practice.
Pile says that it is not surprising that agency staff will walk
out on difficult cases when there is a risk of being scapegoated
with no redress: "The individuals are responsible for their
decisions in line with their professional code in a way that the
employer isn't. It's not right to blame agency workers [who haven't
had] any induction, and if it's a stretched department no one can
show them how to do that."
This is something that should be resolved soon: Lord Laming last
month recommended that the employers' code of practice be reviewed
and then made statutory, which the government has accepted. Pile
also flags Laming's recommendation to the Social Work Taskforce
that there should be maximum case load limits and mixed loads as a
way for local authorities to tempt agency staff back into permanent
employment.
That could help to tackle not just the high use of agency staff,
but the high vacancy rates to boot. "The Local Government
Association has looked at bringing back retired social workers,"
says Pile. "Why not start with the agency workers?"
• Expert guide
to Laming
•
Agency working: the pros and cons
•
Bill McKitterick's advice on how to break the agency cycle
This article appeared in 2 April edition of Community Care
titled SOS or SAS?