Author: Alissa

SWAN PICKETS THE 2018 SOCIAL WORKER OF THE YEAR AWARDS

SWAN and our supporters took the case against unethical corporate sponsorship to the Social Worker of the Year Awards and held a friendly picket outside London’s plush Royal Lancaster Hotel on Friday the 30th November, where the 2018 awards ceremony was being held. For over an hour we leafleted, spoke to sponsors, social workers, nominees and their guest arriving for the awards. We found that the majority of those who stopped to talk to us had already heard about the campaign, understood our case and fully supported what we were doing. This was a reflection of the widespread support we have had for this campaign from social workers up and down the country, who agree that sponsors with a track record like that of Capita have no place in social work let alone at a workforce awards ceremony.

With CAPITA having been removed from the Social Worker of the Year website, a judge resigning and the organisation ‘Social Workers Without Borders’ withdrawing from the award in protest at CAPITAs sponsorship, the organisers appear to have treated this as just a PR disaster and their initial response was to hide behind the excuse that no-one wanted a ‘debate about sponsorship to overshadow the work of the Social Worker of the Year Awards’. However, they have been forced to recognise the depth of feeling in support of this campaign and have been reminded that they did the same in 2012 by allowing G4S as a sponsor.

As the evening got underway inside the awards itself, the very first announcement they made was that they knew there had been big issues with the sponsorship of the awards this year and that the Awards Board were taking ‘the matter seriously’.  They announced and repeated their intention, as they had said in an earlier public statement, to hold an ‘ethics review’ of future sponsorship and here they were greeted with much clapping and cheering from the audience – another indication of the popular support for the campaign. That fact the award organisers were forced to address the issue right at the start of their event, and for those in the audience to give such a response, gives some sense of the impact we have all made with this campaign.

We wish to remind the organisers and the corporate sponsors that the charity that runs and owns SWYA have still yet to publically explain why they invited or accepted CAPITA as a sponsor in the first place.

SWAN and In Defence of Youth Work are both concerned about the corporate sponsorship of awards ceremonies for Social Work and Youth Work from organisations profiting from austerity or human rights abuses:

https://socialworkfuture.org/2018/10/08/statement-released-condemning-capita-and-ingeus-involvement-in-awards/

Statement Released Condemning Capita and Ingeus … socialworkfuture.org SWAN Statement condemning the corporate sponsorship of the 2018 Social Worker of the Year by Capita and Children & Young People Now Awards by Ingeus

 

 

Our campaign against Capita and Ingeus is gathering pace and has already achieved a fantastic victory for social work values – Capita have now pulled out of the SWA ‘Social Work Values’ award!

 

The campaign has widespread support and has engaged social workers in offices up and down the country. Several organisations and individuals have added their names to the SWAN statement including: Disabled People Against Cuts, Recovery in the Bin, Shaping Our Lives, Mental Health Resistance Network, Social Work Without Borders, Suzy Croft (Registered Social Worker & ‘Social Worker of the Year Lifetime Achievement Award’ Winner 2016), & Professor Peter Beresford (University of Essex).

 

Alongside this, one high profile nomination Social Workers Without Borders withdrew in protest and a Judge has pulled out in solidarity. This was eventually covered in Community Care here when the organisers of the awards announced something they are calling an ‘ethics audit’ see:

https://www.communitycare.co.uk/2018/10/15/social-work-awards-ethics-audit-capita-sponsorship-boycott/

 

Last week Capita’s sponsorship and profile were quietly removed from the SWA18 awards website with only the co-sponsor of the ‘values’ award remaining as a single sponsor. Subsequently the Social Worker of the Year Awards made this statement regarding Capita ‘offering to withdraw’:

http://www.socialworkawards.com/news/update-regarding-sponsorship/

Update regarding sponsorship – socialworkawards.com www.socialworkawards.com Update regarding sponsorship 10/24/2018 No-one wants a debate about sponsorship to overshadow the work of the Social Worker of the Year Awards.

 

 

This statement is hardly an acknowledgement of Capita’s total unsuitability to sponsor a social work award, let alone one about social work values. We are considering how best to engage with the Social Worker of the Year Awards at present, to ensure they fulfil their leadership role and stand up for social work values. The Social Worker of the Year Awards are on Friday 30th November at Royal Lancaster Hotel, London W2 2TY from 6pm.

 

We have called a friendly picket outside the CYPN awards in protest against Ingeus having anything to do with celebrating social work achievement, and we are calling on all our members and supporters to join us:

 

Children and Young People Now awards Wednesday 21st November at the Hurlingham club SW6 3PR, ASSEMBLE from 6pm (until 7pm)  for the CYPN awards (see: https://www.cypnawards.com/ceremony)

SWAN Statement condemning the corporate sponsorship of the 2018 Social Worker of the Year by Capita and Children & Young People Now Awards by Ingeus

 

SWAN is extremely concerned at the level of corporate sponsorship creeping back into those annual events where we cherish and celebrate those in the workforce who represent best practice and individual achievement.

 

It is with alarm that we learn that the multi-national outsourcing giant CAPITA has been allowed to sponsor the ‘Championing Social Work Values’ category, in the forthcoming 2018 Social Worker of the Year Awards. This is particularly ironic given that CAPITA has a such poor track record of championing the type of ‘values’ we espouse, when it comes to its own actions.

 

CAPITA is the Home Office’s immigration enforcement contractor. It recently sent a SMS text message to a Windrush generation member, Gladstone Wilson aged 62, telling him that he needed to leave the country as ‘soon as possible’. Capita is also contracted by the Department for Work and Pensions to carry out Personal Independence Payment (PIP) assessments which brutalise and impoverish disabled claimants and those with mental health needs, but under this government “cruelty can be lucrative”. The DWP has been resisting calls to release documents that would highlight just how much they know about Capita’s failings, since 2016.

 

In a joint venture with the Barnet Council, a capital investment manager working for CAPITA defrauded the Council of over £2 million. He was jailed after pleading guilty, but sloppy financial control and poor accountability in the contract allowed the manager to make 62 fraudulent payments – ripping off the people of Barnet. CAPITA has been heavily criticised by Unison for its work with Barnet Council.

 

A damming report published by the National Audit Office investigation earlier this year, concluded that CAPITA’s performance had fallen a ‘long way below’ an acceptable standard. Service failures included its role within the NHS where there is a catalogue of 500,000 patient registration letters backlogged, medical supplies not being delivered, and delays or loss of patients’ medical records all of which had ‘put patients at risk’ it said.

 

Meanwhile, the media publication ‘Children and Young People Now’ has recruited the multi-national company Ingeus to sponsor its ‘Youth Volunteering and Social Action Award’. Here we find yet another company making millions out of the unemployed by providing welfare-to-work schemes. Ingeus does not recognise Trade Unions. In the north-east of England in 2012, Ingeus was referred almost 28,000 jobless people and got only 920 into sustained employment, a success rate of 3.3%. 

 

SWAN seriously questions whether CAPITA and Ingeus should really be given the privileges of being associated with the awards when their own ability to respect dignity, competence, social justice and service is woeful. SWAN believes that CAPITA and Ingeus’ involvement with these awards is incompatible with social work and social care, and nothing short of a cynical device on their part to attract more business and to advance the corporate capture of social work and children’s services. They should be shown the door!

 

Signatories:

Social Work Action Network – swansocialwork@gmail.com – https://socialworkfuture.org/

Disabled People Against Cuts

Recovery in the Bin

Shaping Our Lives

Mental Health Resistance Network

Social Work Without Borders

Suzy Croft (Registered social worker & ‘Social Worker of the Year Lifetime Achievement Award Winner 2016)

Professor Peter Beresford (University of Essex)

Follow this link to the SWWB webpage, where you can photos of the day, and our joint statement condemning the US policy of family separation.

https://www.socialworkerswithoutborders.org/campaigning/

In Salford on July 19th, this challenging question will be debated at a Unison meeting with contributions from SWAN and DPAC. Please find below the flyer details – do share with all interested parties. Please do consider attending.

SWAN is a co-signature on the following letter – please feel free to circulate and to contact MPs.

 

OPEN LETTER

Nadhim Zahawi MP
Parliamentary Under Secretary of State for Children and Families Department for Education

By email

10^th May 2018

Dear Minister

Re: PROPOSED EXPANSION OF THE FAST-TRACK SOCIAL WORK PROGRAMME

The purpose of this letter is to call on the Government to suspend the proposed tender to expand the fast-track children and families social work programme. The signatories are the main professional organisations representing social work, including practitioners and academics.

 

A Prior Information Notice (PIN – 2018/S 064-142495) was issued on the 29^th March 2018 and remains on the website: (http://ted.europa.eu/TED/notice/udl?uri=TED:NOTICE:142495-2018:TEXT:EN:HTML). However, the planned information day on the 27^th April 2018 was cancelled and we are unaware of the current status of this tender.

 

We request that the tender be suspended in order:

 

1. To allow the opportunity for a full stakeholder consultation and impact assessment – that includes current providers within the HE sector and social work employers- on the long and short term implications of such a radical shift of scale in the funding and delivery mode of social work education.
2. To allow time for a transparent and rigorous assessment of the use of £50 million of scarce public funds for this project and how far it represents value for money.
3. To allow time for proper evaluation of the current fast-track scheme, ‘Frontline’, for which this current tender is, without question, an extension.
4. To ensure that this evaluation critically examines the impact of this route into social work on the workforce, particularly in light of the challenges that many employers continue to face in recruiting and retaining experienced social workers and leaders.
5. To ensure the meaningful involvement in the evaluation of a range of stakeholders, including representatives from our organisations and the new Chair of Social Work England.

 

Our primary concerns regarding this tender and the expansion of the Fast-Track programme proposed are as follows:

 

The cost of this tender

 

A recent Department for Education study (Cutmore and Roger, 2016) found that the unit costs to government are significantly lower for the established mainstream routes into social work than for the accelerated routes: Undergraduate (£ 14,675); Postgraduate (£ 23,225); Step Up (£ 40,413) and Frontline (£ 45, 323). The tender suggests that the cost per student would actually rise to £55,000 in the next few years.  This raises important concerns about the continuing disparities between the funding available to programmes that ostensibly have the same aim; that is to educate the future workforce.

 

The lack of longitudinal evaluation

 

The House of Commons Select Committee on Social Work Reform (2016 – 2017) recommended that:

 

The Government commission an extended research study of Frontline alongside university routes to establish comparative long-term outcomes. The Government will then have a stronger evidence base to make decisions on any future changes to the funding and structure of qualification routes.

 

A study has been commissioned but has not concluded. However, the Government is committing large amounts of money to extend a programme that is unproven in resolving the challenge for employers of retaining and developing experienced social workers. This is puzzling given that a critical issue for many local authorities concerns retention.

 

Moreover, Frontline is based on the Teach First model. A study by the National College for Teaching and Leadership found that after two years the retention rate for Teach First was poorer than for other graduate routes (Allen et al., 2016).  This reinforces the need for evaluation before large amounts of scarce public money are allocated further.

 

Impact on social work education and research in universities

 

The fast-track programmes offer students a wage of around £20,000, and the payment of fees. This represents a significantly more favourable level of financial support than that offered to students on any other qualifying route into social work. Beyond the obvious issue of equity, this pattern of provision risks creating deep instability in the mainstream routes to postgraduate qualification that already exist in universities, with important medium and long-term threats for the sector as a whole.

 

In particular, the proposed expansion of a fast track children’s social work training to cohorts of up to 450 students per year will pose a significant challenge to the viability of current postgraduate programmes in Universities across England.   We are concerned that this expansion will reduce applications to – and thereby threaten – courses in some of the most prestigious, research-oriented Universities where such post-graduate provision tends to be clustered.

 

Masters students are of central importance to the sustainability of a research culture for the social work profession, not only within universities but also within practice environments.  Once damaged, the sector’s capacity for research will be very difficult to repair.

 

In written evidence to the Select Committee, the School for Policy Studies at the University of Bristol stated that “retaining social work education within research-intensive universities is essential” and that there was a risk that the expansion of Frontline could cause social work education to disappear from universities, and in turn threaten “internationally-excellent” social work research.  Additionally, Professor Brid Featherstone reported to the Select Committee that:

 

Research is the life blood of any profession and [Frontline’s] future intention to disentangle themselves from an ongoing relationship with the HEI could mean that their methods of work are not rooted in an organic research base.

 

We think it is essential that Government, engage with the implications of an extension of Frontline, which is not university-based, for a profession which is currently built on independent and academically robust social work research and education at Masters and doctorate levels.

 

Equality issues

 

Not only is the renumeration for Frontline (and Step Up) students, as opposed to students on traditional programmes unequal, but it would appear from the research on who has been recruited to study on Frontline programmes to date that structural inequalities are being reproduced. Maxwell et al’s (2017) study comparing the pre-training characteristics of Frontline and mainstream route students concluded that Frontline has recruited a more socially advantaged and less diverse group of entrants and that ‘the impact of this not uncontroversial initiative warrants careful monitoring through longitudinal study if we are to fully understand the nature of this most recent instance of social engineering in England’s social work profession’ (p. 502).

 

In addition, the Frontline model, which requires attendance at a 5 week residential programme over the summer, is potentially restrictive for students with caring responsibilities for children or adults.  We have asked the Department for Education whether an equality impact assessment was undertaken prior to the issuing of this tender notification. The response received was that:

 

The Department for Education understands the importance of, and is committed to, ensuring appropriate considerations are made on how our policy decisions affect different individuals. With this particular procurement, we have considered how we will meet our Public Sector Equality Duty through the advertised service once it is procured, and will continue to pay regard to these duties as the procurement exercise progresses.

 

We consider this an inadequate response to the Public Sector Equality Duty given the evidence already available about Frontline cohorts so far.

 

In the light of the issues raised in this letter, we urge the Government to suspend this proposed tender and would welcome further dialogue with you about constructive ways forward.

 

 

Yours sincerely,

 

Association of Professors of Social Work (APSW)

 

British Association of Social Workers (BASW)

 

Joint University Social Work Education Council Social Work Education Committee (JUCSWEC)

 

Social Work Action Network (SWAN)

 

 

 

Copied to:

Association of Directors of Adult Social Services (ADASS)

Association of Directors of Children’s Services (ADCS)

Chair of Social Work England

Local Government Association (LGA)

Chief Social Worker for Adults

Chief Social Worker for Children and Families

Shadow Minister (Education) (Children and Families)

 

 

References:

 

Allen, R., Bibby, D.,  Parameshwaran, M., Nye, P., Education Datalab and FFT (2016) Linking ITT and  workforce data: (Initial Teacher Training  Performance Profiles  and School Workforce Census), National College for Teaching and Leadership, Department for Education, Reference DFE- RR507

 

Cutmore, M. and Roger, J.  (2016) Comparing the costs of social work qualification routes, York Consulting, Department for Education, Reference: DFE-RR517

 

Maxwell, N., Scourfield, J., de Villiers, T., Pithouse, A. and Le Zhang, M. (2017) ‘The Pre-Training Characteristics of Frontline Participants and Mainstream Social Work Students’, British Journal of Social Work, 48(2), pp. 487-504

SWWB supports Afghan Child’s challenge to the Government over failure to adhere to DUBS amendment

(ZS and High Court Challenge)

https://www.duncanlewis.co.uk/immigration_news/‘REJECTNO_FAM’_our_fight_for_the_abandoned_children_of_Calais__(20_February_2017).html

https://www.theguardian.com/world/2018/feb/28/teenage-refugees-high-court-challenge-could-give-hope-to-thousands

The Calais refugee camp ‘The Jungle’ was brutally dismantled by French riot police on the orders of the then President Hollande in October 2016, leaving hundreds of unaccompanied children stranded.  Together with the French Legal Shelter, Social Workers without Borders had already provided voluntary assessments of the serious risk of harm faced by at least a dozen such children  since April 2016 helping some of them reach safety in the UK.

 

During the destruction of the camp we worked frantically to pull together a team of social workers who would go over to the camp and conduct Best Interest Assessments with the solicitors, Duncan Lewis.  We were supported in this callout by many SWAN members – spreading the word about what we were doing through an activist network of social workers, students and academics.

 

The children’s experiences during their journey and their subsequent stay in the Jungle had traumatized them.  They all needed significant professional support to protect them from further serious harm. This included a 14 year old boy, ZS.  Some of them feature in Sue Clayton’s powerful film Calais Children: A Case to Answer.

 

After fierce lobbying led by Lord Dubs, the Government agreed to include an amendment to the Immigration Act 2016 (section 67) to relocate some vulnerable lone-child refugees from Europe who had no close family connection in the UK.  The Government subsequently restricted the number of children given safe passage under the ‘Dubs amendment’ to an arbitrary 320 and imposed cut off date of October 2017. This was successfully challenged in the Courts with the result that the number of children allowed to enter the UK under Dubs has been slightly increased.  SWWB condemned these restrictions and  highlighted our concerns that refugee children were consequently being exposed to an increased risk of trafficking and sexual exploitation due to the negligence of the UK and French Authorities.

 

Since the distribution of children across France, some of whom were placed in empty holiday camps and hospital wings, completely unsuited to meeting the needs of vulnerable children, SWWB continued to review the children we met and our social work Assessments showed that many children, ZS included, were displaying symptoms of Post-Traumatic Stress Disorder.   We subsequently launched a successful Crowd Justice campaign to give us some much needed funding to continue our follow up Assessments.

 

Now, ZS, supported by Duncan Lewis, is challenging the decision to end the Dubs amendment on the basis that the Home Secretary failed in her duties required under the Dubs amendment. ZS currently remains in France.

 

 

 

As Social Work volunteers we worked around the clock, and in distressing conditions, in order to challenge social injustice.  In doing this we took a massive step into the unknown, practising outside of our Local Authorities and familiar domestic legislation.

 

Redefining social work outside of our local authority practice has centred on transcending borders imposed by neo-liberalist ideologies, managerialism and marketisation. In developing an awareness of its parameters and influences and then fostering thinking and action which is directed by social workers themselves, firmly aligned to the principles of social justice, we seek to reclaim social work on our own terms. We can use this experience to transform our social work practice from inside and outside the State.

In celebrating World Social Work day on 20^th March, let’s applaud the Social Work Volunteers who chose to shine a light in the darkest of places and support those oppressed by political ideologies and inaction.

 

See More:      https://1drv.ms/v/s!AiwHMgl2FUGOg7pY8w5ClwYw65uXhQ

 

www.socialworkerswithoutborders.org