The Health and Care Professions Council (HCPC) requires its registrants to re-register on a set date every two years. Social workers who have transferred across from the General Social Care Council will have to prove they meet the HCPC’s standards and keep a detailed record of their continuing professional development (CPD) in order to re-register in the future. Make sure you understand the changes using our guide.

Social workers will have to record CPD differently (Isopix/Rex Features)

Eight-point guide to the CPD changes

1. Professional development is changing, right?

Yes, it’s a result of the Health and Care Professions Council (HCPC) taking over the regulation of social workers in England from the General Social Care Council (GSCC) as of 1 August. As part of the change, the GSCC’s post-registration training and learning (PRTL) system will be replaced by the HPC’s continuing professional development (CPD) approach.

2. What does the switchover from PRTL to CPD mean?

It’s not just a change of acronym. At the moment social workers in England must demonstrate they’ve done at least 90 hours of professional development in order to re-register every three years. The HCPC still wants social workers to record their learning activities, but it doesn’t require them to complete a fixed number of hours. Instead, the incoming regulator is more interested in how learning activities have improved social workers’ skills and helped service users (see below).

3. How will CPD be measured if the HPC doesn’t count hours?

The HCPC benchmarks CPD against its standards, which you can find out more about here. Registrants must demonstrate that they have kept continuous, up-to-date and accurate CPD records, so cramming in most of the training just before registration won’t do. They also need to show a mix of activities that are relevant to their current or future practice and show how these contributed to the quality of their work as well as how they benefited service users. Finally, registered social workers must be able to produce written CPD profiles backed up with evidence. Find out more about what HCPC expects on its website.

There is no requirement to refer to the Professional Capabilities Framework (PCF) in your CPD profile, but it can help you plan your learning. Look at the different capabilities for your level; consider which you can already demonstrate and which you need to develop. What does your employer expect of you, based on your specialism and level of experience?

4. Will the HCPC check every social worker’s CPD profile?

The HCPC will register every social worker in England on the same date every two years, so it’s impractical for it to check every individual CPD profile. Instead, at registration time, 2.5% of social workers will be picked at random and told to submit CPD profiles for auditing. The randomness of the sample means it is possible social workers could go a whole career without doing one, but equally they could end up having to submit one every two years. Newly qualified social workers will be excluded from the audit.

5. What counts as CPD?

Anything you can justify as beneficial to your work or service users is acceptable. It could be formal training, attending a conference, reading an article on Community Care Inform, mentoring someone or joining a professional body. Even watching TV could count, as long as it’s relevant (i.e. not Homes Under the Hammer). There is a list of suggested activities in appendix one of this guide on the HCPC’s website, but it is by no means exhaustive. Basically, if you can prove it helped your practice, it counts.

6. What do these CPD profiles look like?

If audited, you will have to present a written profile, which consists of a summary of your practice history for the last two years, a statement of how you have met standards of CPD and evidence to support that. You should choose roughly four or five activities (the ones you learned the most from) to evidence your statement. See above for some CPD profiles for social workers

7. When will these changes affect me?

The register transfers to the HCPC on 1 August, so you should start thinking about your CPD profile then. However, the first audit of CPD profiles, which is due to take place in 2014, will assess CPD activities starting from 1 December 2012. That means there’s a grace period of a few months when you won’t have to record CPD, although you should still be planning your learning and development. You could theoretically carry some of your current PRTL activities over: for example, you might learn something now that you don’t put into place until the end of this year, so it would come under the HPC’s time frame.

The first audit of CPD profiles will take place in the run up to November 2014, when all social workers in England will be expected to re-register with the HPC.

8. Anything else I should know on the training front?

The HCPC isn’t going to take over the GSCC’s job of accrediting post-qualifying (PQ) courses. The GSCC says the College of Social Work might take this work on, but this has yet to be confirmed.