By Karen Reid, Chief Executive

I am delighted to celebrate World Social Work Day today. This is an opportunity for social workers across the globe to celebrate their achievements as well as to raise awareness and support for the important role they play in our communities. Here in Scotland, we are also celebrating the 50th anniversary of the Social Work (Scotland) Act 1968. This far-reaching legislation provided the basic structure for contemporary social work in Scotland and introduced a local authority duty to promote social welfare. It placed the organisation and provision of welfare services for “persons in need” with local authorities, so that they could live well in their own communities.

Although perhaps sometimes less visible to those not directly benefiting from social work services, the 1968 Act is just as visionary as the other great social reform acts of the last century which established the welfare state and founded the national health service.

It is probably impossible to ever provide a complete survey of the impact the 1968 Act has had over five decades, but there are tens of thousands of children and adults whose lives have been enhanced, often immeasurably, by the systems, and ways of working, it enshrined. Its endurance is testament to its importance.

But World Social Work Day is not just an opportunity to celebrate an Act – it is reminder to celebrate a profession. I would like to thank social workers, past and present, for the work they do in protecting people and supporting them to be active, empowered citizens who can influence positively the direction of their lives, even in the face of the hardest challenges. Too often unsung, social work is a vital profession and we must do all we can to continue to attract our best talent into it. Without the experience, skills and commitment of social workers, the social fabric of our communities would be compromised in ways I, and I am sure many others, could not countenance.

In the Care Inspectorate, an important part of our role is to help assess the quality of social work provision in Scotland, and support it to improve. In fact, our formal name is Social Care and Social Work Improvement Scotland. Since 2011, our joint inspection programmes have helped provide assurance and insight, and identify areas for improvement, across a range of social work activities. By leading the joint inspections of services for children and young people, we can assess how well community planning partners are working together to deliver positive outcomes in their areas. From later this year, our new model of inspection will focus on children for whom there are corporate parenting responsibilities. Our joint inspections of services for adults, undertaken in partnership between the Care Inspectorate and Healthcare Improvement Scotland, are responding to integration. We recently published the first report from our new-model inspections which focus on strategic planning in health and social care partnerships; more are due to be published soon. In the next two months, we will be publishing findings from a thematic review of adult support and protection across Scotland, with plans to undertake further scrutiny and improvement support in relation to self-directed support and community justice.

These inspections, deploying world-leading approaches to scrutiny, are all designed to ensure that people are experiencing positive outcomes, and to help highlight, and support, improvement where this is necessary. I am very grateful to the many social workers we employ in the Care Inspectorate (and other professionals who make up our hugely talented and experienced multi-disciplinary teams) for the work they do in ensuring that the quality of practice across Scotland remains high.

It seems fitting that we should highlight the 1968 Act's achievements just as we start rolling out the new Health and Social Care Standards next month. They put the spotlight on what really matters – the experience of the person. This keen focus on human rights and wellbeing is one of the features that make these new standards truly unique and innovative. The standards will be at the heart of everything we do and are no longer just focused on regulated care settings: they speak to how services should be planned and commissioned, as well as how people’s needs should be assessed and met. They are relevant in social care, early learning and childcare, children’s services, social work, health provision, and community justice. So, they will help us ensure that anyone’s experience of care is the best it can be, meeting the needs, rights and choices of the individual. The standards bring constructive challenge to providers and commissioners about how they will improve people’s experiences of care. For us in the Care Inspectorate, these standards are aligned with our own evolution. We are moving away from compliance to a more collaborative approach which helps services improve as much as they can. I have often said that the Care Inspectorate is on a journey from compliance to collaboration and the new standards provide a vehicle for this journey. The Care Inspectorate is a scrutiny body which supports improvement, with a formal responsibility for furthering improvements in the quality of social work to help ensure people’s experiences are the best they can be. So, as we reflect on 50 years since the Social Work (Scotland) Act and celebrate the role of social work in our communities we can see future work is already being shaped by our shared focus on improving the experiences and outcomes for people. I wish you all the best for World Social Work Day.

Karen Reid Read more If you would like to learn more about the new standards please visit the Health and Social Care Standards website. The Care Inspectorate’s Improvement Strategy 2017-2019 is published on our website.