The Future of Social Work
The Cross-Party Group on Social Work met on Tuesday evening (27 September) to discuss a vision for how social work services should be delivered and experienced in Scotland.
The discussion was framed in the context of the National Care Service Bill, which the Scottish Government introduced to parliament in June.
The Bill will deliver the biggest changes to social work in over 50 years, but much of its detail still needs decided upon. This presents a crucial opportunity for social workers to shape a new future for the profession.
Previous meetings have uncovered the serious challenges facing social workers and people who use services. Spiralling caseloads, lack of preventative work, no autonomy to build relationships and increasing capacity and resource problems are contributing to a burnt out and demoralised profession and people not getting support until they are in crisis. It's clear there needs to be ambitious, radical reform to social work in Scotland.
Tuesday’s meeting began with a the Minister for Wellbeing and Social Care, Kevin Stewart MSP providing a helpful outline of the National Care Service Bill and its progress to date. Mr Stewart stressed the importance of everyone engaging with the co-design process and feeding in their views through the formal government channels. A new lived experience panel has been set up for this purpose.
The group then heard a presentation from social work commentator, Colin Turbett on how the role of social work needs to move away from being one of reactive, crisis-led response to that of relationship-based community work that gives social workers autonomy to provide earlier support.
Colin highlighted how through successive legislation since the Social Work Scotland Act 1968 the role of social work has become eroded. This has resulted in a disconnect between what social workers learn to do and what the profession actually is in practice. This is burning social workers out and forcing many to leave the profession. If we can shift social work back to the preventative, community-based profession that people become social workers to do then both the profession and people who use services will be better supported.
Colin’s presentation can be viewed here.
We then moved into a panel discussion involving Mr Stewart, Jeremy Balfour MSP, Paul O’Kane MSP, Cllr Paul Kelly from COSLA and Sara Redmond from the Health and Social Care Alliance. The questions covered what the impact will be of taking social work out of local authority control through a National Care Service (NCS), how can we recruit and train more social workers, how will the NCS address issues around self-directed support, what work is being done to improve working conditions for social workers and how can we ensure all social workers engage with the NCS as it gets designed.
There were also comments from group members on how bursary support for postgraduate social work students in Scotland is too low, that to have human rights at the centre of a NCS we need to ensure that budgets are set to the right level, the risk of conflating rights with the duties on public authorities to provide services and that there is a risk of an implementation gap with the NCS which means the service might not work as set out in legislation if the culture is not changed.
The meeting concluded with SASW National Director, Alison Bavidge thanking everyone for their contributions and offering that the group will share views from this session with the lead parliamentary committee examining the Bill at stage one.
The Cross-Party Group is now officially one year old and this meeting served as our inaugural AGM. SASW is delighted to once again be elected as the Secretariat and we’re also pleased that Fulton MacGregor MSP and Jeremy Balfour MSP will be our Convener and Vice-Convener respectively.
Anyone can get involved with the group’s work and attend meetings either as an observer or a member. We are always on the look out for more social workers to join. If you’re interested, please contact cpgsocialwork@basw.co.uk