Frontline – Written evidence (FFF0034)

About Frontline

1       Frontline is a social work charity working to ensure that all children in England have a safe and stable home, and that their life chances are not limited by their social or family circumstance. We create social change for these children and their families by developing excellent social work practice and leadership through our programmes, and by building a movement of leaders in social work and broader society as part of our Fellowship.

2       Together, our programmes form a well-structured series of leadership development opportunities that we believe are fundamental for those within the sector, whether working directly with children and families, influencing decision-makers or bringing about system-wide change. We believe that the purpose of children’s social care is, at its core, to protect children and keep them safe. That’s why, across all of our programmes, we focus on child protection social work. This approach makes us unique within the sector and ensures social workers at all levels are equipped with the specific skills needed, always holding children as the number one priority.

3       To date, we have introduced over 2,000 people to social work as a profession through our two-year Frontline programme, which now accounts for approximately 10% of all newly qualified child and family social workers. We have developed over 300 managers through our Firstline programme – a 10-month programme for first line social worker managers – while through Headline, a 12-month leadership development programme, we give heads of service the tools they need to lead their teams more effectively.

4       Anyone who completes one of our programmes joins the Frontline Fellowship. A growing community of 2,000 social workers, the Fellowship enables and empowers fellows to do their best work for children and families and bring about change in a system that too often prevents this. That’s why we support them, our local authority partners and participants on all of our programmes to find innovative solutions to these challenges and bring about much needed system change.

Executive Summary

5       As a social work charity whose expertise lies in training child and family social workers, our responses to the committee’s call for evidence are within that context.

6       From our experience of delivering training programmes for social workers, we believe that public services need programmes that incorporate learning “on the job” alongside traditional teaching days. Any reforms to enable more professionals to join the public services workforce should also take into account the unique and individual learning requirements of those wishing to join the public services workforce.

7       We believe that our unique unit model, which provides trainees with a supportive learning environment as part of a small team of social workers, could have broader application across public services and on other training programmes. Adequate provision of ongoing support and development opportunities are also key to attracting people into the workforce, and ensuring they stay, and that’s why we provide programmes with a clear progression path.

8       It’s our view that current approaches to training public services workers creates siloed professions that work ineffectively together. Facilitating a period of joint training which takes place before professionals are rooted in their specialisms may support a more joined-up approach to working, but wider system change is needed to enable increased collaboration. 

9       Within social work specifically, more needs to be done to change perceptions and raise the status of the profession to attract more individuals.

10  More broadly, equipping leaders with the skills and knowledge to tackle the long-standing challenges in their respective professions and improve workplace culture is essential to improving recruitment and retention of staff. Developing excellent leaders is crucial in creating public services where workers are supported and motivated to do their best work and are always prioritising the needs of service users.

11  Overcoming underrepresentation in the public services workforce organisations requires an understanding of why certain groups aren’t entering the workforce and identify barriers to entry. Organisations across public services should undertake research to find out what is preventing them from achieving greater diversity within their workforces.

12  We believe an approach to leadership rooted in systemic principles, that helps leaders look at the whole system that social workers and local authorities are operating within and avoids placing blame with an individual, is key to achieving this.

Our Responses

2) Conventional approaches to training have not enabled enough professionals to enter the public services workforce to meet demand. How might training change to maximise the number of public services professionals and improve their skills?

13  As a social work charity, our expertise lies in training child and family social workers, therefore our answer to this question will be within that context.

14  Based on our experience of delivering the Frontline and Firstline programmes, our view is that an effective approach to training people to enter the public services workforce is one that is grounded in theory and enables them to learn through practice, while providing a supportive environment that nurtures and challenges them.

15  Learning “on the job” while being deeply embedded in a workplace setting, combined with more traditional teaching opportunities provides participants with real, day-to-day experience, as well as giving them a strong theoretical knowledge basis to their practice. Making sure that professionals in the early stages of their careers are well supported is equally important. Our unique unit model, within which trainees work on the first year of the Frontline programme, enables them to learn in small teams led by an experienced social worker. The model provides a supportive environment which encourages trainees to work closely together and challenge each other. This model also reduces the risk of a 'single line of sight’, which can pose a risk in the traditional social work structure. As such we can see that the unit model could have broader application across public services and on other training programmes.

16  Providing ongoing support and development opportunities is also key to attracting more people into the profession, as well as honing their skills so that they are able to progress. This is why there is a clear route for progression across our programmes, with our Firstline and Headline programmes offering leadership training for social work managers and senior leaders. In addition to this, we offer ongoing development and networking opportunities to all of our fellows (anyone who has completed one of our programmes) through our Fellowship. We believe this has contributed to the fact that the majority of Frontline programme participants are still in social work practice five years post qualifying, and to the fact that three quarters of these have progressed to more senior roles within this time. We hope by continuing to offer fellows development opportunities, we can support them to progress and, as a result, sustain their commitment to social work.

17  While research shows us that the process of learning is universal, organisations need to recognise that individuals have unique and individual requirements. As such, they need to ensure equitable access to learning by considering factors like geographic location, neurodiversity and comfort with digital communication tools. Advances in digital technology have expanded the ways training can be delivered, offering different approaches to training that ensure accessibility and inclusivity. Further expanding these could play a significant role in enabling a more diverse range of professionals to enter the workforce. These approaches must be held to rigorous standards of quality; to achieve high quality learning experiences, we use evidence-informed approaches to our learning design and quality assurance measures, applying theories and research from the fields of cognitive science, psychology and education.

3) What are the hurdles to joint training between services? Do siloed approaches to attaining professional qualifications prevent joint training? How might better data-sharing improve joint training?

18  Currently, school leaders, police, health workers and social workers are trained in isolation from each other, and mostly work in silos throughout their careers. There are few structured opportunities for them to understand each other’s perspectives or to develop new ways of supporting children and young people.

19  Our view is that joint training is likely to be more effective if delivered before professionals become rooted in their respective professions and ways of working as well as throughout their careers. Facilitating a period of joint training early on in their careers would support workers from across public services to build strong connections and foster a collaborative approach from the outset. Ongoing opportunities to work and train together will be necessary to maintain these strong multi-agency links. It would also provide opportunities for prospective professionals in different areas of public service to learn about their respective roles and develop a shared knowledge of tools and approaches that can achieve the best outcomes for children and families.

20  We recognise that there isn’t currently a framework that would support joint training to such a degree, and this would need to be developed to ensure a consistent and coherent approach. This framework would also need to consider how to most effectively balance the development of specialist knowledge required for each profession alongside joint learning.

21  However, it’s important that joint training is seen as the start of achieving a more joined-up approach across the public sector. We’ve heard from several Directors of Children’s Services that bringing about sustained improvement to joint working requires mechanisms and approaches that prioritise, or even mandate (including using regulatory levers) greater collaboration across services. More also needs to be done to provide the technical capabilities, so that professionals can access the same data, as well as permissions that would support better and more timely information sharing.

22  Within the social work sector there are several examples of the successes of joint working which may provide helpful learning to the public sector more broadly. These include: No Wrong Door and the Social Workers in Schools Programme pilot.

4) How might the public sector become more attractive as an employer, particularly in comparison with the private sector? How might it become attractive enough to retain workers throughout their careers while maintaining a level of turnover that brings fresh ideas to organisations?

23  Social work, as with other public service professions, is a highly skilled career and one that has the potential to have a significant impact in the lives of the most disadvantaged. Yet, for many, social work is not seen as an attractive career.  

24  This requires work to challenge stereotypes and perceptions of social work, raise the status of the profession and actively target and inspire more people to consider social work as a career choice. One way to do this is by investing more in campaigns and advertising, as has been done for teaching. As a social work charity, we have invested some of our own funds in this area recently by launching a three-year, early engagement campaign, This is the Work. 

25  More also needs to be done to tackle long-standing challenges that cause people to leave the public services. In the case of social work, high caseloads, lack of support and overly bureaucratic procedures leave social workers unable to spend time directly with children and families and are consistently referenced by social workers as reasons for exiting the workforce. It's possible that supporting leaders to remain in direct practice could help alleviate unmanageable caseloads that are driving social workers out of the profession – we believe that ways to create more opportunities for social work leaders to continue to hold cases should be explored.

26  Remaining close to practice is also crucial to ensure leaders remain connected with those in front line work. It enables them to draw on direct insight and evidence to ensure service users remain at the centre of service delivery and decision making. Brave, deliberate leaders model this approach and empower employees to use their training, skill, knowledge and judgement to do the same. In doing so, they are able to create a culture that encourages innovation, inspires confidence and builds loyalty among staff. When paired with ongoing development opportunities, not only does this create an environment in which employees can thrive, it supports services to be progressive and employees to creatively overcome challenges together. This approach and culture is attractive – local authorities such as Leeds and North Yorkshire are great examples of this. Showcasing examples of innovative leadership and evidencing the impact it is having would help to change the perception of the public sector.

27  Conversely, when staff feel constrained by rules and regulations it is devastating for morale, and both pushes people out of the profession and builds a reputation that deters others from applying. This is why we work with social workers at all levels, and our local authority partners, to improve culture and to develop leadership skills. 

6) How can providers of public services recruit a more diverse workforce? How should they improve their recruitment of BAME people, people with disabilities, older people and people who use public services and live in the communities that providers serve?

28  Frontline is an organisation committed to anti-racism. For us, that means proactively tackling systems and structures that perpetuate and embed racism in our society. You can read more about our diversity and inclusion approaches here. Anti-racism doesn’t always feel like an easy topic but, for employers to recruit individuals from Black, Asian and minority ethnic backgrounds, they must actively acknowledge and challenge the barriers that prevent people from a wide range of groups securing opportunities to grow and develop, and support the people impacted by these barriers. Organisations like Flair, a people analytics company that measures how anti-racist an organisation is through employee surveys, enable employers to gain insight and ensure their strategy is employee and evidence led.

29  To ensure that an inclusive and anti-racist approach underpins our approach to all recruitment, we have developed and implemented inclusive recruitment principles. We have also started introducing these for our local authority partners to encourage them to put forward a more racially diverse range of candidates for our training programmes.

30  In addition, recent research we commissioned revealed interesting insights and stories. For example, we found that when looking at public sector careers, Black Caribbean audiences find social work the most appealing compared to white and other Asian students who find it the least appealing career choice, and 34% of Black African students think you need to have studied at a Russell Group university to be successful in a public sector profession.

31  This is only one example of the work we’ve completed to better understand how we achieve a more diverse workforce - we are equally as focused on improving representation among all abilities, gender groups and protected characteristics. By undertaking this kind of research, organisations can better personalise marketing and recruitment approaches and develop different audience personas to increase marketing efficiency and effectiveness. Employers should also take time to talk to colleagues who are happy to input and share their experiences, as well as enlisting the advice of experts to help create marketing messages and better tailor support.

14) What tools do good leaders use to incentivise and challenge their workforces to transform service delivery? Are there any examples of best practice?

32  Our experience over the past nine years across all our programmes is that excellent leadership training equips people at all levels to improve people’s ability to perform effectively in their roles and contribute to, or create, a culture which enables the most effective work to take place. Skilled leaders can strip away obstacles and create an environment in which professionals can make decisions confidently and stand by these decisions without fear of blame or reprisal. We believe an approach to leadership rooted in systemic principles is key to achieving this; it ensures leaders look at the whole system that social workers and local authorities are operating within and avoids placing blame with an individual. There is a strong evidence base and research to demonstrate that systemic approaches can reduce blame culture, encourage the system to work together and, in turn, ensure children are better protected.

33  That’s why we developed our Firstline programme around seven core leadership capabilities: inspiring others; analysis and decision making; holding to account; learning and development; impact and influence; resilience and reflexivity; and professional authority. While they were designed specifically for children’s social work, we believe these capabilities would enable leaders across all public services to improve the quality of their supervision and leadership in a number of key ways: oversight and observation of practice; ability to provide feedback and manage performance; and willingness to take responsibility to influence change within the organisations they work in.

34  We believe that clear, decisive and brave leadership is crucial at all levels of social work from front line practice to senior management. Across public services, professionals are asked to make life-changing and difficult decisions and it’s important that those at all levels within public services are held to account appropriately. By equipping managers with the tools and techniques to facilitate frank and honest conversations, such as the radical candour model, leaders can model a transparent approach which will more increase visibility and encourage others to speak up when they see risk, experience challenges and identify solutions. Leaders should also use and draw on data to clearly demonstrate the impact of decisions and actions on the end user. Knowledge and experience are required to frame the data in a way that both best evidences impact and drives best practice. Tools such as public narrative help leaders to better communicate their messages by drawing on their own experiences, values and motivations and connecting these with their audience. Such tools can support leaders to motivate their colleagues to take action.

February 2022

8