Cutting the red tape: moves to slash social workers' paperwork

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Paperwork, red tape, bureaucracy call it what you will, it has long-been associated with social work.
It comes as no surprise, then, that many in the field have welcomed plans by the Children's Workforce Development Council to support 18 pilots from across the country to test out ways of working that allow social workers to spend more of their time with children and families and less on form-filling and compiling reports.
The aim of the Remodelling Social Work Delivery Project is not only to improve services to children and their families, but also to help retain social workers and reduce turnover. It will take forward recommendations in Care Matters: Time for Change and complement the social work practice pilots being set up to find out whether, by allowing small groups of social workers to work in autonomous organisations, they can deliver better outcomes for children in care.
Paper obstacles
John Kemmis, chief executive of Voice, the voluntary organisation which works with children in care, welcomes the CWDC plans, saying the issue of paperwork getting in the way of direct work chimes strongly with the experiences of young people in the care system.
"We spent 18 months examining the lives of looked-after children in England and one of the four key recommendations that came out of it was the need to create a better balance between working directly with children and all the other tasks that professionals have to do," says Kemmis.
"The bureaucratic processes that have become associated with the care system have to be minimised and adapted if we are to serve children as individuals and promote their sense of identity."
Linking better working practices with improved recruitment and retention is not new either. Options for Excellence: Building the Social Care Workforce of the Future, published in October 2006, linked recruitment and retention difficulties within social work to heavy workloads. The 2003 Victoria Climbie Inquiry report, meanwhile, identified the need for social services departments to tackle supervision issues, manage staff members' high workloads effectively, and provide strong administrative support.