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Chapter 7 Leadership and direction
We evaluated the leadership and direction of social work services in East Dunbartonshire as good, having important strengths with areas for improvement.
The Chief Executive was personally committed to developing a higher profile for social work services within the local authority. We saw evidence that this was being achieved for children's services. Strategic planning and partnership working here were strong and good progress was being made shifting the balance of care. However, we considered that leadership in community care needed to be strengthened.
Senior politicians we met were supportive of social work services but some had more to learn about key policy areas. We considered their support for social work services was well-evidenced by an increasing financial commitment over a period of years. Elected members and the chief executive had confidence that good leadership and stewardship of social work services had delivered improved services. Nonetheless, there was a need to look again at the current balance of expenditure between child care and community care services.
Senior managers were surprised to learn that communication with staff was still an issue as they had already taken a number of steps to improve their performance in this area. They accepted they needed to do more.
Criminal justice social work services locally contributed to the good leadership provided through the inter-authority criminal justice partnership.
Vision, values and aims
Social work services were part of a wider Community Directorate that included housing, education and community services. Elected members and others were positive about the overview of services the structure provided them with and said it had helped internal partners understand social work issues better.
The Chief Executive said her vision was to bring social work services close to the centre of the corporate body. Working together delivered 'collaborative gain' - we saw some evidence of this between education and child care services in particular. Senior staff and managers at a corporate level reported that social services had an increasingly high profile within the authority. The chief executive was also committed to partnership working which she viewed as having been integral to the developing children's services agenda.
The Chief Social Work Officer ( CSWO) in East Dunbartonshire had recently updated and issued a vision statement for East Dunbartonshire social work services. This took as its central theme 'improving the experience of the customer'. We found staff at different levels of the organisation endorsed and owned this vision for services. We found good examples of front-line leadership in applying this vision in service delivery - in older people's services, in child protection, in residential child care.
Children's services had a place at the community planning board, represented by the 'Delivering for Children and Young People's Themed Partnership'. Community care was not one of the themed partnerships and not well represented within other existing strategic partnerships. Neither was community care well represented in the community plan for 2006-11. The CSWO acknowledged the need for a higher profile for community care in community planning and we saw evidence that he was pursuing this with the community corporate director.
Recommendation 13
The Director of Community Services and the CSWO should pursue a higher strategic profile for community care services. They should have a higher corporate priority within the council. Senior managers should make sure that service plans include longer term social work priorities that are reflected in both corporate and community plans.
Following elections last year there had been a change of administration and an influx of new members.
We met elected members from across the spectrum who were all supportive of the services social work provided to the community. Some acknowledged they had more to learn about key policy areas such as their responsibilities as corporate parents. Despite this we heard that few members managed to attend the briefings laid on for them by social work. Senior social work managers needed to keep this position under review and consider whether there were other ways of briefing elected members.
Leadership of people
The current CSWO had faced significant challenges in developing the service 4 years ago when he took up his post. The services then had significant recruitment and financial problems. The failed attempt to set up a Community Health and Care partnership had absorbed a lot of staff time and energy. There was no doubt that leadership qualities were needed to bring about the improvements there has undoubtedly been on all of these fronts. We considered that the current CSWO had provided an important stability and had overseen a real improvement in service delivery. The elected members we met were confident in his leadership and that provided by the social work management team who were described as 'dedicated'.
The CSWO was a member of the corporate directorate community management team which met fortnightly. He was line managed by the Director of Community Services and had regular contact with the Chief Executive. The Chief Executive said the CSWO could also attend the corporate management team meetings and had the 'right to roam' to make sure that all matters relevant to social work were acted on appropriately. She was keen for him to increasingly exercise that right in making sure that social work issues were embedded in the corporate agenda and taken forward with the fullest commitment from all internal partners. Elected members and the chief executive recognised the specific responsibilities of the CSWO.
The Chief Executive spoke of the 'transformational change' in child care and child protection that the themed partnership had helped to bring about. The change had been so successful that it was now felt possible to drop the use of the word integrated from children's services plans because it was a 'given'. This was an area where it was evident that significant strides had been made.
East Dunbartonshire criminal justice services made a good contribution to the planning processes of inter-authority partnership. In turn they benefitted from the sound systems for directing and quality assuring practice that had been developed through the partnership. Criminal justice staff were highly motivated and they felt included and informed in making any changes to improve the service.
However, some community care front-line practitioners and managers said that they felt disempowered and unable to influence the future direction of services. Some were disillusioned and felt senior managers needed to be more decisive in taking action to deliver real improvements. They said that they were not visited by elected members even when they came to their offices to meet with managers. Staff in child care, who were generally more positive, also thought that communication with senior managers could improve, reporting that feedback from team meetings did not always flow back up the organisation.
The CSWO was disappointed that more staff disagreed than agreed with the statement that senior managers communicated effectively. He said that the size of the service, together with the improvements in communication streams outlined earlier in the report, should have resulted in more positive feedback.
East Dunbartonshire had implemented single status in March 2008. It had impacted differently on different staff groups. The council had taken steps to keep staff informed of progress with regular updates via a newsletter, road shows and a telephone helpline. Many staff told us they found the process lengthy and demoralising, and managers and councillors acknowledged that the process had impacted negatively on the morale of staff.
Recommendation 14
Managers should review their internal communication strategy to build on what they have already introduced and to ensure there is consistency of communication across all parts of the service.
Leadership of change and Improvement
The political interest in the performance of social services across the authority was facilitated by a formal committee structure and scrutiny panels. The panels did not impact consistently across service areas although elected members reported that they were 'getting better'. The makeup of the political administration - a conservative/labour coalition - meant members often had to talk things through more. Members acknowledged that at committee this might create additional uncertainty for officers about the outcome.
At the time of the inspection the corporate policy and improvement team were leading the development of the single outcome agreement 2008-09 for East Dunbartonshire to be submitted to Scottish Government. It had decided to do this through the community planning partnership.
Senior managers were keen to emphasise the low base-line that social work services had inherited from the break-up of the former Strathclyde region although this was now many years ago. Many staff we spoke to during our fieldwork at different organisational levels stated that there had been a positive change in the council's attitude to social work over the last two years. They thought that the council now had a better understanding of what social work services were about, the challenges they faced and how they impacted on communities. They had seen improvements in recruitment and training and said staff were more motivated as a result.
Operational managers endorsed this and were clear that the pace of change had accelerated further in preparation for this inspection. Until recently social work managers undertook individual service audits and progress against targets was undertaken by the themed partnership subgroups and subgroups of the PPIGs. Senior managers were committed to a more strategic and outcomes-focused approach to performance management. The new performance improvement framework was being rolled out across the service over the next year.
A good recovery had been made from the failed Community Health and Social Care partnership proposals. Relations with the East Dunbartonshire Community Health Partnership were good but we shared the view of senior managers that we have yet to see the best that can be achieved through effective joint working. Managers stated that there were financial constraints in community care and a need to build capacity. The community director thought that the level of investment in community care would benefit from the single outcome agreement emphasis on safety and vulnerability. We thought that community care services required considerable investment and development and that the council should look very carefully at recent levels of expenditure across all services.
The local authority faced some big challenges, in particular the huge increases on the way in the numbers of older people. There had also been a steep climb in the number of homeless people. Until the opening of a direct access homeless service, which coincided with the inspection field work, people with addiction problems who became homeless, were routinely accommodated in a hotel in Glasgow. Staff also identified finding accommodation for young people leaving care as a particular difficulty. Despite the corporate structure young people were still said to be falling between housing and social services and this was seen as thwarting good intentions set out in the draft corporate parenting strategy. The community directorate needed to address this.
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