Skills for Care's new leadership framework: A welcome step – but does it go far enough?

The framework sets out the behaviours, values and expectations associated with effective leadership at every level of the sector, from frontline care workers to senior strategic leaders. It is intended to underpin leadership development, workforce planning, appraisal and organisational improvement, while aligning with the Care Workforce Pathway and the Care Quality Commission's Well-led assessment framework. Esteemed social worker and author Dr Neil Thompson shares his thoughts on the framework.

Leadership quality is now widely recognised as one of the key factors in relation to both service quality and staff wellbeing in adult social care (Harvey and Weekes, 2022). The publication of the Skills for Care Leadership Qualities Framework (LQF) is therefore welcome. It is an ambitious attempt to set out what good leadership looks like, organised around a Management and Leadership Code and five leadership dimensions, with guidance pitched at four levels of seniority – from care worker to strategic leader. Skills for Care should be commended for tackling a subject that has too often been left implicit.

Genuine strengths

There is much to admire. The Code's six principles – be accountable, be collaborative, be compassionate, be curious, be inclusive and show integrity – place values at the heart of leadership, rather than treating them as optional extras. The emphasis on compassion is especially welcome and the framework rightly extends that compassion to colleagues as well.

Equally important is the insistence that leadership is not confined to formal positions. By recognising care workers as leaders in their own right, the LQF reflects a growing consensus that effective care organisations depend on collective rather than hierarchical leadership (NISCC, 2022). Its alignment with the Care Workforce Pathway and the CQC's Well-led framework also makes it genuinely useable in appraisal, workforce planning and inspection preparation, while the self-assessment orientation fits well with the type of self-directed learning that I advocate.

The gaps that matter

A balanced appraisal, though, has to acknowledge some significant omissions. The most fundamental is that the LQF does little to distinguish social work and social care leadership from leadership in any other managed service. Its principles, admirable as they are, would be just as recognisable in healthcare, education or corporate management. But social work and social care leadership are not simply management applied in a care context – it is a distinctive form of professional practice, shaped by values of social justice, human rights and empowerment (Sullivan, 2016).

Social justice is a telling example. Anti-discriminatory practice – which examines how power, privilege and cultural and structural inequality operate within and through organisations – is central to social work yet largely absent here. The framework tells leaders to be inclusive but treats inclusion mainly as a matter of how leaders behave towards others. It says little about the cultural and structural barriers that stop minority individuals reaching leadership positions in the first place: the gatekeeping, the inequitable access to mentorship and the expectations that together amount to a pipeline failure (Rast et al., 2018).

Relationship-based practice fares similarly. The disciplined 'use of self' that defines social work – the reflective engagement of one's own values and relational capacities – is reduced to broad guidance about building trust. Reflective supervision, emotional intelligence and the careful management of professional boundaries deserve far fuller investigation.

The account of change is thin too. Around 70% of change initiatives fail, largely through inattention to the human dimension (Phillips and Klein, 2023), and the evidence increasingly favours participatory approaches over top-down implementation. Yet the LQF treats service improvement mainly as a matter of curiosity and innovation, leaving aside workforce resistance, the risk of values drift during restructuring and the ethical complexity of leading change when the people who use services are themselves vulnerable to disruption.

Two further omissions stand out. The framework does not acknowledge the persistent tension between values-based practice and managerialism – what leaders should do when organisational policy conflicts with professional values (Munro, 2011). And it makes no reference to research evidence at all, setting out what good leaders should do without grounding those prescriptions in the literature that would justify them.

A constructive next step

None of this is to dismiss the LQF. It is a solid foundation and a genuine step forward. But these are substantive gaps, not minor refinements – and frameworks that lose sight of what makes social work and social care leadership distinctive risk reinforcing the very managerialist assumptions the profession has spent decades challenging (Ferguson, 2008).

I have addressed some of these issues in three reports. The first is a more detailed analysis of the LQF (Thompson, 2026a). The other two explore the problems social work and social care currently face,(including the distinctive challenges of leadership in our field – Thompson, 2026b) and managing change in social care (Thompson, 2026c). A future version of the framework that engages with these issues would be much better suited to the realities of leading in our field.

References

Ferguson, I. (2008) Reclaiming Social Work: Challenging Neo-liberalism and Promoting Social Justice, London, SAGE.

Munro, E. (2011) The Munro Review of Child Protection: Final Report - A Child-Centred System, London, The Stationery Office.

NISCC (2022) Social Work Leadership Framework, Belfast, Northern Ireland Social Care Council.

Phillips, J. and Klein, J.D. (2023) 'Change Management: From Theory to Practice', TechTrends, 67, pp. 189-97.

Rast, D., Hogg, M. and Moura, G. (2018) 'Leadership and Social Transformation: The Role of Marginalized Individuals and Groups', Journal of Social Issues, 74(1), pp. 8-19.

Thompson, N. (2026a) Social Work and Social Care Challenges Report, Birmingham, The Social Workers Union.

Thompson, N. (2026b) Guide to Managing Change in Social Work and Social Care, Birmingham, The Social Workers Union.