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Our response to the Law Commission consultation

Back in February the Law Commission published a consultation paper on proposals to update the law for adult social care in England and Wales. This feels like a very long time ago now, a lot has moved on since the consultation paper was produced, we’ve had purdah, the election and now a new government, combined of course with the current climate of financial constraints and incredible pressures on local authorities. To that end we think that it was an unfortunate time to canvas for views and opinions on such a key area, but we went ahead despite that.

We considered that responding to the Law Commission Consultation was critically important as we are deeply interested and involved in how people working in adult social care are enabled and empowered to work for the benefit of their customers. As part of promoting an evidence-informed way of working, we also have a role in questioning and commenting on how social care responds to what is impacting upon it.

Photo by Howdy, I’m H. Michael Karshis

We received a disappointingly low number of responses from our Partner agencies, only four, and yet we were not surprised given the current pressures and demands on them. We also anticipate that a number of agencies will be providing their own responses to the Law Commission. On a more positive note, we were heartened by the time that our Reference Panel spent discussing and debating the consultation paper and the responses that they provided. You can read our response and we would welcome any thoughts, comments or discussion about it so please do leave a comment below or contact us by email. Thank you.

Futures thinking

Today we launched the Dartington review on the future of adult social care. It was produced in response to a challenge from our Partnership Board who asked us to produce an independent review on the future of adult social care.

What’s the aim of the review?
The aim of  the review is to offer an authoritative and evidence-based assessment of the development of adult social care between now and 2020. Wherever possible it seeks to draw on existing evidence and to consider likely future scenarios. The intention was twofold, to assess the current position and to assess the prospects for change.

What is the focus of the review?
The review is in four parts, an introductory overview report and three supplementary evidence reviews that examine international experiences; the social care workforce; and climate change and sustainability.

Why the timeframe?
The window of a decade was chosen to allow for an element of ‘futures thinking’, while also ensuring that the review is firmly rooted in the ways in which policy and practice may evolve within a tangible timescale. The 2010 General Election was the first in which adult social care had the potential to be a key campaign issue. The hung parliament that emerged from the election has seen the Conservatives and Liberal Democrats working together to set out a programme for partnership government over the next five years, details of which can be seen in The Coalition: our programme for government. This programme promises reform of the social care system to provide more control to those requiring support and their carers, unsurprisingly with funding arrangements as the main priority for now.

What future scenarios are suggested?
Four possible future scenarios are offered which pose a range of possible trajectories: residual service; incremental betterment; care crunch; and transformed wellbeing.

Who wrote the report?
The overview report Dartington review on the future of adult social care was written by Richard Humphries who is currently Senior Fellow for Social Care at the King’s Fund.

The first evidence review What can England learn from the experiences of other countries? was written by Caroline Glendinning who is Professor of Social Policy and the Research Director for the Adults, Older People and Carers Team at the Social Policy Research Unit (SPRU) at the University of York.

The second evidence review The future adult social care workforce was written jointly by Jennifer Bernard and Daphne Statham.

The third evidence review Personalisation, sustainability and adult social care: strengthening resilient communities was written by Jon Rae, who is Head of Vocations and Enterprise at Schumacher College.

How can I find out more?
The report will soon be available in full on our website; limited numbers of hard copies are available for non-Partner agencies – please contact  us for further information. If you work in one of our Partner agencies then please contact your Link Officer in the first instance, you can see who they are here or get in touch with us directly via blog@ripfa.org.uk.

Over the next few weeks each section of the review will be profiled on this blog. We very much hope that the review will be a useful starting point to provoke wide-ranging debate and reflection, both within and beyond our Partnership. To that end we really welcome your thoughts and comments.

Law Commission Consultation

As you may be aware the Law Commission has recently published a consultation paper on the proposals to update the law for adult social care in England and Wales. Here at research in practice for adults we’re collating responses to this consultation on behalf of the Partners in our network. The proposals represent a significant change to the law in this area and we feel that it is important that our response takes into account the views of our network of Partners.

We have therefore invited our Partner agencies to provide comments and feedback so that their views may be incorporated into our response. Our reference panel have also been discussing the consultation document electronically and their thought and views will be incorporated into our response.

We understand that reading the full consultation document is time-consuming and we therefore prepared a summary of the issues that we perceived to be the most pertinent to our Partners and we highlighted a number of key questions, in italics, for their attention. You can read our summary here. If you wish to read the consultation document in greater detail, and to comment on areas that we have not covered in this outline, the full summary may be accessed on the Law Commission website.

What do you think of the proposals? We’d welcome a discussion here and would love to hear any thoughts, comments or questions  - as detailed or as brief as you like.

Creative responses at @researchip’s #dforum

Over the last twenty four hours our sister organisation, research in practice have been holding their Directors Forum at Dartington Hall. research in practice, or rip for short, have been at the forefront of supporting the use of evidence in children’s services for almost fifteen years. The Directors Forum (DF), is held annually, for twenty-four hours, running from lunchtime to lunchtime to allow for plenty of informal networking as well as the structured conference timetable. The DF provides an opportunity for those leading the delivery and development of services for children and young people, to come together and hear about the latest evidence and reflect upon its usage in their field.

This year rip’s DF was entitled ‘Creative Responses: reshaping services for maximum impact’ and it focused on the design of services in the context of spending constraints. I spoke to a number of delegates over the 24 hours and they all had similar stories to tell. I think it’s fair to say that there was a common sense of uncertainty. It is obviously still early days with this parliament and too soon to know all the policy changes and priorities of the coalition government, however nearly everyone acknowledged that this was no time to sit and wait for clarity, it was business as usual with an ever tighter focus on efficiency and value for money.

Attendees heard from speakers who addressed a number of key issues citing research and practice examples throughout. Topics covered included macro-economics (Paul Ormerod), the evidence base and research messages (Prof Stephen Scott, National Academy for Parenting Practitioners/King’s College and Prof Martin Knapp, PSSRU and LSE), Social Return on Investment (Kate Mulley, Action for Children), Young People’s Parliament from Bristol 1, and Total Place (Lesley Cramman) with a panel of practice examples from Nottingham, Croydon and Hertfordshire.

A number of the speakers over the two days were of interest to those of us in research in practice for adults. In fact one of them, Prof Martin Knapp, has also kindly agreed to speak at our Directors Policy Forum event next week that has a similar focus on the importance of making evidence-informed decisions and sharing good practice in the context of spending constraints.

The closing speaker of the event was Charles Leadbetter. Charles was talking about a piece of work he’d completed recently called ‘Learning from Extremes’. Funded by Cisco, this work looked at social entrepreneurs who are devising new ways of working and new approaches to supporting learning in difficult social circumstances. Key to the analysis of this work was a four cell matrix – across the top is location of learning (formal or informal) and down the side is innovation type (sustaining or disruptive). The contents of the cells are as follows:

Improve               Supplement

Reinvent              Transform

Improve schools through better facilities, teachers, and leadership
Supplement schools by working with families and communities
Reinvent schools to create an education better fit for the times
Transform learning by making it available in radically new ways

Charles argued that too much of our progress in the UK is focused on the top left cell, improve. He made the point that so much is already sunk into existing systems that it is very difficult, if not impossible, to give up on the improvement agenda. Improvement is essential but nowhere near enough.

Charles made the call for different and new approaches to innovation and highlighted the need for cultural change and not just changes in service delivery. He also acknowledged that innovation rarely comes from within; I’d hope that rip and ripfa are far enough ‘outside’ our partner agencies, yet close enough to the issues that they are dealing with, to be able to play a supporting role in this.

The focus on cultural change should strongly resonate with anyone working in adult social care at the moment as the sector grapples with the significant cultural changes required to enable the personalisation agenda to be mainstreamed across all services. This has been the focus of our Change Project, SDS360: the process of change in self-directed support.

Reflecting on education Charles believes that more focus is required on the other three cells of the matrix. He called for a “pull not push” approach to engaging with families and had several examples of educational settings where sport, art, drama or music were key to a more creative approach to learning. He highlighted the benefits of peer support and peer learning, making the observation that our current systems waste students and they should be bringing them back in as peer learners.

The transform cell of the matrix is the one most absent from public services currently. The learning within that cell (disruptive and informal) is dependent upon the presence and work of renegades, hackers, entrepreneurs and mavericks. Skills rarely requested in most public sector job advertisements!

The challenge for us is to support learning and knowledge sharing across sectors, to improve overall practice and in turn, ultimately improve the experience and outcomes for those requiring the support of social services. The discussion that followed Charles’ session highlighted the current situation as described by one Director “we’re paralysed by the price of failure”…Charles challenged the status of failure and pointed out that many kids are already being failed by the current system. He suggested that we should be motivated, not paralysed, by it.

Throughout Charles’ talk there was a strong argument that for radical change to occur then genuine new ideas need to be nurtured, supported and tried. I suspect that we still have quite a distance to travel on the journey towards translating this into a reality in public services. I’d be really interested to hear your thoughts on what support rip and ripfa could provide to help our partners with this.

For now, I’ll finish with the words that Charles ended with – a great question for anyone interested in redesigning public services.

The key question is do you want change or do you want control?

Developing practice in safeguarding adults

Last year research in practice for adults published a series of resources that focus on safeguarding. These resources were the result of a Change Project that explored the evidence base and what research tells us about good practice for adult protection and safeguarding, and brought it together with the wisdom of a number of practitioners who were involved with safeguarding work. The Safety Matters suite of resources consists of a literature review, a practitioner handbook, a briefing for Local Authority Councillors and an online discussion forum and resource bank for sharing resources. Online versions of full text resources are only available to staff in our Partner agencies, although hard copies of the resources are available to purchase for non-Partners.

So that is the background to the work that we have been doing in safeguarding and the resources that we have produced. I wish to highlight some new work that we are doing focusing on safeguarding in this post though. Since the Safety Matters resources were launched we have received a number of requests for in-house support from our Partners. Lately we have had a number of queries from agencies who are interested in gathering feedback from people who have been involved with safeguarding services – either as a result of some abuse that has happened or in an attempt to prevent abuse happening and to keep people safe.

One of the highlights of being a ripfa partner is that each agency has access to another 44 agencies through the partnership network, alongside the support of the ripfa team. I am strongly of the opinion that there are no magic answers in safeguarding and that someone, somewhere within our network is likely to be facing a similar problem or conundrum. Therefore on Friday we are bringing together a number of people from five of our partner agencies for what we are calling ‘a knowledge exchange’.

The aim of this exchange is for all those present to hear about the other agency’s  approaches to a number of issues;  for discussion to take place around how the approaches could be replicated elsewhere; and for those present to problem solve and share ideas for moving issues forward. The day will start with an overview of where each of the agencies have got to in the process of implementing safeguarding standards. Each update will be followed by an opportunity for clarifying questions. Then the discussion will move on to address the following topics:

• How have other partners implemented standards for safeguarding?
• How have other partners gathered information on the views of the victims of abuse about their experience of the safeguarding process?
• Is the development of a local authority quality mark for safeguards a way of raising standards and developing consistent practice across teams, agencies and providers?
• How are service users involved in developing standards?
• What standards do people have relating to other board members and relating to service user involvement?
• How do other authorities manage the overlap between internal provider disciplinary investigations and our responsibility for the abuse investigation given the increasing nervousness and lack of clarity surrounding the complexities of employment law and our lack of statutory authority?

We’d be very interested to hear anyone’s experiences or views on any of the above. So please do leave us a comment and or contact us on twitter. I’d be particularly keen to hear from anyone who knows of pre-existing standards for safeguarding adults and how they are used in adult health and social care. I’d also be very interested in hearing the views and experiences of those working in children’s safeguarding which has quite a different approach. Please do let us know what you think. Thanks.

What should we talk about?

As you can see this is our first blog post, we’ve got lots of exciting projects and work going on at the moment and consequently quite a lot of ideas of what we could talk about. We’d really appreciate you letting us know which of the following you’d like to see a blog about:

• Safeguarding – especially the development of safeguarding standards
• SDS360 – the culture of change for self-directed support
• Occupational Therapy and personalisation
• Integrated Working: the next five years
• our approaches to supporting Partner agencies to use evidence in their practice
• Change Project methodology.

Photo by laurakgibbs

Please leave a comment or talk to us on twitter with your preference, or anything else you’d like to know.