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The ability to uphold the values, knowledge and attributes expected of the social service workforce is essential to the delivery of effective care and support. This is particularly significant as the sector develops its roles and practices in the structure and delivery of integrated health and social care services.
Providing quality care is determined not only by the knowledge and skills of workers but also by their values and attributes. ‘Use of self’ is a vital component in a worker’s toolbox. A worker’s use of self is a fundamental ingredient in building trusting and effective relationships. However, effective relational work also brings into play the need for sound judgement in recognising and upholding professional and personal boundaries.
Social service workers are often faced with situations that require them to weigh up competing factors, especially when assessing and managing risk. This requires workers to be competent and confident in their professional values, knowledge and skills.
The SSSC Codes of Practice and the National Occupational Standards (NOS) set out the key behaviours and competences expected of social care workers and alongside the Continuous Learning Framework can be used to underpin and reinforce the importance of ensuring the workforce has strong positive values alongside knowledge and skills.
The Sector Skills Agreement (2008) for the Scottish social services sector highlights ‘soft skills’ as a skills gap identified by employers. Feedback from employers conveyed that the greatest needs were in relation to team working and interpersonal skills, with written and oral skills just behind. Soft skills remain a desirable attribute in the social service workforce today and the Sector Skills Agreement (p.27) advises “Implementation of the Continuous Learning Framework across Scotland and use of it by employers to enable staff to develop their skills”.
The SSSC Workforce Skills Report (WSR) offers an overview of key skills challenges for the sector. The findings echo the messages SSSC has regularly heard from employers, frontline workers and learning and development staff. The Workforce Skills Report is a recurring publication, reflecting changing conditions in, or which influence, the sector.
‘Generation Y and learning’ published by Ashridge Business School contains learning styles and skills gaps in the workplace, between generations.
The Continuous Learning Framework (CLF) sets out what people in the social service workforce need to be able to do their job well now and in the future and describes what employers need to do to support them.
The Organisational Capabilities help employers to:
The Personal Capabilities focus on managing self and managing relationships, emphasising the importance of softer skills and emotional intelligence as workforce attributes.
The Common Core of skills, knowledge and values outlines the key attributes that everyone working with Scotland’s people should have core common skills, knowledge and values.
The Scottish Credit and Qualifications Framework (SCQF) is Scotland’s national qualifications framework. The SCQF supports lifelong learning and can help:
Step into Leadership helps you to find resources and information to develop your own and others’ leadership skills. Scotland’s social services need effective leadership at all levels of the workforce, as well as citizen leadership from people who access support and their carers.
Those entering the social service workforce and registered with SSSC are required to adhere to the SSSC Codes of Practice. The Codes of Practice set out standards of practice and behaviour expected of social service workers and their employers.
Making decisions is part of day-to-day practice in social services and it is a necessary skill that social service workers are able to make sound decisions. This attribute has implications in workforce planning and development. In the SSSC Making Better Decisions learning resource you will find a number of scenarios that relate to work roles across social services. All the scenarios reflect real situations and dilemmas in which workers have made ‘wrong’ decisions that have led to investigations about their actions. They include aspects that commonly arise in such cases.
Fitness to practise is a requirement for registering, and ongoing registration, with SSSC.
A social service worker is fit to practise if they meet the standards of character, conduct and competence necessary for them to do their job safely and effectively with regard to the SSSC Codes of Practice.
Implications for workforce planning include recruitment of workers who can meet, and continue to meet, registration and fitness to practise criteria.
The SSSC Learning Zone has apps and resources to help all those in social service workroles to develop their knowledge and skills. The resources are all free and individuals can work through them at their own pace. Learning from the resources can contribute towards Post Registration Training and Learning (PRTL) and employers are welcome to use the resources within their workplaces.
Iriss has developed a resource on Building your Personal Learning Network. People who can seek new information, make sense of it, and share it with their colleagues will be an asset to any work team.
The SSSC interactive Career Pathways Tool helps social service workers see what opportunities and different professional roles a career in social services could offer them. There are three main pathways to explore:
The Right Values, Right People toolkit contains information to support employers and workers to adopt values-based approaches to recruitment. The toolkit contains different types of resources including videos and PDF documents that can be downloaded.
The Safer Recruitment Through Better Recruitment resource is good practice guidance intended to help employers, especially those in social care, early education and childcare and social work to meet existing legislative and regulatory requirements in relation to the safer recruitment and selection of people who work with individuals who receive support and care from social services in Scotland.
Iriss has published an evidence summary on Voluntary social care recruitment. The publication seeks to identify some best practice recruitment strategies from voluntary social care and other relevant sectors and industries. It provides background information about social care recruitment in Scotland and identifies the key challenges identified in the evidence. It identifies values based recruitment as one of the main approaches to recruitment being taken in health and social care in Scotland, and identifies key sources of information about the benefits and impact of the approach.
Planning for the future by the Scottish Social Services Council is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution 4.0 International License. Based on a work at http://learn.sssc.uk.com.