The Social Care Academy
Charlotte Goddard
Tuesday, January 31, 2017
Vacancy rates and staff turnover have plummeted in Essex since the opening of its children's social work training academy. Charlotte Goddard asks those behind the initiative how it has been achieved.
In 2010, Essex County Council's social workers had unacceptably high caseloads, with some dealing with up to 90 cases. Staff turnover was high and there was a heavy reliance on agency workers.
Fast forward to 2017 and Essex has reduced its use of agency staff to just 0.4 per cent while caseloads have fallen to around 12 per social worker. "We currently have less than 50 vacancies, and for a county as big as Essex that's a huge achievement," says Sukriti Sen, director of local delivery for the council's family operations department.
At the heart of this turnaround is the Essex Social Care Academy (ESCA). Set up in 2012, it is described as "the engine that keeps the service running". The training and continuous professional development (CPD) it offers has been key to disseminating shared values about ways to work with families throughout children's services, as well as improving conditions for social workers and thus driving recruitment and retention - a virtuous circle which leads to greater stability for children and families in the county.
In November, it won the Recruitment and Professional Development category at the 2016 CYP Now Awards.
Funded from the general social work budget, the ESCA team sits within the social work department. "People have asked whether we could centralise it, but I am wary of that," says Dave Hill, director of children's services, who first suggested setting up the academy. "The way you train other professions is different from how you train social workers."
The 13-strong team is based in County Hall in Chelmsford, although they spend a lot of time visiting practitioners all over Essex. The team oversees a range of different areas, including the core training programme for all children's services staff; training for foster carers, residential care staff and partnership agencies; the Assessed and Supported Year in Employment (ASYE) for newly qualified social workers (NQSWs); and the practice educators' programme. The team also covers recruitment and retention, a Masters programme, and a framework for aspiring managers.
ESCA develops bespoke training working with a range of universities to ensure staff have access to the leading researchers and experts in their fields. Partner agencies such as health and the police force also take part in training, as do support staff and foster carers, helping promote a consistent approach to practice with children and families across Essex.
The voice of the child is central. "Every year we have four workshops delivered by the Children in Care Council," explains Becky Coles, senior social care workforce officer at ESCA. "It makes a massive difference and gets people thinking about what they are trying to achieve. We have also had the Children in Care Council involved in interview panels recruiting staff, and have worked with them to identify gaps in the service."
ESCA runs an annual organisational health check, surveying qualified and unqualified members of staff as a way of gauging morale and finding out where any gaps in support and training might be. It has also been involved in improving recruitment, introducing assessment centres where NQSW applicants take part in group and written exercises before a formal interview, and putting together an interview toolkit for managers featuring interview questions based on all core areas of the social work professional standards framework.
Overleaf, a range of social care professionals pinpoint the impact of the academy thus far.
THE DIRECTOR OF CHILDREN'S SERVICES
Dave Hill, executive director for people commissioning
When Dave Hill came to Essex in 2010 as director of children's services, the service had twice been rated inadequate. "It is tempting to start firefighting, but having already set up a social work academy as DCS in Croydon, I wanted to take things one step further," he says.
Hill sees the development of staff as the key to good recruitment and retention. "Of course they deserve the right wage, and we are competitive, but it is not just the money," he says. "People are very conscious of the fact we have an academy and are keen to join us because of it."
Ultimately, he says, it is children who benefit. "The number of children taken into care was going up inexorably," he says. "Once staff feel supported and are well-trained, you then create a virtuous circle where there is staff stability, and families will even come forward and ask for support, leading to fewer children taken into care when they could stay with their families."
At a time of austerity, it is often the training budget that gets slashed, but Hill says this is a false economy. "We were spending millions a year paying agencies for interim staff, and we can now spend that on children's services, including on early intervention," he says. "The cost of running the academy is probably the same as the cost of six or seven children in care placements. We have reduced the number of children in care because practice is better. It would be easy to attack the training and development budget, but then find that you have got six or seven more kids in care, with that saving immediately lost."
In the early years ESCA focused on managers, but Hill says if he had the time again he would focus more on foster carers and frontline workers from the start. "At the beginning we ran a lot of large events with outside speakers, but lately we are moving more into bespoke training for individual staff and teams," he adds.
The next step could be to export Essex's expertise to other local authorities. "We are putting a business case together to see if it is viable to make an offer to some other local authorities, to see if they would use our academy or to help set up their own," says Hill.
THE STRATEGIC LEAD
Sukriti Sen, director of local delivery, family operations
Sukriti Sen is strategic lead for the academy. "We needed to ensure the workforce had the right tools, knowledge and skills to deliver quality social work," she says. "We wanted to equip social workers with theoretical models and an understanding of tools that will help them build relationships with families, so they can go back and make the changes in their own practice."
A relationship-based approach underpins the academy's work. "It is about looking at the strengths of families, and how can we work on those," explains Sen. "If we go in recognising the positive in families, and take time and effort to build that relationship, the likelihood is the family will engage much better. We wanted to look at not just social workers but also foster carers, and partner agencies, in terms of understanding what a relationship-based approach is."
Essex's success has led to interest elsewhere. "A lot of other local authorities have come in to see the way we do things, and we are very open to sharing what we think works," says Sen.
ESCA is part of a wider recruitment and retention strategy, which includes the Frontline social work graduate recruitment programme. "We will be doubling the number of Frontline participants from eight to 16 in September," says Sen.
THE SENIOR OFFICER
Jan Williams, lead on ASYE, Masters programme, aspiring managers framework
Jan Williams, who has been a qualified social worker since 1994, is one of seven senior officers in the ESCA team. She leads on the Masters programme. "We want staff to have knowledge of current issues such as child sexual exploitation, so we looked at who is leading in that field, spoke to the University of Bedfordshire, and they came and delivered a Masters module in CSE," she says. "The same applies to domestic violence and abuse with the University of Worcester, and we also have a good relationship with the University of East Anglia."
Part of her role is to help social workers progress their careers within Essex. "There are lots of opportunities to develop by moving jobs rather than leaving the organisation, but sometimes it is difficult for staff to go to their manager," she says. "Instead they can come and talk to ESCA and see what vacancies there are."
The team also believes it is important to celebrate social work, promoting good news stories and encouraging entry to awards, resulting in Essex social workers winning Social Worker of the Year in 2014 and 2016 and the ESCA team scooping the CYP Now Award for Recruitment and Professional Development in 2016.
IN NUMBERS
- Since September 2012, Essex County Council Family Operations has recruited more than 265 newly qualified social workers (NQSWs)
- NQSWs have a retention rate of 94.5%
- Essex employs just 32 agency staff in a workforce of 871 social work posts
- ESCA has been running for four years
- ESCA has trained around 2,700 social care staff
- In March 2010, Essex children's services had 600 unassigned cases. By March 2016 this had fallen to 27. A new recording system now means every case has an assigned worker
- The number of children in care in Essex fell by 415 between 2010 and 2016
Source: Essex County Council
THE MULTI-AGENCY PARTNER
Peter Hall, support sergeant, Crime and Public Protection Command, Essex Police
In 2015, HM Inspectorate of Constabulary's child protection inspection found Essex Police was not adequately protecting children at risk, due to widespread serious and systemic failings. There were particular concerns about a lack of joint working between police and social services.
In response to this, Peter Hall was involved in facilitating joint training between police officers and social workers on Section 47 of the Children Act 1989, working with the academy. "We trained a couple of hundred people overall," he says. "Sometimes co-operating can be a bit difficult, as there are cultural differences, but we are there to do the same thing, and the welfare of the child is paramount."
During the training, police officers sat with social workers from their local area and were able to take part in challenging discussions. "When we take children into police protection from very poor conditions, and then we find social care has put them back, that can be difficult," says Hall. "But social workers were able to talk about how children fare better with their families almost all of the time."
The joint training has had a recognisable effect, according to Hall. "Police officers are now more likely to think ‘has this case met the threshold for a Section 47 referral?'" he says. "There is much less tension between social care and the police - you can pick up the phone and have a talk. I have been in this job for 30 years and never seen police work so closely with social care."
THE EXPERIENCED SOCIAL WORKERS
Danielle Martin, senior practitioner, and Corne van Staden, team manager, children in care, south team one
Danielle Martin, who joined Essex as a newly qualified social worker in 2012, has just completed a Masters. "ESCA arranges modules, all of which count towards a Masters," she says. "The training I have received has helped me when progressing care plans, and it opens your mind to other avenues to engage with families and children."
As an example, Martin used an innovative approach when doing some resilence work with a reluctant teenager. Instead of getting the young person to write things down on paper, she suggested writing in the sand, which sparked her client's interest. "It was successful and I wouldn't have come up with that idea without doing that training," she says.
Corne van Staden is just starting a PhD in systemic practice with Bedfordshire University. "I took part in systemic leadership training in 2015 with a group of managers, and through that there was an opportunity to take it further," she says. "Ultimately I want this to impact on our care planning and lead to better outcomes for the children we work with."
Van Staden rates training as a major incentive for her to stay with Essex. As well as receiving training, she also delivers it. "What ESCA does is to try and train a number of people over the years and they then expect you to train others and use that knowledge, which is high impact but lower cost," she explains.
THE NEWLY QUALIFIED SOCIAL WORKER
Chloe Bond
Chloe Bond has been with Essex for seven months. "When I was at university they did a recruitment event, and the big pull that Essex has was ESCA and the training and support they offer," she says. "The support I am receiving is definitely helping in the challenges of the job. I can always email a member of the ESCA team, and there is one in our office nearly every Friday, so you can see them face-to-face."
Bond's ASYE is being organised by ESCA. "Next week I am attending a course on direct work which will give us examples of work we can do with young people," she says. "We also have six half-day workshops, where all the NQSWs can chat about how things are going. It's like an informal supervision."
Bond took part in joint training with Essex police. "We were sat around the tables according to the different parts of the county we work in, so we were with people who worked at Basildon police station," she says. "Different professions have different protocols to follow, and it did help with that."
THE FOSTER CARER
Darren Harman-Page
Darren Harman-Page and his wife, both full-time foster carers, have been with Essex for 14 years. "In the last few years training has really upped its game," he says. "There's a bit more planning now, so a child can be matched with a foster carer who has the right skills."
Foster carers meet the supervising social worker every six weeks and discuss training. "We now book our own training through an online portal, rather than going through the social worker," says Harman-Page.
The couple tend to look after children with additional needs and disabilities, so specialist healthcare training is important. Harman Page also rates highly a recent course on "theraplay". "It was a two-day course run by Steve Layzell, who is a fantastic practitioner, and he gave us strategies on understanding and managing behaviours," he says. "The way looked-after children need to be parented is not the same as other children."
Some courses see foster carers trained alongside social workers, but Harman Page was disappointed he could not access one course on neuroscience. "I was told social workers take precedence," he says. He is in favour of joint training but believes all courses should be mixed. "Otherwise there can be confusion on both sides," he says. "Social workers are doing their job, and sometimes we don't understand some of the decisions they make. Joint training can help with that."