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Listen to thisA paper issued this week from the Scottish Social Services Council (SSSC) marks significant developments in the training of workers in residential child care in Scotland. The SSSC is a body set up by the government to regulate the social services workforce. The Council's stated vision is of a confident and competent workforce. Its first stab at achieving that vision, outlined in a consultation paper last June wasn't encouraging. In pursuit of a wholly qualified workforce it set out a qualifications framework for residential child care at a level and of a nature so low as to be meaningless. Of particular concern were proposals to base the framework around vocational rather than professional qualifications. The Scottish Institute for residential Child care (SIRCC) and a range of other interested parties responded to this consultation, highlighting a number of concerns around the message it gave around the status of residential child care.
The revised document, issued last week, signals an encouraging openness within the consultation process. The framework now adopted is considerably broader in the range and type of qualification that will be considered appropriate for registration purposes. Interestingly too, there is far greater scope for those with higher level qualifications, such as social science degrees and professional awards in disciplines other than social work, such as occupational therapy, arts and drama therapy, teaching, community education and curative education to be considered qualified. The breadth of qualification being considered appropriate creates a number of possibilities to reshape the nature of residential child care in Scotland. It opens the door to more European models of practice. Or indeed, within a Scottish context it perhaps allows us, 40 years on, to reclaim Lord Kilbrandon's vision of a welfare oriented youth justice system based around education, “in its widest sense."
Such possibilities won't be immediately recognised by all of those in the profession. Many service providers will at this stage be wondering how on earth they are going to register existing largely unqualified workforces. For them there was merit in baseline qualifications being set low for it minimised the gap between where they are at the moment and where they need to get to, to ensure the registration of workers. Unfortunately much of the debate up until now has been conducted at the level of what has been thought to be logistically and economically manageable. This has detracted from appropriate debate on the kind of qualifications that are desirable, indeed essential to reflect the nature of the job, to improve the status of the sector and ultimately to enhance the experiences of children and youth in those services. To that end, there is no point in institutionalising a system that confers qualifications upon staff without improving their capacity to understand or operate within the complexities of the job.
The fundamental objection to vocational qualifications is that they start from the premise that work with children and youth can be broken down into a series of discrete instrumental tasks. They assume too, a particular view of education as being about the acquisition of a received and fixed body of knowledge set out as a series of competencies to be evidenced. This approach to education denies its potential as a transformational experience through which taken for granted assumptions and orthodoxies can be contested and reconstructed in the light of experience. If any job is unsuited to a reductionist and instrumental approach to the education and training of its workers it is residential child care. It requires the ability to intuit, to reflect, to think critically and generally to operate within some of the 'softer' areas of knowledge. Fundamentally it requires a connection with 'self' and an understanding of how this impacts on our work with children and youth. Such qualities of emotional intelligence can't be easily categorised and listed. This raises questions about the kind of person we do recruit. We need to find ways to ensure that we can still attract and nurture individuals who demonstrate authentic and genuine human qualities and the desire and confidence to engage and be involved with children and youth, irrespective of their qualification. The broadening of the qualifications framework offers opportunities to consider how we do so more creatively, freed up from the straightjacket of a primarily vocational frame of reference.
