The resolute reformer

More than three years have passed since Moira Gibb was asked to chair the Social Work Task Force. Back then the profession was reeling from the media storm and political backlash that followed the death of 17-month-old Peter Connelly.

The task force was charged with carrying out a review of frontline social work, which it concluded in December 2009. Early in 2010, the Social Work Reform Board was created to take forward the task force’s 15 recommendations for change, including plans to assess every new social worker for their first year in work, and to establish a college as a voice for the profession.

The board’s latest progress report, published in June, will be its last. Seated in a sparse meeting room at the Department for Education on a sunny afternoon, Gibb acknowledges that progress on the reforms has been slower than she had hoped.

We are accompanied by a press officer and a civil servant, poised to gently correct her when she uses the previous government’s terminology to describe the reforms. What was called under Labour the “assessed year in practice” is now referred to as the “assessed year in employment”.

“When I think back, I’m amazed it has taken us this long to get to where we are,” she says, smiling. “The task force was a year, and that seemed like quite a long time.”

Pace of progress
But given everything that has happened since the board was established, Gibb believes that progress could have been even more sluggish. The change in government and related policy shifts, as well the tough economic climate cannot be underestimated, she says.

“This government doesn’t want to produce a whole set of instructions and pass them out,” she explains. “It’s a sector-led model and people in the sector are by definition busy doing other things, so it’s not surprising that it has taken longer. I like to think that because it has taken longer it means that the change is not superficial, but that it is enduring.”

In terms of the “profound” impact that the cuts are having on councils, Gibb admits that asking people to overhaul the way they work at a time when spending is restricted is extremely difficult.

“Trying to make changes to the system while you’re also trying to save money is really hard because the financial bottom line never goes away,” she says. “Inevitably the financial pressures have an impact on morale.”

She adds that the plethora of changes currently affecting the social work system make it more challenging for professionals to get to grips with reform.

“This isn’t the only show in town; you’ve also got Munro and the adoption changes,” she says. “Local authorities have consolidated staff, particularly at a senior level, so people are stretched across a wider range of issues to deal with, and are pulled a bit tighter.

“People have tried to protect the frontline of practice, which of course makes good sense. But some of the bits that oil the wheels and make collaboration and working in partnership possible have been lost.”

Despite all this, Gibb is confident that the efforts of the reform board are starting to reach fruition.

New social work degree programmes are being developed for introduction in 2013 and the Assessed and Supported Year in Employment for newly qualified social workers comes into force this September.

“Ideally we would have had that whole cohort of students trained on the new curriculum and in a different way, before doing the assessed year,” Gibb says matter-of-factly. “As it stands, some of the students this year will have come out of brilliant courses, others of not so brilliant courses.”

She adds that changing the culture of higher education institutions and the expectations of social work students is no mean feat.

“We do have to be more careful about who we select to train,” she says. “We have to train them better in the universities and in their placements and we have to instill in them a sense of continuous learning, instead of the attitude that ‘I’ve done my degree, I know everything there is to know’.”

“Higher education institutions have to decide to adopt the new curriculum and the new approach to entry to training. If they don’t, of course the work we’ve done won’t make a difference.”

College membership deal
Another of the task force’s recommendations, The College of Social Work, has also reached fruition – notwithstanding a somewhat shaky start, owing to a feud with the British Association of Social Workers (BASW), which vigorously opposed a membership deal between the union Unison and the college.

“If you could rewrite history and have a smooth start you would certainly want to do that,” Gibb admits.

“I think that it has put some people off the college, who thought we should be grown up enough to agree. But there are ?lots of examples of professional differences being quite strong, even within the small groups of the sector.”

The challenge for the college, she says, is that it needs to create some momentum around recruiting new members fairly quickly.

“That’s quite hard when social workers are worrying about pay, pensions and all those sort of things that people are rightly worrying about just now,” she explains. “It won’t be effective unless lots and lots of social workers choose to join, so we want to encourage everyone to join the college.

“It is unrealistic to expect it to be as effective as a college that has been going in the medical profession for 500 years. It will take some time to build.

But if it is successful then it will breed success. We want social workers to be saying to other social workers: ‘have you joined the college?’”

The recruitment of the first chief social worker for England, a recommendation of the Munro review of child protection, is now under way. Gibb will be continuing formally as the chair of the reform board until the chief social worker is in post.

“It’s fantastic that we’ve got that role spanning the Department of Health and the Department for Education (DfE),” she says. “They will have to influence lots of people and shape the job.”

Gibb admits that a part of her has considered “leaving social work behind” when her time as chair of the reform board comes to an end.

But she says that just that day, a colleague at the DfE joked that she never has, and never will, “let social work go”.

Nevertheless, Gibb will next take on a role as a civil service commissioner, and has been appointed to the NHS Commissioning Board.

“Those are both part-time, but are obviously significant responsibilities,” she says. “Coming from the sector myself, I’m sure lots of people in local government will want to tell me what’s working and what’s not working around the NHS changes.”

On the NHS reforms, she acknowledges the scale of change is “daunting”, but she is eager to take on the challenge and provide a strong voice for children and young people.

“I certainly said at my interview for the post that I didn’t think that children featured in much of the stuff that I’d read about the NHS changes,” she says.

Looking back at the task force and reform board’s achievements, Gibb is proud.

“The level of collaboration that has gone into the reform board has been fantastic,” she says. “I think we’ve won the argument that social work matters as a profession. People now recognise that a high-calibre profession at the heart of these difficult jobs is essential and there’s no shortcut to that.”

She is hopeful that the reforms will gather pace and bed in when she steps down. “We’ve tried to smooth out the road for people to travel but they still need to travel that road,” she says. “So we’ve made it easier for people, but people still need to make that choice. It’s not ‘job done’, not for a minute really.”


Social work reform

• The previous government set up the Social Work Task Force in January 2009
• Moira Gibb, then chief executive of Camden Borough Council, was appointed to chair the 16-strong team, including representatives from children’s charities and The Sun’s agony aunt, Deidre Sanders
• The task force was charged with carrying out a review of frontline social work. It published its report Building a Safe, Confident Future, and 15 recommendations to improve the system in December 2009
• The Social Work Reform Board was set up in 2010 to take the 15 recommendations forward. The board’s latest progress report in June 2012 will be its last