Frontline training scheme poses a threat to social work education
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Loading... - Chimlin Bui
- 16 Oct 2021
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A recent Society Guardian piece suggested social work academics and the Frontline fast-track training scheme should end their “feud”. This distracts from important questions about what Frontline means for the future of social work education and practice.
Frontline is seen by the academic community as a significant threat to the traditional model of university-based generic social work education and training, which prepares practitioners to work with children and adults.
This May, organisations representing social work wrote to the children’s minister, Nadhim Zahawi, urging the government to suspend the £50m tender for a two-year extension of fast-track children’s social work training, pending an impact assessment and a consultation with interested parties.
The letter raised a number of concerns. It queried the appropriateness of spending £50m of public funds without a proper assessment of the programme’s value for money, or before the outcome of an evaluation of its impact on social work recruitment and retention rates.
It also raised concerns that Frontline wasn’t recruiting enough people from socially and ethnically diverse backgrounds, and that its five-week residential summer training programme excluded people with caring responsibilities. The letter highlighted that Frontline attracts a great deal of funding while the government has capped the number of students eligible for bursaries on master’s programmes, leading to a significant drop in funding and a fall in applications, with some smaller courses closing and concern that others will follow.
Most master’s programmes are taught at universities with research-active staff and PhD programmes. If there were fewer master’s programmes, the amount of independent, up-to-date research needed to support good social work would be reduced. At the same time, Frontline is moving away from the university-based model and towards a highly practical training-based model using a limited toolkit of interventions.
Unlike the other fast-track routes into social work, Think Ahead and Step Up, Frontline’s academic component is not delivered by a university and its curriculum team lacks academic experience and credentials, such as a body of published research. The concern is that expanding and extending the Frontline programme (next year will see a cohort of 450, up from 340 this year and 280 in 2017) will be at the expense of university-based programmes, leading to a reduction and dilution of the sources of knowledge social work draws from to shape good practice.
In his response to the letter, Zahawi stated the decision to extend fast-track was made in response to recruitment and retention problems.
But Frontline has in-built retention issues. It is marketed as a “leadership development programme” from which graduates may have careers in social work “and beyond”. Successful applicants to Frontline can defer entry to the civil service fast stream. The concern is that graduates from the programme may shortly leave practice for other careers, exacerbating problems with the retention of experienced social workers.
In his letter, Zahawi also repeated Frontline’s recruitment mantra: that the profession needs to attract people who would not normally consider a career in social work. But the profession needs people who are driven by values and a commitment to principles such as equality and social justice, not those who may be lured by promises of professional prestige and quick routes into “leadership”.
From the outset, Frontline aimed to recruit the “brightest and best”, which, alongside its stated aim to transform social work by improving the workforce with status-driven high-flyers, still comes across as divisive and elitist. The profession already has lots of great social workers. They need resources to do the work they want and need to do.
The aims and rhetoric of Frontline don’t sit well with social work values. In fact, terms and concepts such as “social work values” and “social justice” are totally absent from Frontline’s publicity. Social policy and politically driven inequality are core social work concerns, yet Frontline barely, if ever, mentions them. This is very concerning. Frontline’s version of social work is one that favours technical skills and is aimed at fixing troubled families, but is dangerously silent on the impact of complex social and political factors on those families’ experiences and outcomes. This perhaps explains the programme’s ascendance under successive Conservative governments.
Despite the objections, it seeems as if the tender is going ahead. Aside from Zahawi’s response, which hardly allayed concerns, there has been no opportunity for dialogue. Social work is known internationally as an academic discipline and a practice-based profession. Here, substantial public funds are being spent on separating social work from its academic base. It continues to be a matter of deep concern that this is not discussed with those in the profession, other stakeholders or, crucially, with the public who are footing the bill.
