| |
Background
The emotional toll on child welfare workers — who are often ill-prepared for the life and death decisions they have to make, who carry caseloads that are too high, and who lack adequate supervision and support — impact the safety, permanence, and well-being of children, as well as the willingness of the workers to remain at their jobs in the long term. Turnover is highest among those who are hired with the least background education and training.
Child welfare is a field of practice that the public most readily identifies as a social work domain, yet less than 30 percent of child welfare workers have professional social work degrees (BSW or MSW). In some states the number of professional social workers in public child welfare is as low as three percent, with fewer than 15 percent of states requiring a BSW or MSW degree for any child welfare position (CWLA, 1999).
The delivery of agency-based child welfare services is deeply rooted in the early history of the social work profession, and direct links exist between child welfare competencies and social work education curricula (Rittner & Wodarski, 1999).
Social work professionals continue to play key roles in child welfare direct practice, supervision, administration, research, training, and program and policy development. However, despite the long history of connections between social work and child welfare, child welfare agencies have difficulty in recruiting and retaining qualified staff. This is due to high caseloads, poor working conditions, limited resources, low salaries, declassified positions, policy and values confusion, no clear career path, and lack of quality supervision. Furthermore, the expanding opportunities for professional social workers in a variety of practice areas, combined with the difficulty of working in child welfare, often leads social workers toward other fields of practice.
A review of the Child and Family Service Reviews being carried out in states by the Children's Bureau, identifies deficiencies in agencies' abilities to assess 'needs' (Cohen, 2003), reinforcing the need for child welfare workers to have the knowledge and skills offered through social work and to have a workload that affords them the time to carry out these tasks. This is reinforced by the study by Pasztor, Saint-Germain, & DeCrensczo (2002), which found that "assessment of situations" was the critical skills identified as necessary for child welfare staff.
Recently, several states (Arizona, New Jersey, and Nebraska) have been successful in gaining support from policy makers to increase the size of the child welfare workforce. This will help to lower caseloads and allow staff to provide the depth and breadth of services that children, families, and foster families need to achieve permanence and safety for those in the child welfare system.
But the challenges are to find the workers and keep them, addressing both recruitment and retention, as the solutions to these problems are intertwined. These states and others must seek answers to the questions:
- Who are the best people to be our nation's front-line child welfare staff and supervisors?
— AND —
- What can an agency do to keep those workers whom they hire and invest in through pre-service and in-service training?
Additional services and intervention research is needed to address the variables and processes raised by these questions, as well as dissemination of research findings which already point to answers.
- There is not only a demand for more workers, but for workers who have the knowledge, skills, and values to:
- Perform high quality assessments for both children and families
- Make decisions at multiple levels
- Work with children and families with complex needs
- Facilitate intra- and inter-system coordination
- Understand and implement policy mandates and advocate for changes where needed
- Develop relationships with the multiple players in the child welfare system
- Maintain their own emotional well-being, faced with trauma and a stressful working environment
For almost 50 years, there have been debates over what the optimum education and training for child welfare work should be and whether child welfare agencies should seek BSW and MSWs for front-line practice (Zlotnik, 2002). As more public and private agencies attempt to meet accreditation standards, as states and localities access federal funds for degree education of workers, and as agencies face challenges attracting the "right" workers and then getting them to stay, there is a growing body of evidence that supports the value of professionally educated social workers in child welfare.
Over the past 15 years a growing number of social work education programs have partnered with public child welfare agencies to prepare students for child welfare careers and to provide MSW education to already employed staff, often with the support of federal child welfare training funds (Title IV-B, 426 and Title IV-E) (Zlotnik, 2001), building a cadre of committed staff and developing outcome studies that support the value of a social work degree.
|
|
