Currently 80 per cent of the one million people working in social care have no relevant qualifications. There will be new funding for training, new standards, and a three-year training programme for social workers. And, to make it all possible, the Minister held out the promise of new resources. Many things stand in the way of progress however. So too is addressing the variability of services, not just across the nation but even within single agencies.
Resources are a perennial issue.
John Ransford touched a nerve when he spoke of the difficulty of trying to improve standards when social services staff were constantly undermined by the media which are ever willing to point up failures and not successes. Quality in the voluntary sector Judi Clements, the Chief Executive of MIND, put the voluntary sector perspective on quality. We need to attract commissioned services, provide a good service to users and show the public that charities can be trusted. At MIND, quality initiatives had permeated all levels of the organisation, from governance to service provision, quite a challenge when the organisation has a federated structure of 215 local associations. MIND had used the 'excellence' model as its framework, systems of peer review to improve standards of care practice, a standards guidebook and, clearly, much hard work to get users and other stakeholders on board.