“There is a gap in the narrative around the value of social work,” ADCS President says

It was a busy Autumn for social work with new agency rules coming into force and a policy paper with wide-reaching reforms proposed for social work with children.

The Labour government, elected in July, is arguably still in its infancy. However, the signals of intention from new Education Secretary Bridget Phillipson and Children’s Minister Janet Daby are widely viewed as positive.

“We've had a Government that’s been really in ‘listening mode’, both at Secretary of State level and also at Ministerial level. So it feels it just feels different, and it feels positive.”

We spoke to Andy the day after his keynote address at the National Children and Adult Services Conference (NCASC) in Liverpool, where he joined speakers including Children’s Minister Janet Daby and other leaders in both children’s and adult services.

“I talked in my speech in when I became [ADCS] President of the kind of sense of optimism. We are still feeling optimistic about the future, despite the challenges that we are experiencing and despite the fact that, in many ways, children's experiences and children’s lives now are significantly more challenging than they were 14 years ago.

“We’re five months into a new government. We need to see how that translates into policy and change. The policy paper that came out a couple of weeks ago is a really good indication of the kind of direction of travel and the focus the new Government are giving to things like prevention, early intervention, family help, and kinship care as well as really kind of getting on and tackling profiteering, which you know we've been talking about for what feels like forever.

As ever, central part of the conversation around children’s services is the issues with local government funding. Recent analysis from the Local Government Association (LGA) estimated a funding gap of £6.4 billion forming in the day-to-day council budgets in 2024/25 in comparison to 2019/20 budgets. The Autumn Statement promised £600 million extra for social care, albeit across adults and children’s care, and a £1 billion uplift for the SEND system, however this “only pays off the overdraft”, Andy says.

“We've been really clear with the government that you can't do the reforms they want and the change that they want on the cheap. It's got to be fully funded and it's got to roll out in a consistent way.

In 2022, Josh MacAlister completed a review of children’s social care, recommending a program of changes – many of which are addressed in the Government’s latest policy paper – costed at around £2.6 billion. Andy says that delaying the implementation of these reforms will only cause further problems.

“What was £2.6 billion in MacAllister review will be more now. Two years and a bit later, things just go up. We're all experiencing that in other aspects of our life.

“If you are at the cliff edge, it can be very difficult then to take a step back and introduce and increment change that will be required as part of the reforms.

“There's been a kind of reality check conversation that we've had to have with DfE and the Government about needing to realise how hollowed out councils are after 14 years of cuts.”

New national rules aimed at reducing over-reliance on agency social workers within children’s services which came into force at the end of October. While it is too early for a clear picture to develop, and some aspects of the rules – such as regional price caps – are still being formed, Andy said the early indications looked positive.

“I think that where we are with the agency rules is broadly positive. I think we go back two years and look ahead at what we've got now, I think we would have not expected to be in this space.

“Anecdotally we're already seeing some agency workers start to make some decisions about whether or not they wanted to move from agencies onto the books of local authorities because they could see what was going to happen.

“I think what we're seeing is a much greater consistency around cost. We're seeing less attrition, less churn and we've seen more agency workers come onto the books of local authorities, so it bodes well.

“I mean, we'd still like it to go further. We'd still like the government to revisit what was taken out of the equation at the 11th hour around the banning project teams holding casework. Because, you know, casework is not a project. Social work is not a project. It’s about relationships with families and children.

Andy’s route into children’s social care is perhaps not the most usual, but makes him uniquely placed to see the perspectives of both the professionals in the sector and the people they work with. Andy was placed with foster parents straight from hospital when he was just six weeks old and was adopted just before his 11th birthday. He talks fondly of having the same social worker for four years in these formative years and how it ultimately influenced his decision to become a social worker himself, something he maintains to this day.

“Being a social worker, just felt very natural to me. It was in my blood. It was something that I’d wanted to do from an early age. I absolutely adored my social worker, had a great relationship with her.

“Even though it was in the early 80s, to have the same social worker [for that amount of time] is probably quite unusual. It would be great practice now. It was probably fantastic practice back then.

“It's still something that I feel very passionately about and I'm trying to do my job to connect with the work social workers do in terms [of my role] and talk about my experience and what that means to children.”

In a speech at the same conference, Children’s Minister Janet Daby highlighted the pressures on the social work workforce and vowed to tackle the burnout caused by an “overstretched and undervalued” workforce, giving extra support to local authorities to recruit and retain more social workers.

“Clearly, we know that there's a shortage of social workers and the Government will need to think about what that means and what the pipeline looks like.

“There's also an opportunity to think about what particular aspects of practice require a qualified social worker and where somebody with an alternative qualification might be able to assist.

“We're going to, with interest, see some of the learning from the Pathfinders and Family Help programmes to see how that's working.

“There'll be lots of examples up and down the country of alternative workers that work alongside social workers to help manage and reduce caseloads for social workers.

Asked about social work’s perception in the wider public and whether a more positive image is needed, Andy says that the good work is not spoken about often enough.

“It’s often only profiled when something has gone wrong, rather than, you know, the tens of thousands of times every month when something goes right. I think there is definitely a gap in the wider narrative around the value of social work and the role of social workers in changing children's lives.”

Josh MacAlister's review completed in 2022 and one of the central philosophies to the final report was love. Asked how difficult it is to define and create policy that will establish this concept, Andy says that this comes from the workforce itself and the values and life experiences that inform their practice.

“I think it’s difficult to create policy that places love in a statutory context.

“See social work is a really value-laden profession and people come into the profession for different reasons […] I don't think it's a profession that you fall into.

“People that move into the profession, I think, want to improve the lives of the people they work with. And you know, there's legislation and there's a policy that guides structures, the things that the social workers do on behalf of the state. But I think within that there's values that drive the person and help the person enact those policies in a way that leads to good outcomes.

“I think it is about the kind of values of the profession and the way in which social workers, through their training and supervision, reflect on the work they're doing and why they're doing it and what that means for children and what that means for the lives of children.

“It's not about what's in the legislation, it's about how you build the relationships on the ground. It's about how you understand the experiences and what's going on with that child and try and empathise with the child and their family, and then how you try and enact and direct and put that change. That is at the heart of social work. Now you might want to call that love. You might want to call that care. You might want to call that compassion. It's probably all those things. But that's for me, I think, what drives social workers into the profession.”