Frontline has rebranded its fast-track social work training programme as Approach Social Work.
The rebrand comes a decade after the charity started delivering the scheme, under which trainees qualify in a year and are prepared for a career in child protection social work.
The organisation itself will retain the name Frontline.
Rationale for Frontline rebrand
Explaining the decision, Frontline’s external relations director, Jackie Sanders, said: “This rebrand comes alongside several changes for the 2024 cohort as part of the new contract for the programme, which also includes the extension to a three-year programme.
“Our main priority for the rebrand was to ensure the new name and visual identity both support the purpose of our programme to attract new people into the profession. We received highly positive responses from the testing audience – made up of some of our local authority partners, current and former participants and jobseekers interested in social work.”
Branding for Frontline’s fast-track scheme, now called Approach Social Work
The organisation now trains up to 500 participants in each cohort, with trainees placed in local authorities or children’s trusts in England. There, they work in groups of five under a consultant social worker – an experienced practitioner who serves as both manager and practice educator.
Bursary levels
In this qualifying year, trainees receive bursaries worth £18,000 outside the capital and £20,000 in London, a similar level to fellow fast-track schemes Think Ahead and Step Up to Social Work but more generous than funding for students on traditional university courses.
After qualifying – while employed by the same council or trust – participants receive further support from Frontline in year two and then are expected to complete a master’s in advanced relationship-based social work practice in their third year.
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when the issues facing children are parents and family members with mental disorder/developmental problems and/or substance misuse issues (with all the associative financial issues) how is this going actually help equip sw’s?
Frontline is struggling to justify it’s existence with a government on it’s last legs in
interested in anything unless it unsettles local authorities which it which is FLs primary purpose. As a further sign of failure the entry qualification has been officially dropped to a 2.2 degree and the masters extended to three years making it no longer a fast-track programme. The fact is, in it’s 10 year existence, it has completely failed to make any impact what so ever on recruitment and retention or improve the very difficult problems of child protection work. Whether the Labour front bench understands this is another worrying matter as it has always as starry-eyed about FL as the Tories.
Fast track to social work is and will make SW’s even more expendable.
Senior SW will continue to leave SW as their knowledge and skills will be matched against a SW who qualifies in one year.
Envision more headline news of child protection scandals of mismanaged oversight of children on CP.
As a former Frontline trainee, I’d be shocked if the retention rates for the program were worth it – it fasttracks people into social work jobs, yes, but the system is so broken that the participants just fasttrack themselves out of it at the first available opportunity. That, and anecdotally the LAs who sign up with Frontline (now Approach) tend to be the ones most desperate for new staff, I.e. the ones with the worst working environments.
I concur totally with what you have said. I have had 26 years of frontline statutory local authority child protection experience, and I cannot wait to leave this toxic, stressful, broken, and not fit for purpose system. I started when I was 24, and im going on 52, and there is no way I would have stayed had I been older and wiser, or had another profession to fall back on.
My sister, a cp recipient, commented recently “the grave yards are full; filled with our children …. at least this time it was cancer and not suicide” …
.
If there was any lingering doubt that social work, not social workers, has become nothing more than a performative charade acted out by incompetents clueless but destructive nevertheless, confirmation can be found in the totally non-ironic embrace of “Rebranding”. When advertising agencies define your social work ‘brand’ beware of the New Coke effect.