New reports highlight leadership and workforce challenges in social work

Leading social work academic Dr Neil Thompson has called for a fundamental rethink of leadership development across social work and social care, warning that too many managers are relying on training designed for the commercial sector rather than the realities of frontline practice.

Dr Thompson, an ambassador for the Social Workers Union (SWU), has published two new reports exploring the challenges facing the profession and arguing that leadership development must better reflect the complex ethical and practical demands of social work.

The first report, People, Problems and Potential: A Framework for Understanding and Addressing the Challenges Facing Social Work and Social Care, uses Dr Thompson's long-established "3Ps" framework to examine the growing pressures on the profession.

Explaining the thinking behind the report, Dr Thompson said social work was facing challenges beyond those traditionally associated with the profession.

"I've been aware for quite some time that we have a number of problems in social work and social care above and beyond the challenges that are inherent in the nature of the work."

The report applies the 3Ps framework, which Dr Thompson describes as recognising that "where there are people, there will be problems, but there will also be potential."

He explained: "My work has revolved around recognising the people issues in whatever we do, recognising and seeking to address the problems that arise and also fulfilling as fully as possible the potential that we encounter in our work. And so what I've done is use that three Ps framework to look at the problems that we're currently experiencing in social work and social care."

According to Dr Thompson, the report does not seek to offer simple solutions to the challenges facing the profession.

"The report is not about magic answers. What it's about is food for thought to help us to consider and to address the problems that we currently face in our profession."

Alongside the report, Dr Thompson has also published Managing Change in Social Work and Social Care: A Guide for Leaders, which focuses on leadership and organisational change.

He argues that many social work and social care managers receive little formal leadership development and that much of the training that is available fails to reflect the realities of practice.

One concern highlighted in the reports is what Dr Thompson describes as a significant gap in leadership development across the sector.

"Many managers in social work and social care have had little or no training in leadership," he said. "Those that have had such training, it tends to be what I call generic training, which means that it's training that's been developed for a broad audience, mainly around business and commercial enterprise, with little or nothing to say about the specific distinctive challenges of leadership in social work and social care or indeed the strengths in social work and social care when it comes to leadership."

The accompanying report argues that while change across social work and social care is constant, leadership development has not kept pace with the complexity of the profession.

In an accompanying article, Dr Thompson writes that much of the management training available is "simply not fit for purpose" because it does not recognise "the distinctive challenges intrinsic to our work, moral distress being just one example."

He also argues that leadership development should be designed specifically for social work rather than adapted from commercial management programmes.

"These are demanding times and they call for strong leadership. But while the development on offer to our managers keeps overlooking the very concerns that define our work – concerns that business-focused training was never built to handle – the people in key positions will remain poorly equipped to wrestle with the complexity they face."

Dr Thompson concludes that unless leadership development is better aligned with the realities of social work practice, "we will keep struggling to make real inroads into the challenges ahead."