Trying to justify the Government’s
ill-starred Assessment and Accreditation scheme for children’s social workers
in England, Lord Nash, a junior minister in the Department for Education, told
the House of Lords that:
“Almost one in four councils inspected under Ofsted’s current inspection framework has a judgment which indicates that its practice is inadequate. In the light of that startling statistic, it is critical that the Secretary of State is able to bring forward improvement activity that she believes will help raise the standard of social work practice by making clear what standards are expected of children and family social workers and assessing social workers against those improvement standards.
“In other professions, we might expect a professional body to undertake that work but, for now at least, there is no such body for social workers. With the distinct regulatory functions that Social Work England will rightly have, we believe the Secretary of State is in the best position to drive this improvement forward. Indeed, she is the only person who can. In doing so, she will, of course, want to work exceptionally closely with the social work profession.”
One thing his lordship failed to mention is
that it was the Government which pulled the funding from the College of Social
Work, effectively curtailing the development of a professional body for social
work in England.
Another thing, that he might like to
reflect on, is his totally unjustified assumption that local authorities get
poor Ofsted reports because their social workers lack knowledge and skills. Much
more plausible explanations for low standards are under-funding of services,
shortages of staff, burdensome management practices, poor IT systems and the stultifying
impact of the prevalent culture of fear and blame.
And why a politician like the Secretary of
State, who happens to be an accountant by profession and who probably knows
very little about children’s social work, is the “only person” able to drive
improvement forward is a complete mystery to me. Driving improvement forward is
something we should all be doing, especially those of us who deliver services
day after day. They are the only people who really know what happens at the
front line. The idea that a small elite of government ministers and their
advisers know what’s best is a naive fallacy, the pursuit of which will only result
in failure and despair.
