Children & Young People News
This is the general page for the Department.
For news relating to Schools click here
and
for news relating to Social Care click here
Updated 28th Feb 2011
Schools
School JE Information - JE Results info
UNISON response to Notts County Council Letter re Change to Terms and Conditions - letter to members - letter to Council
REDUNDANCY ALERT
If your school suggests that a job group should cut their hours instead of going through the appendix 2 and skills audit procedure, please get in touch with UNISON straight away, as although it may seem staightforward in the beginning, things can go wrong along the way.
Some of the pitfalls are:
1) Intimidation by the Head Teacher
2) Group members may agree to cutting hours when they cannot afford to, or they may feel pressured to by the group.
3) When the hours are agreed your Head Teacher may dictate when your hours are used in school and this is very likely to be to the school's advantage and not yours, leaving you very unhappy.
So far we have only heard from members when things go wrong and unfortunately by then it can be too late to rectify the problem. Contact us NOW!
Joint convenors: Hazel Allister and Ann Veal
Senior stewards Caroline Carr and Neil Brown
Social Care Work
Cutting caseloads would save lives says UNISON
UNISON, the UK’s leading public trade union, today reiterated its call for strict controls on social work caseloads, after a new report* showed just one in five social workers thought they had enough time to work effectively with the children they are responsible for. Only 25% said their employer had an effective caseload management system.
The report also highlights a climate of fear with practitioners too scared to say they can’t cope with the volume of work for fear of being disciplined. It reveals a gulf in understanding between social workers and team leaders, and those in senior management who do not listen to what they have to say. The union is also calling for employers to have a duty to respond to social workers’ concerns.
Helga Pile, UNISON national officer for social workers, said:
“Social work departments are massively overstretched, and the pressure on staff is unsustainable. Excessive caseloads are a perennial problem, and this survey proves that leaving caseload management to chance is not working. What’s more it is dangerous, just as the tragic cases hitting the headlines prove.
“How can anyone say everything possible is being done to protect children, families and vulnerable adults if employers are allowed to go on loading more and more cases on to social workers? We must now move to enforceable national standards for caseloads, and better workload management systems.
“Only a third of social workers feel they can have a say in how their service is run. Yet these professionals are expected to cope with one of the toughest jobs going dealing with problems most people don’t even want to think about. Employers and the government have got to start taking social workers’ views seriously. We want clear duties on employers to make sure that not only are the issues heard, but they are acted on.
“The real barrier to boosting social work is underfunding. We cannot allow more lives to be swept away in the cuts that threaten to engulf local services.”
In Notts, Unison is vigourously pursuing this issue and all aspects of the "Health check" ,which is recommendation 6 of the Social Work Task Force. We proposed at JCNP and Management accepted,that there would be a Joint Trade Union/ Management Working Party to look at how the Health Check could be inplemented in Notts. We have had two meetings to date with further meetings to follow. We will be insisting that there is full involvement of Social workers in this process to gain a realistic picture of how things are.
We know full well that although there has been a caseload weighting system in place for several months,that it has by no means resolved the issue of many workers having too high caseloads and working inordinately long hours. Given the continuing huge increase in referrals and record numbers of children in care this problem is only likely to get worse unless there is a big increase in the f.t.e establishment of Social workers and not just the knee jerk response of recruiting agency workers.