Another thing that will come out of the Task Force report will be a reconfiguration of functions among the various national social work organisations. Obviously something will have to be done about the GSCC, the regulator of social work in England, whose chief executive got sacked, as expected (he’s been on gardening leave for some months), having been found not making sure that the discipline arrangements were working properly. Actually, many people say he’s been given the heave-ho because the government made sure he was left holding the parcel when the music stopped. However, the crucial factor is clearly that there was very poor management of the cases in house, and difficulty in coordinating the work of some of the outsourced case managers. Another sign that if you’re taking responsibility for regulating things, the trendy businessification solution of outsourcing is very likely not a good idea. Most managers of difficult issues want to have clear control of the staff who are dealing with the issues. It also seems that a new computer system was shambolic – where have we heard before that admin problems have arisen from a belief that some clever computer system was going to render something cheap and easy that inherently requires human judgement?

The overall impression is that they are trying to do the GSCC on the cheap, and this is at least partly because the government, which is always under financial pressure, is taking the main financial and managment role. As usual, British governments can’t face anything that might affect them not being in their control, but it’s also because there’s not enough money in social work to pay for its own regulation. I can’t avoid the feeling that we are not paying enough for the GSCC. It’s to every social worker’s advantage to be sure that the public knows that professional standards  are being effectively enforced and I can’t see how the GSCC can do this on £30 a year from a fairly small number of us, when it has many other responsibilities as well. I see a fee rise coming soon.

You can see the report about all this at:

http://www.gscc.org.uk/NR/rdonlyres/940CEBBE-88BF-48DF-A645-0E1B5E7FE1EB/0/090930_CHRE_GSCC_Finalreport.pdf

The initial issue was a backlog in discipline hearings (a bit surprising when you read the list of press releases from the GSCC, which are mainly about this or that social worker being disciplined).

But reading the report points up a number of things about the rules that GSCC operates by. For example, the GSSC deals with the misconduct of social workers, not their professional competence or quality of service. You could say that quality of service is a matter for the service regulator, the Care Quality Commission, but inevitably it also reposes in what the professionals in the service are doing.

There might be one or two reasons for  the reliance on and problems with local disciplinary procedures. One is the long-standing issue that local authorities have always taken the view that social workers should do their bidding, and they don’t like professional bodies interfering with what they want for all sorts of namby-pamby reasons of professional standards. This was one of the historical reasons for the long time it took for local government and the unions to accept that they did need to have a professional regulator in social work. There are apparently cases of difficulties in getting local authorities to cooperate with the GSCC. All this is unlike the NHS which is quite accustomed to the idea that its professionals are qualified competent professionals who are entitled to make and follow through on their own judgements about the right thing to do about the situations they face; it is also required to cooperate with those professional bodies. You can understand how discombobulated the healthcare regulator guy who wrote the report was by the funny ideas in local government and the failure to ensure a focus on quality of practice as the main point of professional regulation in social work.

Of course, assessing professional competence and actually going out and looking for things that have gone wrong is expensive. And, reading between the lines, there are also signs that the chief executive told the Department of Health about the backlog and no extra money was forthcoming, so you can imagine the civil servants in the relevant departments’ attitude to concerns about the rules not permitting more complex issues about quality of professional service to be explored. Perhaps, links with civil servants got too much priority because government is so important for the GSCC in trying to get more support than we might have expected from politicians, perhaps neglecting  the possibility of an alliance with social workers and their organisations who have a very real interest in making sure professional regulation goes well.

Also, like the head of all organisations run by a committee of very part-time trustees (I’ve been there), the chief executive seems to have got the balance wrong between keeping up their commitment to the things that were going well – I’m sure lots of  things were – and laying it on the line about the things that weren’t. There is always the problem (I’ve been there) that when you tell them that things are wrong, they blame you instead of doing something about it, so it’s always difficult to decide when to warn them that they’re in schtook.

Also, I wonder what BASW and other professional associations were doing, because the reort says:

3.11 We wrote to professional associations and unions with a remit in social care to invite evidence (see Annex 5). None of them provided evidence to this review.

Well as a member of BASW, I want to know why not; it must have had evidence to give of the effects of all this on its members. And it should certainly have views about how the GSCC carries out its professional regulatory function. It is also implied by what I’ve already said that BASW’s members have an interest in a strong GSCC committed to social work values, and perhaps its representatives have not been making sure that the support of the profession is behind its national regulator.