Tag Archives: supervision

Learning from mistakes: reflective learning in social work

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No one likes to talk about their own mistakes. They are an inevitable part of the human condition, highlight our flaws, inabilities and limitations and can place a spotlight on what happens when resources and people are stretched too thinly.

In certain professions, including frontline social work, mistakes – however innocent or unintentional – can have potentially life-changing effects for service users. Keeping them to a minimum is of paramount importance. And it’s important that if mistakes have been made that they are not only rectified but also analysed to consider what went wrong, and what can be done to avoid the same thing happening again. For social workers the stakes could not be much higher – people’s lives are in the balance. So how can social workers not only recognise, reduce and rectify mistakes, but also use them as learning opportunities to improve performance and decision making in the future?

Making the most of our mistakes

It is important that practitioners and their managers know which strategies are most effective for them and their team when it comes to extracting valuable insight from mistakes. This only comes from having a strong and secure working relationship, where people feel able to talk openly and reveal insecurities and inadequacies, as well as recognising the positives within their practice.

Working out the correct strategies for each occasion and for each team member will take time. However, some tools and strategies include:

  • learning how to generate effective questions to explore not only how a mistake happened, but why and what steps can be taken to prevent it from happening in the future
  • adopting a strengths-based approach, rather than a deficit-based approach to staff and any mistakes they made
  • reflective frameworks that can be formally incorporated into everyday practice
  • encouraging staff to find a “critical friend” to offer an external perspective and extend personal reflective capacity
  • encouraging staff to take up reflective writing (in everyday life, not just at work) including journals and diary entries
  • training staff on creative models of reflection and on how to give and receive constructive feedback
  • finding ways to feed back to an entire organisation regarding the lessons learned from mistakes and how they can shape practice in the future.

The reflective cycle

One of the traditional models of reflection for social workers is Gibbs’ cycle of reflection (1988).

Among social workers, reflective practice is often promoted. Personal experience and participation should be seen as a positive and an opportunity to develop new skills, learning or approaches. Reflection should be focused on professional errors, asking questions like “why”; “what went wrong”; and “what did I do wrong.”

Reflection can happen at three levels:

  • personal
  • one-to-one with another person (a supervisor, colleague or family member)
  • in groups (at organisational level)

It can be useful to reflect at all levels, where possible, in order to get the most out of the experience and have the biggest impact with regard to what can be learnt from mistakes and how this can be passed to others to avoid them making the same ones.

Taking and giving constructive feedback

Although it may be uncomfortable at the time, social workers and people from other professions should welcome feedback from colleagues and service users as they can be powerful sources to drive professional growth. However, it is important to distinguish constructive feedback from blame. Highlighting helpful advice and using it in a constructive way is not the same as finger pointing and fault picking, and managers must develop the ability to distinguish between the two.

Final thoughts

Mistakes happen, and although we don’t like to talk about them, they can sometimes provide some of the most useful insight for learning and improvement within an organisation. Beyond the organisational level, personal reflection on practice and taking time to consider how you approach certain situations is a vital aspect of the self-aware, continual improvement that social workers must strive towards, even if they don’t always meet the exacting standards all of the time.

If you enjoyed this blog post, you may also find the following article of interest:

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Why resilience matters for social workers

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By Heather Cameron

A recent storyline in the BBC’s Silent Witness programme graphically illustrated the emotional pressures that social workers operate under. Troublingly, this was not a case of dramatic license. Stress is damaging the ability of a significant number of social workers to do their job. This is often compounded by a lack of workplace support, particularly with regard to difficult cases such as child abuse.

In a recent Community Care survey of more than 2,000 frontline staff and managers, more than 80% of social workers felt stress is affecting their ability to do their job.

A third were trying to cope with stress by using alcohol, while 17% are using prescription drugs such as anti-depressants. Despite almost all respondents (97%) stating they were moderately or very stressed, only 16% said they had received any training or guidance on how to deal with work-related stress, and less than a third had been offered access to workplace counselling.

Social workers need high levels of confidence and resilience when dealing with safeguarding issues. And these are worrying findings, given the serious emotional impact more challenging cases can have.

Lack of support

New research for the NSPCC in six local authorities, highlights that social workers are finding it difficult to deal with the emotional impact of child sex abuse cases.

Adequate support and supervision is key to moderating the negative impacts of stress and burnout. The Assessed and Supported Year in Employment (ASYE) – introduced in September 2012 – provides a support framework for newly qualified social workers. However, the research found supervision for experienced social workers continues to still be lacking, with many having to find their own informal support networks.

With reports on child abuse a regular occurrence in the media, the public pressure on social workers and other professionals involved in such cases is unlikely to subside. It’s even been suggested that politicians and the press have a common agenda in presenting ‘bad stories’ about social work to the public.

So what can be done?

With nearly 1 in 10 social workers considering leaving their jobs, its clear that addressing stress is a priority. But they are working in an environment where local authority budgets are being cut and the numbers of children subject to child protection plans increased by 12% between March 2013 and March 2014.

Back in 2009 the Laming Report emphasised the need for social workers to “develop the emotional resilience to manage the challenges they will face when dealing with potentially difficult families”. Research at the University of Bedfordshire has explored what resilience means in practice, and how individual resilience can be improved. It suggests that resilience can be learned, and is supported by reflective practice and self-awareness.

Active listening by line managers or supervisors can be an effective tool for identifying and dealing with the onset of stress within their team. And qualitative research in Scotland suggested that with the right support, social workers can retain the sense that their work is worthwhile and satisfying.

Let’s hope that Community Care’s next annual survey of social workers will show an improvement in work-related stress.

 

Further reading

Some resources may only be available to Idox Information Service members.

‘Heads must roll’? Emotional politics, the press and the death of Baby P, IN British Journal of Social Work, Vol 44 No 6 Sep 2014, pp1637-1653

Social Work Watch: inside an average day in social work – how social work staff support and protect people, against all the odds (2014). Unison

‘Bouncing back?’ personal representations of resilience of student and experienced social workers, IN Practice: Social Work in Action, Vol 25 No 5 Dec 2013

Inquiry into the state of social work report (2013). British Association of Social Workers