First, care

A new initiative could revive a beleaguered profession

ON AUGUST 2nd Magdalena Luczak and her partner, Mariusz Krezolek, were jailed for life for the murder of her four-year-old son, Daniel. The pair starved him for months. They beat him, locked him in a small unheated room, and left him there to die. As with the deaths of Victoria Climbié in 2000 and Peter Connelly in 2007, the boy’s fate has prompted questions about how the authorities missed the abuse. Attention has again focused on social workers.

Participants will attend an intensive five-week summer school before embarking on two years of closely supervised work in local-authority children’s services. If they measure up, they will qualify as social workers at the end of the first year and gain a master’s degree after the second. Funding will come from private donors, the Department for Education and local authorities (though Frontline will remain independent of the government). Recruitment for a pilot scheme, targeting leading universities, begins in September.

Its founders want to boost the status of a much-maligned profession. “We are dealing with a crisis,” says Lord Adonis, a former Labour minister and chair of Frontline’s board. Recruitment is a problem, but so is retention: the expected working life of a social worker is eight years, compared with 14 for nurses. Last year some local authorities reported that a third of their positions were unfilled.

Unsurprisingly, given the opprobrium often heaped on the profession, ambitious graduates tend to steer clear. Of the 2,765 people who began master’s courses in social work in 2011, just five had completed undergraduate degrees at Oxford or Cambridge. And too many courses fail to give sufficient practical grounding in hard child-protection work, says Josh MacAlister, Frontline’s chief executive and himself a Teach First alumnus. Many placements are in schools or Sure Start centres, which provide basic education and health care in poor areas. Frontline recruits will work in small teams with dedicated supervisors in council children’s services.

Reactions to the initiative have been mixed. Some in the profession are piqued that it has been set up by outsiders. Boosters, such as Donald Forrester of Bedfordshire University, thinks the newcomers will bring in much-needed fresh thinking.

Another worry is that the programme is too specialised and too short. Focusing just on children’s services is like training doctors only in paediatrics, says John Carpenter of Bristol University. Lord Adonis, who was himself taken into care as a child, disagrees: “Social work has been too unfocused in the past,” he says. As for the scheme’s length, David Shemmings of Kent University reckons that Frontline students will get about the same amount of face-to-face lecturing as they would on a university course.

Predictably, some criticise the “elitist” focus on the better universities. Supporters point to Teach First, which does the same, but in which a third of new trainees this year were the first in their family to go to university and a quarter were eligible for free school meals when they were children: hardly blue-bloods.

Teach First was (as the name suggests) set up on the basis that participants would teach first and then go on to other jobs. In fact, over half stay in education. There is no “first” at Frontline. At the end of their course, recruits will be offered the opportunity to pursue further professional training, or encouraged to move up the ranks. Those who want to leave will get help to move on. But Mr MacAlister hopes that many will stay. This year 9% of all final-year students from Oxbridge applied for Teach First. Frontline hopes to pull off a similar feat for social work.