Listen to thisSeptember is just around the corner as I write this column. It seems like yesterday since this time last year, when I was about to welcome the first ever intake onto the MSc in Advanced Residential Child Care, here at the University of Strathclyde. That cohort has already nearly completed the taught element of the course. As they are finishing, the second intake is about to embark on their studies. Interest in the course has once again been higher than the number of places available, despite the fact that we are over-recruiting slightly on the basis of last year's experience, where different pressures caused one or two students to fall by the wayside.
One of the really exciting things about the MSc course is it's potential to generate a body of practitioner-based research on Child and Youth Care. By this time next year, there should be ten to twelve completed Masters theses, many of which will be able to be worked up for publication. If we can manage that number on an annual basis we start to give a voice to residential child care in Scotland. Hopefully some of those individual voices will be heard in this column over the next year.
Recruitment is going well too on other courses run under the auspices of the Scottish Institute for Residential Child Care (SIRCC). Here at Strathclyde it looks as though we may recruit almost as many students to the residential child care pathway of the BA/Diploma in Social Work as we will onto our well-established general route.
This raises some interesting points. Firstly, at a time when there is something of a recruitment crisis in social work generally, it appears that residential child care may be an attractive option for many prospective university entrants. The possibilities for intense and robust contact with youth, for getting involved in a range of activities and relationships and the centrality of 'self' in all of this, may mean that we recruit from a different pool from traditional casework or case management oriented areas of social work. Another point worth making is that, by setting out our stall that Child and Youth Care is a subject taught at degree level, we give the message that it is a valid career choice that can stand alongside teaching or other areas of social work. One of the problems we have faced up until now, has been that because the Child and Youth Care workforce has remained largely unqualified and undervalued, those aspiring to a professional career have looked elsewhere. Many of those who have dipped their toes in the water of residential child care have taken them out again pretty quickly, partly perhaps because it wasn't for them, but partly too because so many settings lack the stimulation that comes from working with a critical mass of similarly educated others.
We give a powerful message at times that it isn't the kind of job anyone with any intelligence or ambition would want. Yet we know that working with children and youth can be an attractive career choice. Teaching courses tend to reach their complement without difficulty. In other countries and traditions, where the task of working with youth is an appropriately valued one (not necessarily just in monetary terms), they have little difficulty in attracting and retaining workers. In Denmark for instance, social pedagogy is that country's most popular professional training course.
Against this backdrop, the Scottish Social Services
Council, the new statutory body charged to regulate the education and
training of the social services workforce, is conducting a consultation
exercise on the qualifications it will approve in order for workers to
become registered. The signs are that it seems content to qualify the
existing workforce to a particularly low baseline, rather than
considering how we might attract into the discipline, those who are
capable of changing it for the better.
Child and youth care in Scotland, as elsewhere, needs sights to be
lifted from what is (and very often that's not particularly good) to
what might be. For it is only when staff can lift their sights beyond
what can seem like the everyday struggle for survival, that youth can be
encouraged to do likewise.
Some of the onus for lifting sights and for returning the gaze of those who lack any vision for the future of Child and Youth Care will rest upon new intakes of students, here in Scotland and elsewhere, as they start their courses. Good luck with your studies and carry that torch. And don't mix your metaphors as I have done in this last paragraph!
