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This Is Social Work

By: Social Work England
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  • Summary

  • This Is Social Work is a podcast from Social Work England, the specialist regulator for social work across England. Hosted by our very own regional engagement leads, we’ll be exploring the profession in more depth with a range of guests with lived and learned experiences of social work.
    Copyright 2021 All rights reserved.
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Episodes
  • Let’s talk diversity data part 2

    Let’s talk diversity data part 2
    May 19 2023
    In the second episode, we speak to Andrea Stone, service director for Children's Social Care in Dudley and Emina Atic-Lee, service manager at Surrey and Borders Partnership NHS Foundation Trust and a member of our National Advisory Forum. The forum provides expert advice, support and challenge to our work and how we achieve our objectives. Both have been registered social workers for over 20 years. They talk to us about why diversity data collection is key to practice and highlight its importance. Transcript Ahmina Hi, I'm Ahmina Ahktar, Head of Equality, Diversity and Inclusion at Social Work England. Welcome to this is Social Work, a podcast from the specialist regulator for social workers, Social Work England. Equality, diversity, and inclusion are sent forward to our work as an effective regulator, an employer. They are inherent in our values, which are to be fearless, independent, transparent, ambitious, collaborative, and to act with integrity. As part of our equality, diversity, and inclusion action plan, we made a commitment to better understand the social work profession. We're doing this by actively seeking diversity data from social workers on our register to help us to continue to ensure our processes are fair and to set a benchmark for further insight to support this work and following a successful first podcast season. These special podcast episodes will focus on diversity data collection. In this episode, I'm joined by Andrea Stone, Service Director for Children's Social Care in Dudley and Emina Atic-Lee Service Manager at NHS Foundation Trust. Emina is also a member of our National Advisory Forum. The forum provides expert advice, support, and challenge to our work and how we achieve our objectives at Social Work England. Both have been registered social workers for over 20 years. They talk to us about why diversity data collection is key to practice and highlight its importance. We hope you enjoy. So I'm delighted to be joined by Andrea and Emina today. So before we go any further, I'm gonna ask you to introduce yourself. So I'll start with Andrea. Can you say who you are, your job title and link to the social work profession? Andrea Okay. I'm Andrea Stone and I'm service director for Children's Social Care in Dudley. And I've been a social worker for about 22 years. Ahmina Thanks Andrea, and we'll go to Emina. Emina Hi. So I'm Emina, I'm a registered social worker. I've been social worker for the same time as Andrea, 22 years, and I worked for Local Authority for 22 years after the last year when I joined the NHS. I'm also a member of the National Advisory Forum, which works with Social Work England closely, and I've been a member since March 2020 when it first kind of formed. Thank you both. So we've been talking about the importance of diversity data. In part one, we were talking about the importance of providing information about our identities and how providing information about our characteristics has become commonplace. And we're often asked to share this data when we apply for a job or a course or when we register with the new service. And in this part of the podcast, we'll continue to explore this, and look for some thoughts and reflections from Emina and Andrea. So I'm just going to move on to my first question. Why is it important for social workers to share this data with us? So, I'll start with you Emina. Emina Yes, thank you. I've been thinking about this and I think as a registered social worker, I feel a real sense of belonging within the social work community. I'm really aware that this community is very kind of wide and diverse, as over 22 years I worked with colleagues, when we write your backgrounds in terms of culture, ethnicity, sexual orientation, disability, and I think it's this kind of richness and diversity that makes social work of the most resourceful professions in the public sector. I think they to serve the needs of our diverse communities. And I think this is something we need to feel quite proud of as a profession. And I think the only way for us to have a clear sense of who the eyes are in the profession, and what our identity represents is for social workers to share their personal characteristics with Social Work England, at the point of kind of registering or renewing our registration. And then what would happen, I think is social workers, we would have access to overall figures collected. And I know as enough member that when social work England writes their annual report, there's a really good data around diversity and equality. And we need to, I think, contribute to that. And I think we also hopefully make sure as a workforce we are kind of better presented within social work itself and enough as well. And I think we'll also, hopefully we'll have the regulator kind of have a better understanding. Who we are, so they're better equipped to meet our needs and ensure there's a fairness at every level. Ahmina Thanks, Emina really helpful to hear ...
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    21 mins
  • Let’s talk diversity data part 1

    Let’s talk diversity data part 1
    May 19 2023
    In the first of our one-off episodes, our head of equality, diversity and inclusion, Ahmina Akhtar is joined by Duc Tran, co-chair of the Equality Diversity and Inclusion Advisory Group for the British Association of Social Workers and Transformation Programme Manager at Brent Council. Together with Catherine Witt, regional engagement lead for the northeast and the Humber at Social Work England, they share what the collection of diversity data means to their organisations and outline its importance for the social work sector. Transcript Ahmina Hi, I'm Ahmina Akhtar, head of Equality, Diversity and Inclusion at Social Work England. Welcome to this is Social Work, a podcast from the specialist regulator for social workers, Social Work England. Equality, diversity and inclusion are central to our work as an effective regulator and employer. They are inherent in our values, which are to be: Independent, transparent, ambitious, collaborative, to act with integrity. As part of our equality, diversity, and inclusion action plan, we made a commitment to better understand the social work profession. We're doing this by actively seeking diversity data from social workers on our register, to continue to ensure our processes are fair and to set a benchmark for further insight to support this work on following a successful first podcast season. These special podcast episodes will focus on diversity data collection. In this episode, I'm joined by Duc Tran, co-chair of the Equality, Diversity and Inclusion Advisory Group at BASW, British Association of Social Workers and Transformation Program Manager at Brent Council. I'm also joined by my colleague Catherine Witt, regional engagement lead for the northeast and Humber at Social Work England. They share what collection of diversity data means to their organisations and outline its importance for the social work sector. We hope you enjoy. So, hello Duc and Catherine. It's great to welcome you to have a discussion with me today, about the collection of diversity data as part of our renewal process and really thinking about how important it is. So, before we go any further, can I ask you to introduce yourselves? So, I'll start with you, Catherine. Catherine Hi, yes, I'm Catherine Witt and I am the regional engagement lead for Social Work England in the northeast of England and also the Humber. I'm a social worker. I've been a social worker for 30 years and I've got a real interest inequality and diversity and have been a champion in Social Work England. So it's really nice to be part of this podcast. Ahmina Thank you Catherine. And Duc? Duc Hi, I'm thanks for inviting me. I'm the co-chair of the EDI Advisory Group for the British Association of Social Workers, and I've been a social worker for over 20 years. So equality and diversity and inclusion are part of my passion and interest. Ahmina Thank you. So I'm really pleased to have you here today. And,we've talked about, the importance of diversity data together in the past, in various conversations. And we all know that for most of us, providing information about our characteristics has become common place. We often get asked for this data as part of applying for a job or a course or when we register with a new service. Often I still hear questions about why we need this information, why it's really important, why it's necessary, what we are going to do with it, and does it actually really make a difference. So it feels really key for us to explore that today. And for Social Work England, collecting this data forms part of our commitment to enhance fairness, equality, diversity, and inclusion across the profession. So today I wanna start with asking you why you think it's important for social workers to share this data. So I'll start with you, Catherine. Catherine Yeah, I think it is really important that we get this data. We want to be able to report and analyse from a really good solid evidence space. And to do that obviously we need the information. It's going to really help us build a much more accurate and detailed picture of the social work profession and really sort of ensuring fairness in our processes and better understanding the impact of our policies, you know, such as the annual review of CPD, etc. So it's really important that we get this information just to provide that solid evidence base. Ahmina Thank you Catherine. And Duc? Duc Yeah, pretty much on what Catherine was saying. I think it does offer us an opportunity to get a better understanding of the workforce, especially around the protected characteristics. This information can also help us to better understand our diversity and supporting future research and service planning. And finally, I would say that it's an opportunity to, for us to personally reflect on our identities, and our place in a very diverse workplace. So, you know, it's a special opportunity I think to identify who we are clearly and to think about the other aspects of our ...
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    26 mins
  • Professional standard 6: promote ethical practice and report concerns

    Professional standard 6: promote ethical practice and report concerns
    Nov 17 2021
    In this episode, regional engagement lead Philippa is joined by principal social worker and former chief social worker for adults, Fran Leddra and Julie Stevens, principal social worker for adults, as they discuss professional standard 6. Philippa, Fran and Julie share their knowledge of responding to concerns raised by those who may be accessing care and support services, and the ways in which social workers and the people involved can be best supported to resolve issues at a local level. Join the conversation using #ThisIsSocialWorkPod on our website and follow us on Twitter and LinkedIn. Transcript Philippa Welcome to This Is Social Work. I’m Philippa, Social Work England's regional engagement lead for the South 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 6, ‘promote ethical practice and report concerns’. We're joined by principal social worker and chief social worker for adults Fran Leddra and Julie Stevens, principal social worker for adults, as they discuss the professional standards and their practice as a social worker. We also discuss their knowledge of responding to concerns raised by those who may be accessing care and support services, and the ways in which social workers and those we work with can be best supported to resolve issues at a local level. We hope you enjoy this episode. Hi, welcome everybody. I’m really pleased to join you today to talk about professional standard 6 and I’m joined by a couple of people that are going to introduce themselves, so welcome Fran and welcome Julie. Fran, do you want to introduce yourself first. Fran Hi I’m Fran Leddra, I’m the chief social worker at the department of health and social care. Philippa Thanks Fran, thanks for being with us today, and Julie? Julie Hello, my name's Julie Stevens, I work for Nottingham City council. I’m the team manager for our quality assurance and workforce development team and I’m also the principal social worker for adults. Philippa Fabulous, thank you. So, we're here to talk today about professional standard 6 which is ‘promote ethical practice and report concerns’. At Social Work England we've seen a significant increase in fitness to practise referrals and the number we've received is higher than initially projected. Most of our referrals, I think over 70%, come from members of the public and by members of the public we mean people who've had a social worker themselves or have a family member who've had contact with a social worker. Most of the concerns seem to relate to children and family social workers and we're currently closing around 40% of cases at triage, so this would suggest to us that the concerns are either not meeting our criteria or could be addressed locally, either through employers complaints procedures or staff support or development. The regional engagement team of which I’m part of, work alongside the fitness to practise team in a number of ways and we're currently running some fitness to practise workshops for employers which look at when and what to refer. We quality assure and review fitness to practise decisions and more recently, we've been supporting the triage team acting as professional advisors to consider the concerns raised with us. Much of what we see seems to relate to poor practice and in particular poor communication. I just wondered whether you know, in light of kind of the increase in referrals that we're having, do you have any thoughts about why we might be receiving a higher number of referrals than the previously kind of, anticipated? What are your thoughts Fran? Fran Thank you. I mean that, but that's in some ways not surprising given I suppose the very difficult year that we've had and I suppose we can't really discuss this without the context of the last year and us being in a pandemic but of course you know, it's, it's concerning. In some ways you want the public, don't you, to be able to reach out to Social Work England and to be able to say when they think things aren't right. In other ways you're kind, the fact that 40% of those were actually triaged at that point as not being appropriate for, to take forward in Social Work England tends to indicate that there's something else possible in this last year, or we need to look at trends as we go forward, something else has been taking place and possibly that is around local complaints procedures and local responsiveness possibly during the pandemic. I mean, we know from a BBC report last year that 60% of disabled people said that they felt that their, their care and support had been reduced and that they weren't getting what they need, care centres were closed, normal community touch...
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    36 mins
Political Science Social Sciences
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