This whole Frontline thing has been bothering me, particularly the fact that the Munro Review of Child Protection is used to smack us, our skills and our training, over the head. And the name, 'Frontline' a straight out insult to those of us who actually are Frontline in Social Work.
In his paper, Frontline - Improving the children’s social work profession, teacher, Josh MacAlister, cites Munro's review as supporting his point that 'Of particular note is the quality of the workforce, which has been singled out as a problem'.
I should lay my cards on the table at this point and also say that it bothers me to be ‘singled as a problem’ by a teacher who does not seem to have any actual experience of social work. I could list a host of problems with the way schools work and cherry pick from the plethora of critical reviews of that profession to back my points up, but I’m not going to. I’m not going to because I’ve never worked in a school and would rather concentrate on the issues facing my own profession. Presumably Josh feels Teach First has solved all of education’s problems and he can now solve the other issues facing children, such as the poor quality of social care.
As I’m sure you now know the main thrust of Josh’s paper is the suggestion that the calibre of people undertaking Social Work is not good enough. Josh makes this point throughout his paper and uses Monro to support him. For example he explains that the ‘widely respected Munro review concluded that many newly qualified social workers did not have the necessary knowledge, skills and expertise to deal with the challenges posed by child protection work’. Now to be fair to Josh, Eileen (I don’t know her, but I thought she’s written so much about what I do that we could be on first name terms) did say that. But if you read her review the context of this was not criticising the calibre of students, it is criticising the training they receive. Eileen does not suggest that students just aren’t bright enough to get ‘it’, she suggest that ‘it’ (social work training, explained for non Russell graduates) is the problem, being ‘not consistent in content, quality and outcomes – for child protection’. Later in Josh’s paper he uses the same piece of the Munro report in the correct context, now that really is cheeky! Has anyone told Eileen?
Josh goes on to point out that The Social Work Task Force felt improvement was needed in ‘the quality of recruitment and the training on offer’. Again he turns to Eileen to back this up ‘these findings were mirrored by the independent Munro review in 2011, which called for higher-quality training and argued that children’s social workers need a mix of high-level skills to perform well’. Except they weren’t mirrored, as already mentioned by me, Eileen’s concerns were with the training not the recruitment. Not sure what Josh shaves in, in the morning, but I bet he always cuts himself.
Now I understand that Josh wants to make a name for himself in the world, and he is already doing that with this report. My problem is he’s making a name for himself using my profession. And frankly the more I read of his paper the less I think of it. It’s not that we couldn’t use high quality individuals from Oxbridge, but Josh’s argument on the importance of this is stretched so far that breaking point has been reached. I do not accept the 'findings' of his paper and I do not accept him as qualified to introduce new (adapted) schemes in the recruitment of social work students.
And a final rant on this matter… the sound bite comment by the unelected ex-minister and supporter of Josh’s paper, Lord Adonis, that the state of Social Work is a ‘national scandal' really did infuriate me. So I would just like to point out there have been a number of national scandals in your own profession Lord Adonis, and furthermore weren’t you implicated in one by your colleague Stephen Byers?
Lord Adonis you are an unelected politician, I have no idea what the point of you is but I bet you went to Oxford (spoiler alert, I know he did, I checked).
No comments:
Post a Comment