In this episode, regional engagement leads Philippa, Matthew and Catherine explore professional standard 2 – establish and maintain the trust and confidence of people. They discuss their personal experiences of building trust and confidence in their roles as social workers. Catherine is also joined by National Advisory Forum member Ify and Derren, a young person with lived experience of social work. They share their experiences of building relationships with their social workers, and how communication plays a vital role throughout their involvement. Join the conversation using #ThisIsSocialWorkPod on our website and follow us on Twitter and LinkedIn. Transcript Philippa Hi, I'm Philippa, Social Work England's regional engagement lead for the South West of England. Welcome to This Is Social Work. In this series, we're focusing on the professional standards - the 6 standards that social workers must know, understand and be able to do as part of their role. The professional standards are specialist to the social work profession and apply to social workers in all roles and settings across England. In this week's episode, we're focusing on standard 2 - establish and maintain the trust and confidence of people. To kick off the conversation, I'm joined by Matthew, regional engagement lead for the North West, and Catherine, regional engagement lead for the North East, as we discuss our own personal experiences of building trust and confidence in our roles as social workers, and later in the episode Catherine is joined by National Advisory Forum member Iffy and Derren, a young person with lived experience of social work. they share their own experiences of establishing and building trust in social workers and how communication plays a vital role throughout their involvement. We hope you enjoy the conversation. Catherine I'm Catherine Witt and I'm one of the regional engagement leads for Social Work England and I’m joined by my 2 colleagues today - Matthew Devlin and Philippa Geddes. For me this standard really represents who we are and what we are as a profession, and we aren't going to look at all elements of the standard – we're going to focus on 2.4 and 2.5, and 2.4 is ‘practise in ways that demonstrate empathy, perseverance, authority, professional confidence and capability, working with people to enable full participation in discussions and decision making’ and 2.5 is ‘actively listen to understand people, using a range of appropriate communication methods to build relationships’. And the reason why we've sort of picked those 2 out as being really important is linked, I think, to some of the evidence that we're getting about why concerns are being raised about social workers. So in our fitness to practise process we are seeing that the majority of concerns that are raised with us are about communication and I think that's replicated in many other areas of social work. If you look at serious case reviews and different parts of activity, communication is always the thing that it boils down tom so we thought it would be really helpful just to focus in on that. The other element is about involving people in decisions about their lives and that comes up as a theme on a regular basis. I've been a children and family social worker for about 20 years and involving children and young people in the decisions, the massive decisions, that they make about their lives is something that they will constantly reflect on and come back to you, and feel on many occasions that they haven't been involved in those decisions and it is a real skill. It is very difficult because sometimes you're making very difficult decisions about children's lives that is not something that they want but is about protecting them. So those are my sort of, first thoughts, I'm going to go to Matthew. Matthew, your thoughts on professional standard 2? Matthew I think for me particularly standard 2.4 and 2.5, it sits at the very top of what social work is about and essentially is the reason why I come into the profession. I come into the profession because I enjoy building relationships with people, I enjoy communicating with people but I think for every role that I've had in my career, so the 11 years I’ve been a social worker, I think the importance of building relationships, the importance of good communication, and the importance of transparent communication I think has started at the very top of, being positive in all those roles that I've had and I think and that's from being a frontline social worker, but now as a regional engagement lead, I think being able to communicate and build relationships is incredibly important. It's a skill I think, it's a skill that you develop throughout your social work training whatever route that is. But I think it's a skill that you'll never stop developing as a social worker and I think I've learned a lot in my role now, as regional engagement lead, about how to maybe build relationships on ...
