Yahoo News How degree apprenticeships can tackle social work's recruitment crisis
A new breed of apprentice is starting to appear in children’s and adult services as the sectors open up a work-based route to professional qualification. The first degree-level apprenticeships in social work are now available after more than two years in the making.
The development creates a new option for existing care staff with ambitions to become social workers who have been unable to follow the traditional route. It is hoped that the move will also help address the social worker recruitment and retention crisis which dogs both children’s and adult services. The vacancy rate in 2018 for children’s and family social workers in England was 16%, slightly up on 2017, and staff turnover was approximately 16%. In adult services, turnover was almost 14% last year and vacancy rates ran at 8%, equal to about 1,400 empty posts.
Leicestershire county and Leicester city councils are among the first local authority employers to offer the new apprenticeship to existing staff. The 32 apprentices from the two councils – 16 from each – come from a variety of roles in adult and children’s services, including community and mental health support workers, family intervention workers and intensive family support staff.
The apprentices spend one day a week at the University of Warwick and the remainder of the week in the workplace. When the university welcomed the first cohort through its doors in March, the director of its centre for lifelong learning, Ann Hollinshead, was keen to emphasise the status of the apprenticeship which leads to a social work degree with the right to practise and register. She said at the time: “This is a different way of learning; not a different qualification.”
Heather Pick, assistant director of adults and communities at Leicestershire council, says it decided to offer the apprenticeship because it was disappointed with the quality of newly qualified social workers (NQSWs) coming though the traditional degree route. At the same time, some of the council’s experienced care and support staff were hitting a career ceiling because they lacked the professional qualification.
“For some years we haven’t been particularly enamoured with the quality of NQSWs coming out of university,” says Pick. “I’m not saying they are not academically qualified, but it’s the on-the-ground social work that they lack. It means we are having to put a lot of work into them in their post-qualifying year and it’s probably two years before they are at the stage where they are confident in their practice.
“Then we have unqualified staff without the social work qualification who come from different backgrounds, who have oodles of experiences, but who don’t have the social worker degree. For some time we have been looking at career progression for these staff that would recognise their expertise and it’s the social work degree that will do that. It also means we get NQSWs who are up and running.”
The apprenticeship is a generic qualification, providing students with the option to work in either children’s or adult services – something that Pick says offers the council some flexibility and makes both adults and children’s services “more sustainable”.
While the Association of Directors of Children’s Services (ADCS) welcomes the apprenticeship as another route to professional qualification, it says it is hard to say whether it will help improve recruitment and retention. Rachael Wardell, director of children, schools and families for Merton council in south London and chair of the ADCS’s workforce development committee, says: “It may help with recruitment in the broader sense, but the biggest problem we have is keeping social workers once they have qualified as the qualification is highly sought after.”
Related: The NHS apprenticeships offering a new route to health and social care
The Institute for Apprenticeships and Technical Education is the government agency that approved the apprenticeship standards. These took two years to develop and were signed off last November following the work of a trailblazer group made up of 70 employers, universities and representative organisations, supported by sector skills agency Skills for Care. In the academic year 2018-19, the institute recorded 148 apprenticeship starts – figures that the institute’s chief executive, Sir Gerry Berragan, describes as “encouraging”.
Jane Hanrahan, a workforce development manager at Norfolk council, chaired the trailblazer group. Norfolk plans to offer 20 apprenticeships annually. “For the first time we have a career pathway right from entry level to social worker degree level, from where you can go on to leadership and management – that wasn’t there before,” says Hanrahan. “We are upskilling our staff and when they realise we are paying for their degree, they aren’t going to go anywhere else to work. They stay with you – the degree apprenticeship is completely win-win whichever way you look.”
Experience: ‘When this apprenticeship option was made available, I knew I had to participate’
Peter Chitsenga thought his career had stalled until his employer offered him the chance to study on the job
Graduate and mental health community support worker Peter Chitsenga could not afford to fund himself to complete a master’s degree to become a qualified social worker. With a wife and three children to help support, the cost was beyond the 54-year-old who settled in the UK after leaving his home country of Zimbabwe 16 years ago. It looked like his career in social care had met a dead-end.
But Chitsenga’s prospects opened up again when his Leicestershire council employer offered him the chance to complete th e new degree-level apprenticeship in social work that leads to a professional qualification. “I have a passion for education and I wanted to develop and progress my career,” he says. “So when this apprenticeship option was made available I knew I had to participate in it.”
Chitsenga spends one day a week at the University of Warwick and the remaining four in the workplace. “The great thing about it is that everything I learn I take back to my workplace,” he says. “It’s brilliant. Everything feels relevant – you understand why you are making such decisions. The first thing we do when we go back to university the next week is to discuss how we used what we have learned.”
The apprenticeship will equip Chitsenga to work in either adult or children’s services – an opportunity he welcomes. “You never know where you are going to end up working and it gives me the option to move into children’s services in the future,” he says. “Whatever I do, though, I’m going to stay with Leicestershire – it gave me this opportunity and I want to pay them back and stay loyal.” DA
