Photo copyright Julie Broadfoot, all rights reserved, used with permission

I am passionate about empowering people through knowledge and the power of ideas to change attitudes and lives. The internet provides a wealth of information, knowledge and inspiration for social learning. I was fortunate to attend and contribute to the learning technologies conference and exhibition (#emtech11) held at the Heriot Watt University in Edinburgh on Friday 25th February. It was really interesting to explore how technologies offer new ways to engage, converse and collaborate to improve social services practice.

People are now using the internet to communicate and interact in a completely different way. People want to be heard and understood and this has implications for social learning. This presents both opportunities and challenges for learning, education and training professionals. Is the new role for learning and development as brokers for learning, connecting people to each other and to other sources of learning and not just providing formal learning opportunities?

Social media can be one of the most powerful ways to understand what we do and why, learn as we go, and share what we learn with others through discussions and observation. Social media is, in many ways, all about learning. 

My workshop demonstrated how we can use the internet to answer the question “What would you like to learn today? Slightly daring because those who know me are aware that technology per se is not my strong point!

A big question for me. At a time when public support is urgently needed to protect social work and social care why are we not using social media to engage with our stakeholders? One of my favourite videos from Erik Qualman about the phenomenal growth in social media activity during the past two years

“it is not a question now about whether you should be involved in social media but how well you do it”

I believe everyone should know about TED a unique phenomenon which gathers the best minds from around the world to explore thoughts and ideas. TED shares the inspirational ideas through videos which are freely available online. Two of my favourite TED talks: 

Derek Sivers: How to start a movement 2010
Lessons about leadership and the importance of the first follower with help from some surprising footage, Derek Sivers explains how movements really get started.

JK Rowling: The fringe benefits of failure 2008 At her Harvard commencement speech, “Harry Potter” author JK Rowling offers some powerful, heartening advice to dreamers and overachievers, including one hard-won lesson that she deems “worth more than any qualification I ever earned.”

Do you know about ALISON? - This website has a lot of free resources to help staff improve their basic skills. ALISON is a free online learning resource for basic and essential workplace skills including study skills.

Some excellent resources for social services

Social Care Institute for Excellence: Free e-Learning resources which provide audio, video and interactive technology to assist in exploring the nature of Personalisation

The Alzheimer Society of Calgary has developed an on-line educational resource called Dementia Basics. As a first step to understanding dementia and the disease process, this resource helps families living with dementia and professionals.

Mental Health Foundation: Assessing Mental Capacity This site has been developed to help staff working in health and social care (including those in the private and voluntary sectors) as well as unpaid carers, to improve the way they assess mental capacity. The Assessment of Mental Capacity Audit Tool (AMCAT) is a simple online tool to help staff and others evaluate, reflect and learn about an assessment of mental capacity they have done.

Free access to a Personal Assistant Induction e-learning course through the Independent Living Association (ILA) West Sussex. 

horsesmouth is an online mentoring platform where people affected by dementia can offer each other informal information and advice. Horsesmouth have teamed up with the Department of Health’s ‘Living Well with Dementia’ programme.

Get Safe Online is particularly useful with lots of clear and useful advice about things that you can do to avoid becoming a victim of fraud and identity theft. try the  quiz  “Just how safe are you?” . 

The best thing about social media tools is that they are easy to get started with and can be very inexpensive.

Twitter is a great way to share and discover what is happening in real time through micro-blogging. Start communicating, sharing and interacting with people using short 140 character text messages. It’s a simple way to network with like minded people. My twitter name @shirleyayres

People who tweet about social learning on twitter

@hjarche

@JaneBozarth

@C4LPT The Centre for Learning & Performance Technologies is a good resource to find out about social media for working and learning

@DonaldClark

@JudithELS

If you were not fortunate enough to win a copy of Jane Harts excellent Social Learning Handbook at #emtech11 you can purchase a copy here  

Professional Development through LinkedIn.  LinkedIn is a professional networking site which enables you to connect with colleagues, share information and join groups to discuss and debate professional issues.

The Advanced Social Work Practice Network (ASWPN) is a group for social work practitioners, academics, employers and partner organisations who wish to support the development of professional leadership in social work

The Personalisation Group to revolutionise social care Delivering quality, efficiency and outcomes to support ordinary lives This group is for passionate people in the sector who just want to get on and do it – make the change where it counts

The Scottish Social Work Network  is a new group which provides opportunities for social workers working in Scotland to network, ask questions and share information.

Why not start your own personal social learning network today! I hope this brief overview of the resources available inspires you to use the internet to explore resources, engage in conversations and share your knowledge and expertise. Please feel free to post your recommendations about good social learning resources here and contact me with your comments and thoughts shirley@shirleyayresconsulting.co.uk  

I have recently joined Aspire Knowledge as Consultant Director Third and Public Sector Knowledge. We have now launched the Third Sector Digital Communications and Social Media Convention 2011  Two days of engaging, inspiring and must have knowledge for the third sector covering all aspects of innovation, developments, leading practice and strategy in digital communications and social media

Tags: social care, social learning, social media, social services, Social Work

Gordon Chapman

Deaf people who use British Sign Language (BSL) have traditionally gone to their social worker whenever they had a problem. That is because the social worker understood the needs of deaf people and, more importantly could communicate fluently in BSL.
The absence of post qualifying training has resulted in the absence of social workers willing to work with deaf people. Despite the desire to see a specialist social work service retained, we have to face reality and concentrate on how we can support deaf people more effectively.
Taking into account that most of deaf people’s problems arise directly from their poor language skills and the resultant communication problems, it makes sense to concentrate on how to overcome these in the first instance.
The use of online interpreting services over the Internet provides a simple and low cost solution. By having a computer with a webcam and broadband access in the duty room, you can deal with any query immediately. Similarly, a social worker can take a netbook with a 3G dongle with them when visiting clients.
We have worked very closely with North Lanarkshire Council and have a very successful model which has been very effective in removing the deaf community’s dependence upon social work and shared the burden across the whole of the Council. I believe the time has come for all Local Authorities to look at Online Interpreting and consider using video technology to overcome the communication barrier with deaf people. Sign on Screen is an online interpreting facility which makes access to a qualified British Sign Language interpreter available to anyone, anywhere at any time.  

About the author: Gordon Chapman is Chief Executive of Deaf Connections the oldest charity established for Deaf people in Scotland. He is a child of deaf parents and grew up in a bilingual environment. Gordon is a qualified social worker and registered Sign Language Interpreter and he has been Chief Executive of Deaf Connections since 1983 .

Follow @DeafConnections on twitter and join the Deaf Connections facebook group

Tags: Deaf Connections, Gordon Chapman, online interpreting services, Social Work

I agree with Erik – >“it is not a question now about whether you should be involved in social media but how well you do it”

Erik Qualman is the author of Socialnomics: How social media transforms the way we live and do business. “Social Media Revolution was one of 2010′s most viral videos on YouTube.

Tags: Erik Qualman, online communications, social care, social media, Social Work

Social workers are at the cutting edge of personalisation – both its successes and its failures. At best they are discovering that it can be a liberating force, an opportunity to help people create new, flexible and community-focused support solutions. At its worst it is becoming more work, more forms to fill in, more complicated rules and – although its hard to credit it – more panels to try and get through. It is perhaps not surprising, given the thoughtless way in which government has gone about promoting personalisation, that we should be in this situation, and there is nothing inevitable about it. Local leaders can still protect people and staff from the encroaching madness.

One key lesson is to be entirely honest about the resources we have. If personalisation means giving people the chance to build more creative solutions with limited resources then the same principles should also apply within our systems. We can begin by being honest about how much time and energy social workers actually have and help them focus that time on things that really add values. Our estimates show that there is probably an average of £700 of care management time available for each individual served. This is a significant but very modest amount of time and it won’t be used well if it is spent largely on filling in forms to feed the system itself.

The only way of making better use of this limited time is to follow the principle of trust. We need to trust people more:

1. Trust people and families more. Give people information, contacts, simple systems and let them get on with it. Letting people make mistakes, solve problems and control things themselves is the key to good social work.

2. Trust community more. Encourage services to connect to people to design services with them directly. Make sure people are connected to community organizations and peer support groups.

3. Trust social workers more. Let people focus on those who need most help. In particular let social workers use their judgement. If they know of a good service, let them refer people to it. If they can see a quick solution to a problem then let them set it up.

Everyone fears that others cannot be trusted. Experience even teaches us that sometimes trust will be abused – people will lie, cheat or just make human mistakes. But a system that doesn’t encourage trust is expensive, stupid and disabling – by trying to put in systems that stop people making mistakes we delude ourselves that processes and rules will do what humans can’t do for themselves or if we shift power and control away from people then we shift it away from the point at which it can do most good. When we expect solutions to come from ‘on high’ then we are really expecting solutions from those who are least able to understand what really needs to be done and who are already trying to do far too many things for far too many people.

Trust, delegation and empowerment are efficient and effective – make them central to all your strategies and your work.

Simon Duffy is Director of The Centre for Welfare Reform www.centreforwelfarereform.org whose recent publications include The Architecture for Personalisation, Personalised Support, Personalised Transition and Personalisation in Mental Health

Tags: empowerment, integrated working, personalisation, simon duffy, Social Work

Social media has the power to encourage social interaction and build both online and offline communities.  Social media provides a new way to engage, connect and link with people who use and provide social care services.

Coming this week my thoughts about: 

How social media  “savvy” are social care organisations?

Who is blogging, tweeting, connecting through LinkedIn and Facebook and posting YouTube videos?

Twitter – the paradoxical answer to information overload and the secret of paper.li

How public sector workers are responding to the budget cuts and redundancy via blogs and tweets.

Innovative examples of local authorities using social media to connect with their citizens

Using social media to support children in care. The launch of a unique resource ~ the Click Guide to Children’s Services

Tags: be inspired, encouraging innovation, social care, social media, Social Work

She helped create and chaired the All Party Parliamentary Group for Children, in which capacity she had a seminal influence on the Children Act of 1989. Her revolt against the Government’s plans for secure training centres for young offenders secured the amendment which allowed magistrates the choice of sending them there or to local authority secure care. She opposed benefit changes, the poll tax, the creation of the Social Fund, and the asylum seekers’ bill. She took gleeful satisfaction that government whips affectionately but exasperatingly dubbed her “Lady Faithless”. One of her contributions was to draw attention to the implications for families and children in Bills where their interests were not immediately apparent.

She never married or had children of her own, but as Children’s Officer for Oxford City, she made a difference, directly or indirectly, to the lives of very many children and families. She was one of the first to realise that, in order to re-unite families where sexual abuse had taken place and to protect children from further abuse, effective treatment of the abusers was necessary. She helped to found, and gave her name to the Lucy Faithfull Foundation, which pioneered intensive therapeutic rehabilitation for sex offenders, and is still acknowledged as a leading criminal justice charity.

When Lucy Faithfull died in 1996 social work lost on of it’s most passionate and powerful advocates. 

http://lucyfaithfull.org  The Lucy Faithfull Foundation (LFF) is a child protection charity committed to reducing the risk of children being sexually abused. LFF’s staff work with adult male and female sexual abusers; young people with inappropriate sexual behaviours; victims of abuse and other family members.

 About the Author

Judith Niechcial read English at Birmingham University. She then qualified, and had a long career as a social worker, manager and educator. She has published A Particle of Clay: The Biography of Alec Skempton, Civil Engineer, (Whittles, 2002) a book about her father. She has an MA from the Creative Writing course (Life Writing) at the University of East Anglia. She has lived in The Netherlands and the USA, and now lives in South London. 

Mother to Hundreds ~ The Life of Lucy Faithfull by Judith Niechcial

Publication September 2010  Cost £12.00 (ISBN: 978 0 9532305 3 2)

To purchase this book contact:

Aldersmead Publishing 14 Aldersmead Road, Kent, BR3 1NA

Email: jmfniechcial@hotmail.com

Tags: child care, Lucy Faithfull., Social Work

“Social media is a fundamental shift in the way that we communicate. All the time online conversations are happening about you, your brand and your organisation. “it’s not a choice about whether you DO social media, the choice is how well you do it”

Social media provides organisations with an easy way to connect with stakeholders, share information and discuss developments and policy initiatives. Can social work and social care continue to ignore the growing influence of social media? I am currently researching how many of our national organisations are actively engaging and having conversations with stakeholders through the use of social media.  There are an increasing number of local authorities using social media and the development of the Local Government Group Knowledge Hub is an exciting development. But in this connected age it is disappointing to note how few national social care organisations have the basics of  a twitter account, updated blog posts, LinkedIn profiles and a facebook page.

Some interesting social media facts & figures from the UK’s market (compiled by SimplyZesty):

• 85% of the population is online
• 1/3 have uploaded to a video sharing site
• 1/4 write blogs
• If Facebook was a country it would have over 500 million citizens 

Worth looking at the videso Social media in the UK 2010

Is social media a fad? A refresh of the original Erik Qualman video The Social Media Revolution

Is using social media effectively the big challenge for social work?

Tags: communications, facebook, linkedin, social care, social media, Social Work, twitter

 “3.36 The General Social Care Council is an Executive Non-Departmental Public Body responsible for the regulation of social workers and social work students in England. It is anomalous as the only professional regulator answerable directly to the Secretary of State for Health.

3.37 We see no compelling reason why the General Social Care Council should remain as an Executive Non-Departmental Public Body in the arm’s-length bodies sector, and we see potentially significant benefits from putting the regulation of social workers on a similar footing to the regulation of health professions. This involves the regulator being funded through registration fees charged to those registered, set at a level to cover the regulatory functions. In this way members of a regulated profession buy into their professional standards, which are set independently of government, and have an incentive to ensure these are upheld throughout the profession.

Therefore, we intend to abolish the General Social Care Council and move the regulation of social workers out of the arm’s-length bodies sector to make it financially independent of government. We believe that in future, the most appropriate model for the ongoing regulation of the social care workforce is to transfer responsibility for these functions to the Health Professions Council, a well established and efficient regulatory body currently regulating over 200,000 registrants from fifteen professions. The Health Professions Council – which will be renamed to reflect its new remit – operates a full cost recovery scheme and currently charges an annual fee of £76 per year, which is considerably less than the likely registration fee if the General Social Care Council were to operate alone on a full-cost recovery basis.

3.39 The Health Professions Council has an existing comprehensive and cohesive system of professional regulation which would apply to social care workers. This differs from the General Social Care Council model in several ways:

• the Health Professions Council is solely responsible for setting standards of education and training for its registrants, whereas it is the Secretary of State’s function to ascertain what training is required to become a social worker;

• unlike the General Social Care Council, the Health Professions Council do not register students, though as part of the approval process the Health Professions Council requires all Higher Education Institutes delivering pre-registration courses to operate a fitness for practice system for students;

• unlike the General Social Care Council, the Health Profession Council does not in practice approve post-registration courses apart from those related to prescribing drugs, although it has the power to do so.

We anticipate that the differences would be explored through a review of social care regulation. The abolition of the General Social Care Council, the transfer of functions in relation to the regulation of the social worker workforce and related changes will require primary legislation. The timing of these changes is dependent on discussion with the Health Professions Council and the General Social Care Council to ensure an orderly transition.

Finally, the General Social Care Council is also responsible for the payment of Education Support Grants, and we propose that if this function is to continue it should transfer to another body.” 

There are a number of unanswered questions about what will  happen to the other functions of the GSCC including post-registration training and learning. The HPC only approves a “small number” of post-registration qualifications. The GSCC approves all courses offering a formal post-qualifying award and reviews them every five years.

 The HPC does not register students, suggesting there is “insufficient evidence” that it is necessary to protect the public. This is an important part of the GSCC’s remit, because social work students can be placed in frontline teams within weeks of beginning a course.

How does this fit with the recommendations of the Social Work Reform Board and the establishment of the new National College of Social Work? As always it is the details, which have not yet been published, which will clarify the government intentions and vision for the future role, remit and regulation of social work.  

http://www.communitycare.co.uk/Articles/2010/07/26/114983/GSCC-to-be-scrapped.htm

http://www.communitycare.co.uk/Articles/2010/07/26/114986/sector-leaders-shocked-and-surprised-by-abolition-of-gscc.htm

Tags: gscc, professional leadership in social work, regulation of social work, Social Work

An innovative and groundbreaking development in leadership learning has just been launched by the Leaders Café 2020 which allows you to share the best ‘leadership thoughts’ across the world.

Leaders Cafe is a social enterprise that helps to reduce inequalities in leadership learning in the economy and society. This doesn’t mean reducing the quality of the learning. Their mission is to enable 20 million people at all levels of society to use their leadership potential to lead themselves and others by 2020. This will be achieved by providing access to compelling, world class and low cost learning through the innovative online Leaders Café. Experiential learning is conveyed via webcast technology. These webinars (web seminars) typically last no longer than 60 minutes and provide compelling learning through insightful storytelling rather than through models and methodology.

The Leaders Cafe Promise:

1. You get remarkable interactive leadership webinar learning at a price sustainable to you and us.
2. Invest as little as one hour a week in our interactive webinars, and you will think and lead like a pioneer.
3. As a social enterprise with no owners, profits are reinvested in YOU; to continue to give you more for less.
4. Your membership contributes directly towards learning chances for all.
5. Your membership helps positively to reduce learning inequalities for 20 million people by 2020.

The central ethos of the Leaders Café learning portfolio is that of Pioneering Leadership. The outcomes from participating in Leaders Café’s learning are people who understand what it means to collaborate with others, have an ethos of knowledge sharing and are co-builders of a better world. The cost of membership is kept low to widen participation and is sustainable to both the learners and to Leaders Café. Strategic partnerships – including coffee bar chains and international organisations. – will support the delivery of leadership development for millions of leaders and change agents globally.

You can join for free as an Associate Learner. Premium membership is just £100 per year. Apply the code BEINSPIRED when you check out from joining and you will pay just £80.

Welcome to the Leaders Café 2020

Where is the professional leadership in social work?

The Really Big Question – what makes an effective manager?

Tags: be inspired, Leadership and Management, Learning and Development, Social Work

The 4th National Continuing Professional Development Conference for Social Workers on the theme of ‘Integrated   Practice’ will be held at the Institute of Psychiatry on 14th September 2010.

 The conference features prominent keynote speakers, engaging workshops and a unique opportunity to network with professional colleagues from across the country.

Camila Batmanghelidjh from Kids Company http://www.kidsco.org.uk will be talking about the need for new paradigms of care.

Keynote papers will be given by:

Professor Peter Huxley ( Swansea University ) – Integration of health and social care in mental health services

Professor Nick Frost ( Leeds Metropolitan University ) – Integrated working in frontline children’s services: research, policy and practice

Professor Marian Barnes ( University of Brighton ) – Ethics of care in promoting effective dialogue between workers, service users and carers.

The conference will also feature an interactive plenary session on the theme: “Are families becoming more dangerous?”

Professor Colin Pritchard ( Bournemouth University ) will address the issue of ‘Who kills children?’, based on data presented in his recent British Journal of Social Work paper that hit the headlines.

Attendance at the conference will count towards your GSCC post registration training and learning requirements.

Further information and the online booking form can be found at www.iop.kcl.ac.uk/annualsocialworkconference. Early bird bookings are available until 31^st July. All Making Research Count bookings should be made by Learning and Development Managers to janet.noble@kcl.ac.uk.

Abstracts for parallel workshops throughout the day are still being received . If you or a colleague are interested in leading a workshop of relevance to the conference theme, please submit your abstract by 25^th June. Full information and an online abstract submission form are available from: www.iop.kcl.ac.uk/annualsocialworkconference.

Any questions? Contact Julie Smith, the conference organiser julie.smith@iop.kcl.ac.uk

Tags: advanced social work practice, be inspired, institute of psychiatry, integrated working, professional practice, Social Work