How to make the assessed year work in practice

What can England learn from Northern Ireland about the assessed year for graduate social workers? Vern Pitt reports

Fresh-faced, sporting furrowed brows and sweaty palms, the latest cohort of social workers enters the workplace over the autumn and summer months, all too often to be greeted with mountainous caseloads and labyrinthian systems.

In Northern Ireland, all of the new intake are also expected to pass a formal assessment at the end of their first year of employment. Something that will soon be the fate of newly qualified social workers (NQSWs) in England, where an assessed year is due to replace the current programmes of support developed by the Children’s Workforce Development Council (CWDC) and Skills for Care from as early as 2012.

Community Care spoke to those involved in setting up and evaluating the assessed year in Northern Ireland, which has been in place since the degree programme was reformed in 2004.

Supervision

More than 100 new social workers enter the workforce in Northern Ireland each year. The assessed year aims to give them extra support and avoid burnout.

At the heart of this is regular supervision, says Eithne Darragh, immediate past chair of the Northern Ireland Association of Social Workers, who was involved in developing the system. “The expectation is that social workers will get supervision every two weeks,” says Darragh. “Before we introduced the assessed year, social workers would have got monthly supervision at best.” She explains that, although the assessed year is about ensuring standards of practice, support for fresh social workers is equally important.

In England, the Social Work Reform Board proposes to ensure NQSWs receive supervision weekly for the first six weeks, fortnightly for the rest of the first six months and then monthly thereafter. It is hoped this will reflect their increasing professional autonomy, says Keith Brumfitt, director for social work at the CWDC. He adds that NQSWs should be guided through the assessed year to a point at which they are working at the level of a fully qualified social worker.

Caseloads

Experts in Northern Ireland and England agree that protected caseloads are a good way of ensuring social work graduates make the most of their assessed year.

Frank Carter, a master’s student at Queen’s University Belfast, is researching social workers’ experiences of the assessed year. He says NQSWs are often overwhelmed by the level of paperwork the job requires, meaning smaller caseloads are necessary. However, employers in Northern Ireland have sometimes struggled to implement this.

“One thing that seemed to come through from social workers was that there was a lot of activity when they were new, but that tended to tail off quickly,” says Carter. “People were reporting that, within two to three months, they were virtually up to full caseloads and expected to do the job of an experienced social worker.”

The NQSW programmes in England expect recent graduates to take on about 90% of the work of a fully qualified social worker, rather than capping the number of cases, says Skills for Care’s Graham Woodham. He would like to see the assessed year process keep the best features of the NQSW programme, although he will not specify at this point whether that includes the 90% limit.

Mentoring and support

Carter says most of the NQSWs he interviewed emphasised the importance of good mentoring, through work and/or at an earlier stage during their education. For example, some would maintain contact with the practice teacher who supervised them while on placement. “It can be confidence building,” says Carter.

But Brumfitt says a formalised system, which would see trainee social workers have a long-term mentor throughout their education and the assessed year, is probably too difficult, given the number of employers and universities and movement of staff in England. On the other hand, Woodham says the localised buddy and mentoring mechanisms which many employers now have in place as part of the NQSW programmes will go some way towards filling this gap.

Pay

The Northern Ireland system sees social workers’ pay set centrally because nearly all of them are employed through the five health and social care trusts. NQSWs start at a band five and then, upon completing their assessed year, move up to band six. “It sets an expectation of what they should be capable of,” says Darragh, who also argues it incentivises social workers to pass their assessed year quickly.

However, both Brumfitt and Woodham say this is outside the scope of what is being developed in England. Indeed, the larger number and diversity of employers would make replication of the Northern Ireland pay system highly challenging.

Balance of responsibility

Darragh says that, because employers are so key to the success of the assessed year, the bureaucracy they are subjected to needs to be minimised. “We tried to design the requirements so that employers don’t see it as an extra to supervision,” she says.

The danger of this is that NQSWs will find themselves shouldering the burden for compiling their portfolios of work at the end of the assessed year. In Northern Ireland, that risk is minimised because only a sample of portfolios are ever inspected.

The assessment system in England is subject to consultation, but Brumfitt says the responsibility must, ultimately, be shared between employer and employee.

Line management

Darragh says those developing the assessed year in employment must support line managers, if the system is be a success. “They need to help line managers not to be too anxious about the assessed year; it’s not supposed to be an anxiety-prompting process,” she says. She adds that clear communication with first line managers, not just senior managers, about what is expected is crucial to getting the assessed year up and running.

Woodham hopes that, because managers in England are already familiar with the NQSW programmes, they will be well placed to pick up the requirements of the assessed year in 2012.

‘It gave me the opportunity to challenge things’

Jenni Rice (pictured) started her social work career in a residential children’s home in Northern Ireland four years ago and is still there to this day. For her, the assessed year was an overwhelmingly positive experience.

“I benefited from not being thrown in at the deep end and from having someone monitoring me. I could say I was struggling with something and they wouldn’t judge me for it,” she says. “It gave me the opportunity to challenge things without worrying about losing my job or looking stupid.”

Rice recalls with pride the way her suggestion to up one particularly problematic child’s ratio of staff was listened to by managers. The assessed year built her confidence in her own professional judgement.

However, it didn’t make it any easier being the new person at work. “There were some [social workers] who had qualified 20 years ago. I sometimes came in with a different perspective, and trying to fit that in without stepping on anyone’s toes was difficult,” she says.

Rice says her manager, despite his enthusiasm, wasn’t always very well informed about what was expected as part of the assessed year, though she feels this may have been because she was part of the first cohort to undergo the process. “It relied quite heavily on my interpretation of what was expected.”

Importantly, the assessed year gave her the space to learn at her own pace. “It gave me time to consolidate the knowledge I had accumulated at university,” she says.

Jenni Rice started her social work career in a residential children’s home in Northern Ireland four years ago and is still there to this day. For her, the assessed year was an overwhelmingly positive experience.

“I benefited from not being thrown in at the deep end and having someone monitoring me. I could say I was struggling with something and they wouldn’t judge me for it,” she says. “It gave me the opportunity to challenge things without worrying about losing my job or looking stupid.”

Rice recalls with pride the way her suggestion to up one particularly problematic child’s ratio of staff was listened to by managers. The assessed year built her confidence in her own professional judgement.

However, it didn’t make it any easier being the new person at work. “There were some [social workers] who had qualified 20 years ago. I sometimes came in with a different perspective, and trying to fit that in without stepping on anyone’s toes was difficult,” she says.

Rice says her manager, despite his enthusiasm, wasn’t always very well informed about what was expected as part of the assessed year, though she feels this may have been because she was part of the first cohort to undergo the process. “It relied quite heavily on my interpretation of what was expected.”

Importantly, the assessed year gave her the space to learn at her own pace. “It gave me time to consolidate the knowledge I had accumulated at university,” she says.

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