Colum Conway, General Manager, Social Work England
Story updated
Social Work England missed the standards in its first year of assessing the risk of suitability to carry out referrals, processing registrations and recording workforce diversity in its first year, its own watchdog found.
The Professional Standards Authority (PSA) ruled that the regulator met 15 of its 18 “standards of good regulation” from December 2019 to November 2020, but said it needed improvement in three areas.
Social Work England welcomed the report released by the PSA last week and promised to meet all 18 standards in future evaluations.
In the report released last week, PSA commended Social Work England for its commitment to the sector since becoming a regulator and said other organizations had given their positive feedback on it.
“Encouraging start”
It said it had “been constructive with feedback and … showed commitment to improvement” and made an “encouraging start” in its role as a regulator in the context of the pandemic.
The PSA said Social Work England had met its Fitness for Work (FtP) standards for concern reporting, fair investigation, appropriate decision-making and effective participation.
She also recognized the major challenges the regulator faced in its first year due to the impact of the pandemic on its ability to handle FtP cases, unexpected referrals, and the state of the 1,545 cases it has inherited from the Health and Nursing Council , faced (HCPC). Social Work England found only 10% of the cases the HCPC identified as being on time for a hearing, although the average age of the old cases was nearly a year.
Risk assessment error
The PSA noted, however, that Social Work England had failed to meet the standard of identifying and prioritizing all practicality cases that indicated “a serious risk to the safety of service users” and, if necessary, obtaining injunctions.
First, it found that Social Work England was not making restraint decisions on old cases in a timely manner. The time it took Social Work England to make these decisions increased from an average of 51.7 weeks (including time at the HCPC) to 80.1 weeks over the year. There were also concerns about the case reviewers reviewing a case following an investigation and making injunction decisions, saying that the reviewers were in a small number of cases based on information available earlier in the trial had made references to interim measures.
The second issue raised by the PSA under this standard was that for most of the review period, Social Work England did not perform full risk assessments in the triage phase, so it did not show that it could identify and prioritize higher risk cases . This has improved since August 2020 when, following a review, it began to require staff to undertake a full risk assessment at that time.
The PSA also noted that Social Work England on numerous occasions failed to follow its own risk assessment collection policy by failing to do so when new information emerged.
However, the PSA said it has not seen any cases where the regulator has not responded adequately to information that increases the risk level of a case.
“We will monitor the work of Social Work England to learn from preliminary orders such as:
“However, given the range of concerns we identified and the importance of an effective risk assessment, we have determined that this standard will not be met this year.”
Social Work England said it had introduced refresher training for investigators on risk assessments and restraining orders since the review period.
It said it had now completed full risk assessments earlier in the triage process and carried out further risk assessments for any pending legacy investigations “to ensure they are accurate and appropriate”.
Slower than other controls
The PSA said there was no guarantee that Social Work England would efficiently handle registration requests during the reporting period.
It said it took the “challenging context” of the Covid-19 pandemic into account in its decision, but noted that its processing is slower than that of the other regulators that oversee the PSA from April 2020 to March 2021.
“We know there are differences between the processes and requirements of regulators and we need to be careful when comparing their data,” the report said. “Even so, the difference between Social Work England and most other regulators in terms of these measures was striking.”
From April 2020 to December 2020, 77% of UK registration applications that did not require further investigation within 10 days were processed, up from a target of 95%.
Although performance has improved over the year, the PSA expects these types of applications to be the easiest for a regulator to handle.
Social Work England said it was “confident this is no longer an issue” and is now meeting its goals for processing applications.
The regulator said it had improved information sharing with other organizations, including education and training providers, increased student awareness of the registration process, and improved their reporting mechanisms.
“Not enough diversity data collected”
The PSA also found that Social Work England did not collect enough information on the diversity of social workers in their registry, making it difficult for them to assess whether any of their practices might affect registrants differently based on their proprietary characteristics.
It acknowledged that the HCPC did not provide any information on the demographics of the registrants to Social Work England and said it would take time for the regulator to compile this data.
Still, the PSA said Social Work England had “made limited progress in collecting this important information in the first year”.
PSA welcomed the Regulatory Authority’s Equality, Diversity and Inclusion Strategy (EDI), led by EDI Head Ahmina Akhtar, but it was not finalized and published until after the review period.
“Social Work England has made it clear that it understands how important this work is and what it means to social welfare,” said the PSA report.
“We have no reason to doubt his commitment. However, given the lack of information about the diversity of its registrants and the early stage of its strategy work, we could not be certain that it would work during our review period. “
Social Work England acknowledged that it had made limited progress in this area in the first year and said it was required to meet the standard on future reviews.
It is now collecting data on equality, diversity and inclusion of social workers as part of the registration process.
Commitment to Compliance with Standards
Colum Conway, Chief Executive of Social Work England, said: “It was our first important step during this performance review to become the social work regulator.
“We are committed to continuing to work to meet all of the PSA’s standards for good regulation and we appreciate both the annual evaluation and continued commitment of the PSA.”
