Writing this article during the holiday season in England, we are unavoidably surrounded by bright lights, overplayed songs and that uniquely British phenomenon: the pantomime. While these festive distractions range from mild fun to outright annoying, there is another pantomime going on across England: the pantomime of professional reform.
Pantomimes are generally family-friendly, slapstick and gag-filled affairs, and while they sometimes include topical humour and references, it is widely recognised that they are all surface, with little depth. They are where people go to be distracted, to get in the festive spirit and to entertain their children.
Comparing policy reforms in our public professions with this type of spectacle may at first seem strange, but it helps to highlight the ridiculous nature of what we are consistently exposed to as professionals: all-singing, all-dancing reform proposals that inevitably, when the curtain comes down, leave little lasting positive impact.
A prominent contemporary example of this comes in the form of the Early Career Framework (ECF), due to be introduced to children and family social workers over the next two years. The ECF model has explicitly been borrowed from the ECF in teaching that was rolled out in 2021, and is part of the ever-growing crossover of reforms between these two professions that fall under the remit of the Department for Education. Both ECFs purport to, among other things, encourage the retention of staff.
The Social Work ECF is meant to be a new model of supporting (and assessing) early career social workers, replacing and extending the Assessed and Supported Year in Employment (ASYE), the current offering.
Qualifying as one of the first social workers to go through the ASYE, Joe has distinct memories of how disruptive and inefficient the introduction of that new model of reform was across the profession. And we know from research, over 12 years later, that employers still struggle to adequately support social workers on the ASYE programme because of underfunded teams, huge vacancy rates and chronically poor working conditions.
Replacing the ASYE with the ECF solves none of these problems, and the work involved will likely worsen them. What the ECF does is create the illusion of reform, one that policy makers, like parents taking their children to a festive pantomime, can use to distract from the real challenges being faced in the sector.
What makes this all the worse is that the ECF is based on a model that has already been shown to be very problematic. Jan vividly recalls the introduction of the ECF for teachers. Rolled out precipitously and at great expense across all Early Career Teachers (ECTs), the training was highly repetitious of their pre-qualification programmes. It mandated the same content for all, irrespective of subject, age phase taught or personalised need, and was considered a time-consuming burden.
It’s as if ECTs (and their mentors) are being forced to spend their evenings re-watching the same tired old pantomime on a loop, in every theatre across England. And now that the reviews are in, ratings for the ECF have been 2 star at best. Retention rates have not risen, and arguably, the requirement to complete the ECF has added to the systemic issues of overworked teachers.
As with the strange attachment to pantomime, those outside England looking in may struggle to understand why there remains such a strong attachment to the ECF, despite all these issues. To understand this, and most policies introduced in these sectors over the last 14 years, the old adage of ‘follow the money’ is still apt. Providers of the teaching ECF have done very well at the box office through lucrative government contracts, and no doubt those eying up the social work ECF have similar aspirations.
The world of theatre is often considered a closed shop, hard to break into without connections, and this scenario is also true of policy reform in children’s services. There is a growing body of research and literature identifying a relatively small group of key policy players who are consistently invited to the policy-making performance. Many of these represent organisations that will go on to get those lucrative government contracts when all is said and done.
As an illustrative example, four of the seven-person expert groups who worked to develop the teacher ECF had roles in organisations that would eventually be named among the six lead providers sharing a £250m initial government contract to roll it out. After he stepped down as schools minister, Nick Gibb, who oversaw the development of the teacher ECF, would join another of these lead providers.
There is no lack of additional reforms across both the social work and teaching professions that could similarly be considered as part of this pantomime of professional reform. For example, both professions are also experiencing ongoing reforms of their qualifying education programmes, led by many of the same organisations that created the ECFs.
The problem with pantomime, and the holiday season in general, is that it is a fleeting distraction, and one that inevitably has to give way to the realities of life, and the problems awaiting us in the new year. The same can be said of the ECF. Once the initial excitement, funding and marketing wears off, social workers will inevitably be left picking up the pieces and struggling with the same unresolved issues they have faced for decades.
Jan Rowe was Head of Initial Education at Liverpool John Moores University. She retired in August 2024. Joe Hanley is a lecturer in social work at The Open University.
Failing to learn from teachers: the Social Work Early Career Framework in England by Joe Hanley and Jan Rowe is available to read open access on Bristol University Press Digital here.
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