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I joined SSSC right from the beginning. I worked for the predecessor body, the Central Council for Education and Training in Social Work (CCETSW) and I was actively involved in the consultation and negotiations which led to the establishment of the organisation.
When the organisation started, we went from CCETSW on the Friday, and on Monday became the Scottish Social Services Council (SSSC). We were based in offices on James Craig Walk in Edinburgh at the time, so it was strange that the only thing that changed for the people transferring over was the name of the organisation. We were all involved in ongoing projects at the time and didn’t have the luxury of stopping them and taking time to adjust.
Well, size of staff group and location are the obvious ones. On the first day of the SSSC there were six of us from CCETSW who’d transferred to the SSSC plus the Chief Executive, Carole Wilkinson. Compass House was still being built at the time.
We were very close to being based in Glasgow as the Scottish Government asked us where most of our travel took us and Edinburgh and Glasgow came out top (other than UK travel to London etc). But Scottish Government decided they needed to distribute job opportunities around Scotland and chose Dundee due to the city’s regeneration plans for the waterfront area.
Fun fact: apparently local Dundonians used to refer to Compass House as ‘The Baked Bean Tin’ as the colours of the building looked like the branding for Heinz baked beans.
So, we moved to Dundee as soon as Compass House was built where we were joined by our Registrar, Geraldine Doherty who’d been acting head of CCETSW Scotland, a new communications team and Cheryl Campbell and Mel Taylor as the first registration staff. The land now occupied by Quadrant House and the hotel next door, was fenced off waste land.
I think the sector has become significantly larger and has many more demands placed on it. I think social workers are less able to engage in preventative work (which was much more prevalent when I was a practitioner) as the volume of work has risen much faster that the resources to cope with it.
However, it’s good to see that the core values of the sector have remained intact.
For me, one of the key tasks for the SSSC and Social Work Scotland is to maintain the core identity of social work and social services. Too often our workforce and services are described as health and social care. Almost as if they are one and the same.
I fear if we don’t continue to challenge that viewpoint and assert the unique and essential difference our workforce and services bring to the communities we serve, we’ll be forced down a medicalised approach to supporting citizens which will only address the symptoms of the challenges they face, ignoring the whole picture of their social and emotional wellbeing.
Early in the life of the SSSC, we supported the Scottish Government to produce workforce development strategies and feedback from consultations. However, employers kept telling us they wanted solutions not strategies.
That was the beginning of digital learning at the SSSC. It started as some small projects added to my workload and after several years of being a team of one, we were able to employ additional staff.
Our learning resources and services are now available to the whole social service workforce of 209,000, informal carers, volunteers and staff in allied sectors and Scottish Government are increasingly approaching us to develop new national resources.
Making learning available any time staff need it and giving them credit for their learning has had a significant impact. We have thousands of records of learning which talk directly about how staff have applied their learning to practice. So, we know our efforts link directly to improving practice and outcomes for people who use services.
