Ray Jones: a critique of the DfE’s children’s social work reforms

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By Ray Jones

The Children’s Wellbeing and Schools Bill is currently being debated within Parliament and, at the same time, the Department for Education (DfE) is consulting on its proposals for new post-qualifying standards for children and family social workers and an accompanying induction programme. There are significant implications from both for children and families and for social workers. They ought to be a concern.

The bill proposes the mandatory creation of separate multi-professional child protection teams. This ignores the reality that children who might need protecting are within a fluid continuum of children in need. With more than 85% of child protection plans being generated by concerns about neglect and emotional abuse, the actions to be taken need to be integrated within family support services and not parcelled off to separate, segregated and centralised child protection teams.

The potential impact of multi-agency child protection teams

This runs counter to the parallel emphasis on relationship-based social work and contextual safeguarding. What instead is to be created is the disjunction, disruption and duplication of child protection social workers parachuted in to do section 47 investigations, to set and oversee child protection plans and, presumably, to initiate and lead care proceedings.

This would be even more threatening for families than current arrangements and undermine other social workers, who will be directed by these peers. It will also result in crucial decisions being taken by child protection social workers who know the children and families less well and who have no continuing longer-term commitment to, or contact with, the families.

Along with the introduction of mandatory reporting of child sexual abuse, this is likely to further increase the number of child protection investigations. The only way for other workers and agencies to be able to get the attention and insurance cover of these child protection social workers and teams will be to talk up concerns about children.

Children at greatest risk ‘will be lost’

As a result, children at greatest risk will be lost within escalating child protection workloads, and increased resource will be taken up in child protection activity, with less help and more threat for families, contrary to the aims of the reform agenda.

None of this is much of a surprise. It follows the setting up, in 2023, of Frontline as a fast-track training programme for ‘child protection’ social workers promised fast promotions and higher perceived status; the primacy given to exceptional high-profile cases in recent policy development; and the DfE’s track record of significant funding for the Signs of Safety practice model.

Although ‘strengths-based’, Signs of Safety is, as the title on the tin suggests, focused on child protection rather than family support for children in need, amidst increasingly prevalent and severe poverty and insecurity and public service cuts.

Proposed induction scheme ‘will generate bureaucracy’

And the proposed children’s social worker induction and assessment programme currently out for consultation again fits within the narrative. It envisages that, after the two-year induction period, social workers will be able to go on to specialise in child protection practice

The proposed two-year post-qualifying induction, training and assessment process for social workers joining local authority children’s social services is much too complex. I counted 399 different standards against which social workers would be assessed.

Whilst the government states it wants social workers to spend a greater proportion of their time in direct contact with children and families, the assessment against the proposed standards will generate its own bureaucracy, and take practitioners away from the front line. Agencies will struggle to give social workers the time or support they need, and what may well happen is that lip service will be paid to the process, but with the ambitions set within these proposals watered down.

And there are major workforce issues from what is proposed.

Exacerbating recruitment and retention problems

A further two years of more intensive assessment beyond qualifying as a social worker is likely to be a deterrent for those who might have thought of employment within local authority children’s services, increasing recruitment difficulties. Why take this on when there are other settings in which to work as a newly qualified social worker without the jeopardy of the proposed assessment and the additional workload and time burdens it will involve?

Having completed the two-year programme, there is no award of an additional nationally-recognised qualification (as there was with the former post-qualifying and advanced social work awards) and no expectation of a career grade enhancement. That is to be left to the discretion of each cash-strapped local authority. It is hard to see, therefore, why the proposed PQ standards and assessment will promote retention.

What it is likely to do is to severely hinder career mobility, and this will especially impinge on local authority children’s services. The likelihood is that, in future, a social worker with considerable experience in adult services, Cafcass or the voluntary sector, or whose experience has been within Wales, Scotland, Northern Ireland or elsewhere, will not have undertaken the two-years programme to be required of England’s local authority children’s social workers. This may provide a barrier to them securing work as experienced practitioners within local authority children’s services.

And the proposed induction, training and assessment will be a cost and resource requirement for local authority children’s services, not for other social work employers, with experienced staff taken away from direct social work practice and its immediate management to implement and sustain the processes proposed.

Lessons from scrapped NAAS scheme ‘not learned’

The DfE has not learnt the lessons of history, including the scrapping of what was the previously proposed National Assessment and Accreditation Scheme for local authority children’s social workers , which had all the concerns noted above.

It also ignores the much welcomed Professional Capabilities Framework, developed more collectively and collaboratively by the social work profession following the work of the Social Work Task Force and Social Work Reform Board, from 2009-10.

And it seems to have forgotten the strengths of the 1990s post-qualifying training, education, and qualifications pathways, which were nationally recognised and which applied to all social workers, albeit with the opportunity for specialist career development and progression.

The experience of the past suggests that it is wise to watch out for the unintended consequences of changes in policy and practice. This experience is likely to be especially relevant to the intention to create separate child protection social workers and the proposed induction and assessment process for practitioners in local authority children’s services.

Ray Jones is emeritus professor of social work at Kingston University and has over five decades’ experience in social work. He is the author of ‘A History of the Personal Social Services in England: Feast, Famine and the Future’ (Palgrave Macmillan 2020) and, in 2022, undertook the Independent Review of Northern Ireland’s Children’s Social Care Services