You still have till 22 July 2005 to comment on this landmark consultation document. If you have views, send them in. The more responses, the more importance will be attached to getting workforce issues right.

The Children’s Workforce Strategy

The Department for Education and Skills has published a ninety-page report which raises dozens of key questions about the workforce which provides services for children and young people.

* This is the first time that a Government Department has addressed these issues seriously.
* It is the first time that they have looked at the workforce as a whole.
* And they are not simply issuing edicts, but consulting.

They deserve praise.

The report is subtitled A strategy to build a world-class workforce for children and young people, and this too is a first. World-class? Which Government has ever compared the United Kingdom with other countries before? Generally, we have kept our heads down and found our own answers to our own problems, designing square wheels and ignoring what our neighbours may have learnt just across the Channel. But in this report the European concept of social pedagogy is taken seriously for the first time.

The Contents

The report, with a Foreword from the former Minister for Children, Margaret Hodge, starts by looking at the vision for the workforce. The Government is looking for a workforce which is :
- competent,
- confident,
- well trained, with workers developing their skills and careers by coherent pathways,
- respected by parents, carers, children and young people,
- multi-disciplinary,
- able to work in teams,
- sharing a common language,
- protective of children,
- preventing problems by early identification,
- stable and not subject to undue turnover,
- well led, well supervised and well managed.

All the points made are sound and clearly stated. They may seem obvious, but the obvious is worth stating, especially when it has not already been achieved in the past.

Chapter by chapter, the Strategy then deals with the special problems concerning :
- early years (a coherent overview of this sector),
- social care and foster care (which seems to be coy in declining to talk of residential care), and
- schools, health and the voluntary and community sector (which impresses as a ragbag of everything not fitted into earlier chapters and which should really have been five or six little chapters).
It ends by looking at the action required to make it happen and summarises the recommendations and questions for people to respond to.

A Single Workforce or a Single Profession?

The Government’s reorganisation of social care is breaking new ground. While other professions have regulatory general councils which recognise the individual professionals who wish to bear the protected title as doctors, teachers, lawyers and so on, the General Social Care Council can potentially deal with any workers in the field of social care. It is service-based and not profession-based, even if it has started by registering social workers, who now have a protected title.

Similarly, this Strategy aims in principle to address the needs of the whole workforce working with children and young people. (In the event, it skates over the need for certain groups of workers who are vital to the services, even if in small numbers.) The important question which this approach poses, however, is whether the workforce is a collection of disparate groups or whether it has a fundamental unity and should be seen as a single profession.

This question emerges most powerfully when the question is put whether people working with children should be trained to become a separate profession as social pedagogues (as in most of continental Europe) or as a “new teacher”. What self-image do the workers want?

Our own view is clear. We have argued since the Webmag was first established for a single profession, pointing out the weakness of the workforce as it stands. In other professions, workers have a primary identity as teacher, doctor or lawyer, and their specialism as a teacher of Russian or a consultant in gynaecology comes second. In childcare, workers describe themselves primarily as nannies, childminders, youth and community workers or residential social workers (all the groups having different training systems), and they share the common identity of working with children secondarily.

The public at large have an image in their minds about other established professions, but they are often confused about the different groups who work with children. A single professional identity could offer a clear overall image for the workforce, and a clearer identity could help build its reputation, self-confidence, morale and ability to speak up and be heard.

It remains to be seen whether the term social pedagogy will catch on or put people off. We have argued for the other term used on the continent, social education, as being easier to pick up by the public as a whole, though there could be confusion, as the term already has other common usages. If workers are to be called pedagogues, we don’t want them to be seen as stuffy or somehow linked in the minds of the witless with paedophiles.

A Strange Shape

The childcare workforce is unusual in its shape, and any solutions will have to take account of this. The report skates delicately round this point. It does not actually say that people need to be promoted to be successful, but there is a sort of hint in the way it describes career development.

The fact is that the workforce incorporates a number of distinct models. Some workers are in services, such as local statutory services, where there is a substantial front-line workforce managed by a hierarchy of middle and senior managers, the top-most being on substantial salaries as chief officers.

By contrast, there are hundreds of thousands of workers who are self-employed, (such as childminders), or employed singly, (such as nannies), where there is no hierarchy of management, and no chance of promotion while working directly with children.

Training

In devising training patterns, therefore, there will be different requirements. Those who are in hierarchies will need management training to give them the skills to move on up the ladder. Those who choose to continue working with children will also need ongoing training to update their knowledge, continue their skill-development and motivate them to maintain commitment. The two patterns will diverge.

Despite this divergence, the training framework will need to cover the career needs of both groups. Indeed, the full picture is a good deal more complex than the example given, and it will be interesting to see if the six-level training proposal will match the nebulous needs of the workforce.

In the Report, training is rightly emphasised as a key component in establishing an effective workforce. The focus is on skills, which are certainly important in such a complex matter as bringing children up and dealing with the acute problems they sometimes face and present.

However, the Report omits consideration of training as a motivator for staff. It has been unfashionable for the last thirty years to talk of commitment, values and the attitudes of the workers, but getting this aspect of preparation for work right is just as important as teaching skills and knowledge.

It has perhaps been a spin-off of political correctness that people have been wary about being explicit about the values and beliefs which motivate them, but if children and young people are to be properly served, it is vital that those training workers instil the right approach to the work in their students. These values are not the prerogative of any one religious group, but they do need re-inforcement – respect, concern, commitment, listening, good humour, patience, tolerance, hope, long-term investment, valuing everyone, understanding.... These values may have been learnt by people in their families, but as professionals they need to think about them, and sometimes, in a long career, they may need to be re-sensitised to them.

It is time that training acknowledges its importance in maintaining a fresh, positive, sensitive workforce that will value children and young people – and not just a skilled one.

The Ideal Workforce?

We mentioned above the strange shape – or shapes – of the workforce. The Report emphasises the need to recruit and retain workers, and in general it seems to assume that greater stability is needed. There is no question that in some parts of the country this is true. There are staff shortages, a dearth of foster carers, undue use of agency staff, high staff turnover, and so on. These problems actually damage children. If they have multiple carers, there is a real risk that they will fail to build the secure relationships they need to develop and overcome problems.

A major Report of this sort, however, needs to do more than address current problems, but must tackle the more fundamental question, “What sort of workforce do we need, to do the job effectively?” Only when this has been answered can long-term solutions be found.

For example, in trying to overcome excessive staff turnover, would it help if the reward system produces a stagnant workforce in which there is no movement? This happened some years ago in Dutch children’s homes, where the rewards were so good that no-one left and the staff teams grew old together, offering excellent stability but limiting the introduction of fresh blood and new ideas.

There is an argument for expecting managers to stay in post for some years in order to give continuity and stability of approach, but there is also an argument for a proportion of assistant workers to turn over, broadening their experience in various jobs early in their careers. With such a wide variety of services covered by the Report there is no single model which will work ideally, but Estelle Morris and her colleagues would do well to consider this issue in depth.

Leadership

There is discussion about the need for a leadership cadre, which is welcome. Under the Central Council for Education and Training in Social Work, leadership training in residential child care was effectively wiped out. Without it, where do the managers, inspectors, lecturers and researchers come from? There is a real risk of loss of drive in the workforce.

If this leadership cadre can be established, it will be excellent. There is one worrying point in the report, though. Under CCETSW, post-qualifying training was understandably linked to the social work profession, and it has remained under this umbrella. It is of course important for social workers involved in childcare to have post-qualifying opportunities, but the workforce under consideration here is much wider than social work. Indeed, it could be argued that the imposition of the social work model on workers in settings other than fieldwork actually undermined their contribution, as the aims, values and skills are so different. (The negative views of managers trained as social workers were, in our view, one of the factors which led to lowering standards of residential child care.) Care will need to be taken, therefore, to broaden the base in developing the leaders and managers of the future.

Et Cetera

We would like to have seen the Youth Justice system included in the Report, and there were groups who received very little mention – youth workers, educational psychologists, child psychiatrists and the welter of other professions who need to deal with children. They will all need attention, and where their training and workforce planning are the responsibility of other bodies, they will need to be meshed in.

Finally, we still argue for the registration of all childcare workers. Establishing this principle should be one of the Report’s conclusions.

Respond

This, then, is a landmark report. It is over thirty years since the publication of the Dalmeny Papers, which first raised a lot of these issues, and it is the first time that a Government report has tackled them head on. It is for the workforce to respond and seize the opportunity.

There is a response form to be filled in, or one can send comments electronically. There is no excuse not to get involved in the debate.

* The Report can be found at www.dfes.gov.uk/consultations/. * For hard copies of the report, phone 0845 60 222 60 . * Questionnaires can be returned as hard copies to Department for Education and Skills, Consultation Unit, Area 1A, Castle View House, East Lane, Runcorn, Cheshire, WA7 2GJ. * They can also be emailed to cws.consultation@defes.gsi.gov.uk . * The deadline is 22 July 2005.