Sector concern as DfE ends social work teaching partnership funding

The government has stopped funding social work teaching partnerships, sparking sector concern that progress brought about by the arrangements will stall.

The Department for Education wrote to partnerships at the beginning of April telling them that it would not be renewing funding for the 2024-25 financial year.

One sector leader said that the DfE had told partnerships that there would be funding for 2024-25 last autumn and invited them to bid; however, there followed a several-month delay, culminating in last month’s decision to cease providing resource.

The decision is very unlikely to spell the end of teaching partnerships, which bring together higher education institutions (HEIs) and social work employers, mainly councils, within regional or sub-regional areas.

However, social work sources told Community Care that the removal of funding would make it more difficult for them to operate and deliver innovations in social work education in their local areas.

History of teaching partnerships

The DfE and the then Department of Health launched the teaching partnerships programme in 2015, to drive improvements in social work education on the back of two reviews – by Martin Narey and David Croisdale-Appleby – that had reported the previous year.

The partnerships were designed to be “employer-led” and improve existing joint working arrangements between HEIs and councils, including to enhance workforce planning and ensure that new graduates were

The departments also set them targets to raise the entry criteria for social work courses, boost the number of statutory placements provided to students, enhance service user involvement on courses and increase practitioners’ role in teaching (source: Berry-Lound et al, 2016).

By 2020, following three rounds of funding, 23 partnerships were in place, involving most councils and children’s trusts (115) and HEIs delivering social work courses (51), as well as nine NHS trusts and 14 private, voluntary and independent (PVI) organisations (source: Interface Associates UK Limited, 2020). A fourth funding round followed in 2021-22, with at least one additional partnership, in Northamptonshire, subsequently launched.

Partnerships’ impact

A 2020 government-commissioned evaluation, largely based on qualitative research, suggested that partnerships had resulted in multiple benefits that were in line with the government’s aims, including:

• A culture of collaborative working between HEIs, councils and other partners.
• Improved admissions and selection processes for social work undergraduates and postgraduates.
• Increased and improved statutory practice placements.
• Increased numbers of better trained and supported practice educators.
• Curricula with a stronger focus on the skills and knowledge needed in practice.
• Increased support for social workers on their assessed and supported year in employment (ASYE).
• Refreshed and updated skills for social workers from workforce training.
• Better understanding of local workforce issues and challenges.

Funding arrangements

The government’s intention was that teaching partnerships would become self-sustaining and member-funded over time. This was reflected in its financing arrangements, under which partnerships would receive core funding from the DfE for two years, and then sustainability funding, generally for a further year.

The DfE subsequently offered continuous improvement funding, which was designed to enhance the design, content, delivery and planning of social work education.

The North East Social Work Alliance (NESWA), the partnership for that region, had secured about £400,000 in some years, through combined sustainability and continuous improvement funding, said chair Steph Downey.

“For two years, we understand NESWA secured the most from the continuous improvement fund,” she said. “That’s been really beneficial for the partnership to do some really imaginative things because partners’ workforce funding did not stretch that far.”

Uncertainty over DfE resource ‘the hardest thing’

Downey, who is service director for adult social care at Gateshead Council, said that, despite the DfE’s longstanding stance that funding would eventually end, it had indicated that money would come through for 2024-25.

“In fairness to the DfE, they’ve been really clear from the outset was that there wouldn’t be long-term funding for teaching partnerships and that all teaching partnerships would become self-sustaining.

“But people had been used to the narrative that there wouldn’t be any new funding, but some would then become available. In August and September, we were advised there was more funding and to make a bid.

“We made bids for that and then we had notification that it was on hold. We held on from October to April in a bit of a limbo.

“That’s been the hardest thing – not being sure that there was funding coming through. As a partnership, it would have been easier and clearer to have been told in October that there was no more funding coming through.”

Prospects for sustainability

By the time of the 2020 evaluation, four partnerships were already self-funding.

The report concluded that partnerships’ work relating to “admissions, placement quality, placement support/practice learning and refreshed curricula are commonly well embedded and are expected to continue”.

However, it added: “There is a continued reliance on local champions and goodwill which are dependent on local priorities and individual capacity. Limited budgets, competing priorities and partner restructures are ever present concerns for partnerships in the extent to which partnerships generally would prove sustainable over the long-term.”

While most partnerships indicated that having a central resource, such as a programme manager, was necessary to retain momentum, they said finding funding for this was difficult.

“I understand that some teaching partnerships had to let people go because they didn’t have guaranteed funding coming through,” said Downey. “We were in a fortuitous position that our programme manager got a job at the Association of Directors of Adult Social Services, so we’ve been able to buy some of his time back from ADASS.”

Greater reliance on volunteers

She added: “There was a commitment [within the North East] to continue to meet and work together. But if we don’t have any infrastructure, we’d need volunteers from within the partnership to take on roles such as chairing the practice education forum and the black and minority ethnic forum.

“I think teaching partnerships will continue. I suspect what will happen is that the differences between them will become even wider. Those that have been able to put an infrastructure in place and fund a team will be very different to those where there’s no infrastructure and people are meeting as partners within sector-led improvement.

“There are differences now, but I think they will become wider, not just because there’s no funding but the DfE is not setting metrics. If you have a partnership where one HEI wanted to move away from what had been agreed on entry requirements, they can do that now. There’s nothing to hold them to that.”

Withdrawal of funding ‘disconcerting’

Rob Mitchell, head of service and principal social worker in adult social care at Bradford Council, raised similar concerns about the impact of the DfE’s withdrawal of funding.

“The funding from DfE was often used in the teaching partnerships to ensure each partnership had sufficient structure, co-ordination and oversight to help manage change,” he said.

“Without that I worry that, due to pressure in terms of demands on local authorities and HEIs, we may simply go back to how it was, which, in some cases was local authorities and HEIs working in good faith, agreeing strategies for change and innovation but without the additional capacity to really drive change on.”

He said the Bradford partnership had helped “bridge the gap between social work academia and practice, so that the two things run concurrently together, which enables us to provide better social work”.

Mitchell added: “With a backdrop of Ofsted, and now CQC, inspections across the sector, and a demand that we quite rightly demonstrate evidence of professional growth across all areas of social work, it is disconcerting to think that perhaps our most creative of partnerships, which lead to us providing better social work and social workers who are well equipped to meet challenges, has gone.”

Academics’ concerns 

Academic leaders also voiced concerns about the DfE’s decision.

Professor Janet Melville-Wiseman, chair of the Joint Universities Social Work Association, said: “Funded teaching partnerships have been the cornerstone of  collaborative and important developmental work between local authorities, universities delivering social work education and research and the PVI sector placement providers since 2015.

“As local and regional partnerships, they have been able to respond to local need, whether that be to enhance employability for our students, support practitioners to come in and teach on courses or support academics to remain close to practice.”

She said it was of “significant concern” that the DfE’s decision to end funding was “not grounded in either this evaluation/research, consultation with the sector or our priorities for changes to how funding is directed”.

Professor Christine Cocker, who edited a special issue of the social work journal Practice (Taylor & Francis) on teaching partnerships, published last year, said she was not surprised that the DfE had ended its funding of teaching partnerships, given that that was the original plan.

‘Innovation has had to stop but strong links will remain

However, Cocker, who is head of the school of social work at the University of East Anglia, said that teaching partnership activity had been “scaled down” in the Eastern region over recent years as funding had tapered off.

“Some work has been incorporated into ‘business as usual’ activities among partners, but money is pretty tight across local authorities and HEIs, so a lot of the innovation work that had a positive effect on practice across the region has had to stop or be significantly curtailed.

“We have a positive legacy, which will continue, in terms of how people with lived experience are involved in all aspects of our teaching and programme delivery, and this also included the use of digital resources created for our students.

“We also have strong partnerships with our local authority partners, and these will not be lost either.”

Director bodies voice disappointment

There was disappointment too about the decision from the Association of Directors of Children’s Services and ADASS.

Nicola Curley, chair of the ADCS workforce policy committee, said that, coupled with the DfE’s decision to pull funding from its Pathways social work leadership programme, the removal of teaching partnership resource “sends an unhelpful message to the sector”.

She suggested it risked having an adverse impact on the DfE’s current children’s social care programme.

“The range of government reforms across children’s services are predicated on having a sufficiently skilled and experienced workforce and taking funding away from workforce training and development at a time when we need to be looking at what more we can do to encourage well suited people into the profession, and retain our current workforce is counterproductive.

“We would welcome the opportunity to work with the Department for Education on what comes next.”

In a statement, ADASS said: “With such poor retention rates among social workers – and across social care generally – ending the funding for teaching partnerships (which offer social workers professional development opportunities and training) is a backwards step, unless the funding is reinvested in other social work training offers.”

What the DfE says

A DfE spokesperson* said: “Social work teaching partnerships have been key to strengthening the quality of education and training for social work students and practitioners across the country, and many continue to function independently.”

They said the department was “committed to increasing the number of social workers and [would] continue to support the workforce” through the fast-track schemes it directly funds – Frontline and Step Up to Social Work – increasing the number of social work apprenticeships and its planned national rules on the use of agency social workers.

*The DfE’s statement, along with all other comments for this article, were provided before the announcement of the 4 July general election. The Labour Party has been approached about its stance on teaching partnership funding but had not responded prior to publication.