Abstract
This report presents findings from Year 3 of a five-year longitudinal study which aims to develop a national picture of how early career social workers (ECSWs) experience and navigate their early years in practice. Methods of data collection include annual repeat-measure online questionnaires, participant observation and in-depth interviews. Year 3 findings draw on 120 responses to a national online questionnaire, 14 in-depth interviews and a ten-day period of observation in a single local authority.
Key findings from Year 3
Year 3 findings indicate a workforce that is increasingly confident, capable and critical regarding its professional purpose and contribution. ECSWs emerge as committed to their role in helping the most vulnerable in Scottish society yet constrained by what they experience as sometimes harsh economic, political, organisational and inter-professional climates.
The optimism, strength and resolve expressed by ECSW’s appears, at times, to function as a protection in professional environments characterised by challenge and uncertainty. This dimension underscores the temporal nature of the study findings and prompts consideration of how long workers can sustain and be sustained by this narrative.
Employment
Year 3 data conveys a stronger sense of workers taking responsibility for their career path and wellbeing, including the process of ‘exiting’ practice environments experienced as detrimental. Accounts of the latter mostly involved movement from statutory children’s services to other service areas, with respondents citing a mix of staff absence, high caseloads, lack of resource, stress and professional disillusionment as reasons for exit. Notwithstanding, the majority of ECSWs continue to be employed in statutory settings and almost six out of ten continue to be based in children’s services (56.8%). Closer analysis of workforce movement patterns, including within children’s services, is required to better understand these findings.
Participants continue to describe their experience of agile working in mostly negative terms. As echoed in previous reports, concerns include time inefficiencies, noisy working environments and distance from peer support. The most stressful aspect of agile working was related to uncertainty, specifically, not knowing if you will have a desk to work at. Conversely, positive or neutral messages were consistently associated with having allocated and adequate desk space.
Professional confidence and competence
Year 3 data indicates either sustained or increased levels of professional confidence and competence and a diminishing sense of anxiety and vulnerability for most ECSWs. Participants continue to describe varied caseloads and reasonable increases in volume and complexity. As in previous years, there are exceptions to this picture, with a small number of ECSWs describing overwhelming caseloads linked to staff absence, inadequate support and difficult team dynamics. In most cases, negative experiences were managed at the individual level, ie by moving job.
Findings remain broadly consistent regarding how workers spend their time. Most time is spent on desk-based activities, specifically ‘report writing’, this year followed by ‘time spent with service users and carers’, then ‘caserecording’. As in Years 1 and 2, least time is spent on ‘reading and using research knowledge and evidence’.
Considerations for employers, educators and policy makers
Closer attention needs to be given to social workers’ experiences of agile working. A co-design approach to change would allow employers and workers to work together to maximise the benefits and minimise the harms of developing models and practices.
Policy makers and employers should recognise that social workers have distinctive professional needs and that collegial relationships centred on a proximal concept of ‘team’ are crucial to effective, safe and emotionally resilient practice. Education can better prepare graduates for agile working by exposure to different organisational structures/models during education.
We need to understand why reading, research and evidence emerges as marginal in ECSW accounts of practice. This will be a focus in our next round of interviews, but it is an important question for the sector more generally.
Supervision, support, learning and development
Supervision continues to be a valued mechanism for professional support and development. However, ECSWs continue to describe a privileging of casemanagement over professional development in supervision. The number of ECSWs reporting regular (ie monthly) supervision continues to fall; more than 30% of ECSWs report irregular or infrequent access to supervision (ie 6-8 weeks).
Informal support continues to emerge as an important but under-developed mechanism for supporting professional confidence, competence and development. This year, informal support emerged more clearly as an exchange relationship, as ECSWs give and receive support to and from colleagues.
Considerations for employers, educators and policy makers
Improving the experience, quality and consistency of supervision practice is not especially complex, but it will require a commitment from employers and managers to co-create models of supervision that prioritise occupational needs over organisational ones. Academics and others have a role in supporting this process through knowledge development and knowledge mobilisation.
Informal support can be recognised and harnessed in creative ways to the benefit of organisations and staff. Some social work providers have recently introduced senior practitioner roles as one route towards this, a development that would benefit from national recognition and roll-out.
Professional learning and development continues to be mostly self-directed with little expectation amongst ECSWs of structured learning opportunities or structured career pathways. Relatedly, most ECSWs appear reasonably satisfied with the variety and quality of learning opportunities available, most of which continue to be training-based and delivered ‘inhouse’. Qualitative data indicates an increasing desire for more specialised and/or formal learning opportunities, related to working with particular user groups and/or service areas. Current emphases on self-directed and in-house learning appear to be linked to funding shortages and limited strategic direction for professional learning in social work.
Considerations for employers, educators and policy makers
Professional learning can be strengthened by:
(i) a sector-wide commitment to establishing strategic direction for professional learning, ie in the form of nationally agreed learning priorities aligned to professional standards, promotion pathways and funding routes;
(ii) recognition of the value of different learning opportunities, beyond in-house training and self-directed learning;
(iii) ensuring ‘permission’, ‘funding’ and ‘time’ is available for informal and formal learning opportunities, aligned to workforce/ professional priorities.
Professional identity and leadership
Year 3 findings demonstrate a deepening sense of professional identity expressed in a grounded sense of purpose, values and contribution. Constraints on professional identity continue to include a perceived lack of recognition, respect and support from others, alongside a lack of adequate resource for services required to support change with vulnerable individuals and groups.
ECSWs demonstrate a developing understanding of what leadership means in practice, although one in three remain unclear. There is evidence of regular opportunity for practice leadership across settings, however opportunities are not routinely recognised or rewarded. Findings in this area suggest a continued privileging of traditional models of leadership in which leadership is constructed as a role rather than a disposition.
Considerations for employers, educators and policy makers
ECSWs are confident in their role and purpose but want recognition of and respect from others for the important and complex work they do. Strengthening professional identity requires more consistent attention to known constraints to professional identity at strategic and operational, as well as national and local levels. There is a need for better political recognition of the contribution of social services, a more strategic approach to public and professional messaging and adequate investment in services. Improving the public and professional profile of social work may also require a more coherent and coordinated approach to this from the various bodies that currently represent social work in Scotland.
Next steps
We are entering Year 4 of the study and the fourth online survey was circulated to all ECSWs in March 2020. A final online survey will be circulated in March 2021, followed by a final round of in-depth interviews. Our Year 4 interim report will be available in spring 2021.
Key findings from Year 3
Year 3 findings indicate a workforce that is increasingly confident, capable and critical regarding its professional purpose and contribution. ECSWs emerge as committed to their role in helping the most vulnerable in Scottish society yet constrained by what they experience as sometimes harsh economic, political, organisational and inter-professional climates.
The optimism, strength and resolve expressed by ECSW’s appears, at times, to function as a protection in professional environments characterised by challenge and uncertainty. This dimension underscores the temporal nature of the study findings and prompts consideration of how long workers can sustain and be sustained by this narrative.
Employment
Year 3 data conveys a stronger sense of workers taking responsibility for their career path and wellbeing, including the process of ‘exiting’ practice environments experienced as detrimental. Accounts of the latter mostly involved movement from statutory children’s services to other service areas, with respondents citing a mix of staff absence, high caseloads, lack of resource, stress and professional disillusionment as reasons for exit. Notwithstanding, the majority of ECSWs continue to be employed in statutory settings and almost six out of ten continue to be based in children’s services (56.8%). Closer analysis of workforce movement patterns, including within children’s services, is required to better understand these findings.
Participants continue to describe their experience of agile working in mostly negative terms. As echoed in previous reports, concerns include time inefficiencies, noisy working environments and distance from peer support. The most stressful aspect of agile working was related to uncertainty, specifically, not knowing if you will have a desk to work at. Conversely, positive or neutral messages were consistently associated with having allocated and adequate desk space.
Professional confidence and competence
Year 3 data indicates either sustained or increased levels of professional confidence and competence and a diminishing sense of anxiety and vulnerability for most ECSWs. Participants continue to describe varied caseloads and reasonable increases in volume and complexity. As in previous years, there are exceptions to this picture, with a small number of ECSWs describing overwhelming caseloads linked to staff absence, inadequate support and difficult team dynamics. In most cases, negative experiences were managed at the individual level, ie by moving job.
Findings remain broadly consistent regarding how workers spend their time. Most time is spent on desk-based activities, specifically ‘report writing’, this year followed by ‘time spent with service users and carers’, then ‘caserecording’. As in Years 1 and 2, least time is spent on ‘reading and using research knowledge and evidence’.
Considerations for employers, educators and policy makers
Closer attention needs to be given to social workers’ experiences of agile working. A co-design approach to change would allow employers and workers to work together to maximise the benefits and minimise the harms of developing models and practices.
Policy makers and employers should recognise that social workers have distinctive professional needs and that collegial relationships centred on a proximal concept of ‘team’ are crucial to effective, safe and emotionally resilient practice. Education can better prepare graduates for agile working by exposure to different organisational structures/models during education.
We need to understand why reading, research and evidence emerges as marginal in ECSW accounts of practice. This will be a focus in our next round of interviews, but it is an important question for the sector more generally.
Supervision, support, learning and development
Supervision continues to be a valued mechanism for professional support and development. However, ECSWs continue to describe a privileging of casemanagement over professional development in supervision. The number of ECSWs reporting regular (ie monthly) supervision continues to fall; more than 30% of ECSWs report irregular or infrequent access to supervision (ie 6-8 weeks).
Informal support continues to emerge as an important but under-developed mechanism for supporting professional confidence, competence and development. This year, informal support emerged more clearly as an exchange relationship, as ECSWs give and receive support to and from colleagues.
Considerations for employers, educators and policy makers
Improving the experience, quality and consistency of supervision practice is not especially complex, but it will require a commitment from employers and managers to co-create models of supervision that prioritise occupational needs over organisational ones. Academics and others have a role in supporting this process through knowledge development and knowledge mobilisation.
Informal support can be recognised and harnessed in creative ways to the benefit of organisations and staff. Some social work providers have recently introduced senior practitioner roles as one route towards this, a development that would benefit from national recognition and roll-out.
Professional learning and development continues to be mostly self-directed with little expectation amongst ECSWs of structured learning opportunities or structured career pathways. Relatedly, most ECSWs appear reasonably satisfied with the variety and quality of learning opportunities available, most of which continue to be training-based and delivered ‘inhouse’. Qualitative data indicates an increasing desire for more specialised and/or formal learning opportunities, related to working with particular user groups and/or service areas. Current emphases on self-directed and in-house learning appear to be linked to funding shortages and limited strategic direction for professional learning in social work.
Considerations for employers, educators and policy makers
Professional learning can be strengthened by:
(i) a sector-wide commitment to establishing strategic direction for professional learning, ie in the form of nationally agreed learning priorities aligned to professional standards, promotion pathways and funding routes;
(ii) recognition of the value of different learning opportunities, beyond in-house training and self-directed learning;
(iii) ensuring ‘permission’, ‘funding’ and ‘time’ is available for informal and formal learning opportunities, aligned to workforce/ professional priorities.
Professional identity and leadership
Year 3 findings demonstrate a deepening sense of professional identity expressed in a grounded sense of purpose, values and contribution. Constraints on professional identity continue to include a perceived lack of recognition, respect and support from others, alongside a lack of adequate resource for services required to support change with vulnerable individuals and groups.
ECSWs demonstrate a developing understanding of what leadership means in practice, although one in three remain unclear. There is evidence of regular opportunity for practice leadership across settings, however opportunities are not routinely recognised or rewarded. Findings in this area suggest a continued privileging of traditional models of leadership in which leadership is constructed as a role rather than a disposition.
Considerations for employers, educators and policy makers
ECSWs are confident in their role and purpose but want recognition of and respect from others for the important and complex work they do. Strengthening professional identity requires more consistent attention to known constraints to professional identity at strategic and operational, as well as national and local levels. There is a need for better political recognition of the contribution of social services, a more strategic approach to public and professional messaging and adequate investment in services. Improving the public and professional profile of social work may also require a more coherent and coordinated approach to this from the various bodies that currently represent social work in Scotland.
Next steps
We are entering Year 4 of the study and the fourth online survey was circulated to all ECSWs in March 2020. A final online survey will be circulated in March 2021, followed by a final round of in-depth interviews. Our Year 4 interim report will be available in spring 2021.
| Original language | English |
|---|---|
| Place of Publication | Dundee |
| Publisher | Scottish Social Services Council |
| Commissioning body | The Scottish Government |
| Number of pages | 60 |
| Publication status | Published - 31 Dec 2019 |
| Externally published | Yes |