A well attended plenary discussed the split between the children and adults workforce and future developments.

Gail Tucker, chair of the British Association of Social Workers independents’ forum, spoke of the need to preserve social care professional identity and values under the pressure of integration with health and education. One way to do this was to involve clients in the planning, purchasing and developing of services – what she termed “a true partnership”.

She then outlined what she believed was the two main building blocks of the new social care workforce:

• Professional identity – confidence in its values and knowledge base backed up by registration and ongoing professional learning and development.
• Professional organisations – their role in training, learning and maintaining the professional identity.

She was confident that the social care workforce could meet the challenge of change: “Most of us have become very adaptable because of the massive organisational change that has gone on.”

Ray Jones, director of Wiltshire social services, listed recent developments that had benefited the workforce: registration, degree, post qualification awards, continuing professional development and social care staff training.

He said that the children and adult green papers represented the coming together of several agendas such as political, policy and personal development. In the green papers the workforce takes a central role in assessing helping and developing key relationships with clients.

Social workers should be confident about the future, he said, although the division between the two green papers was creating barriers between workers moving between both sets of services.

He also spoke of his own experience in Wiltshire of integration. The council set up 20 sites around the county integrating health, social services and occupational therapy and so on.  The benefits were easy access, less chance of falling through safety nets and better information sharing; overall greater co-ordinated and comprehensive services. The impact on staff was improved understanding of different professional roles and their own core skills while there had been some redefinition of job roles and creation of new ones.

Jeanette Pugh, director of the children’s workforce unit at the Department for Education and Skills, said that the key issue to both green papers was to improve the supply and recruitment of social workers and to maintain stability of the workforce. This would be done by training, learning and development of workforce.