£4m Boost For 'P Plate' Adult Social Workers, UK

Main Category: Primary Care / General Practice
Article Date: 18 Mar 2009 - 4:00 PDT

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£1,000 each for newly qualified adult social workers and their supervisors for extra support in the first year of practice.

Newly qualified adult social workers will soon be offered more support throughout their first year of practice, with a £4 million injection of funding announced by Care Services Minister Phil Hope today, World Social Work Day.

Care Services Minister Phil Hope said:

"Newly qualified social workers, like newly qualified drivers, can need extra support at the beginning of their careers. The £4 million I'm announcing today will help make sure they have the help, supervision and training opportunities they need to make the transition from student to fully fledged, skilled and confident practitioner."

The £4 million will pay for a framework of support for newly qualified social workers for one year. The scheme includes:

- Opportunity for councils to apply for £1,000 to support each newly qualified social worker they employ in their first year, plus £1,000 for their supervisor for that year.

- Development of a toolkit of resources for social workers and their employers to use to support newly qualified social workers.

- A personal development planning tool, outcome statements, a toolkit to support induction, a good practice checklist, tools to record and evaluate continuous professional development and post-registration training as well as completed examples of these.

Adult social work departments are invited to apply to Skills For Care for their share of the funding, by completing a 'statement of intent' setting out how they will use the money by 31st March 2009.

Notes

1. The Framework for Newly Qualified Adult Social Workers has been developed in partnership with adult social workers, based on research into what works. It has been developed in conjunction with key delivery partners who include Skills for Care, GSCC, SCIE, ADASS, BASW and LGA.

Source
Department of Health UK