In this episode, regional engagement lead Matthew is joined by social workers Lisa and Louise, who share their experiences of engaging with CPD, and how they’ve involved peers and people with lived experience to reflect and inform their practice. They discuss what CPD means to them, the importance of feedback, and the impact that CPD has had on their quality of practice as social workers. Join the conversation using #ThisIsSocialWorkPod on our website and follow us on Twitter and LinkedIn. Transcript Matthew Welcome to This Is Social Work. I'm Matthew, Social Work England's regional engagement lead for the North West of England. 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 episode we're focusing on standard 4, maintain my continuing professional development. We're joined by social workers Lisa and Louise who share their experiences of engaging with CPD and how they've involved peers and people with lived experience to reflect and inform their practice. We discuss what CPD means, the importance of feedback and the impact that CPD has had on the quality of their practice as social workers. We hope you enjoy the conversation. So I'm really pleased to welcome our guests today. I'm going to hand over to both of them to introduce themselves so Lisa, could you just spend a little bit of time introducing yourself and your role and your background and things like that. Lisa Yes hi, hi Matthew, thanks. My name's Lisa Fjaelberg, I'm the practice lead for adult social care in Stockport. I've been in this post since February this year so it's still quite early days really, and this is my first non-operational post. I qualified in 2000, so almost 21 years ago which makes me feel very old. My first, my first qualified post was in the London borough of Newham and then I moved up North to Manchester, Rochdale and now in Stockport so yeah, so I’m an AMHP as well for 10 years, just over 10 years and a best interests assessor as well, and practice educator but I haven't acted in that role for a little while now, yeah so, that's a little bit about me really. Matthew Thanks Lisa, really appreciate that. Louise, could you do the same, just a bit of an introduction and where you've come from. Louise Yes, so my name is Louise Ijelekhai, I’m a social worker from the London borough of Bexley and I work within children's social care. Prior to me working as a social worker, I’ve worked as a support worker for a residential setting which supports homeless families. Prior to that, I also worked within a children's activity camp called Camp Vermont and I enjoyed doing lots of activities with the children. I also was a nursery practitioner for a couple of months as well. I’ve also done volunteering work for people that suffer from brain injuries. Matthew Thanks Louise. I'll maybe just give a bit of an introduction as to my background. So, my background is in adult services, primarily in learning disability. So, my role prior to coming to Social Work England was within a local authority. So, we're really pleased to have some guests today, really pleased to have guests from frontline practice. I think it's really important that we have these conversations with people who can bring in different experiences, so it's good to have a good mix of experience and coming from different backgrounds as well. So, today's podcast is focused on standard 4. Standard 4 is CPD, so continuing professional development. For us at Social Work England, we've put a real emphasis on CPD and we've put a lot of focus on CPD. It isn’t new for social workers, it's been a feature of social work really ever since it's been a regulated profession formally, but I think social workers continually learning and continually developing themselves has been a requirement of social work practice for much longer than it just been a regulated profession. For us it really supports us to achieve our overall aims as an organisation, so feeds into the organisation around public protection so that is the primary focus of Social Work England as a regulator but we also want to improve standards in social work and improve public confidence in social work as well. So the direction that we've taken in relation to CPD and the requirements that are placed on social workers in relation to their CPD really supports us as an organisation to achieve all those things that we’ve set out to do. As I say it's not new for social work, it has been a requirement thinking back to when social work was regulated with the GSCC and then into HCPC there has been a CPD element to those to, those registrations. For us we describe CPD as reflection and the learning activities that social workers undertake throughout their career...
