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The ADASS Roadmap is a 10 year plan. It aims to ensure there will be sufficient public support to drive the political system to deliver the level of funding that will enable all to
‘live in the place we call home, with the people and things that we love, in communities where we look out for one another’.
This is the vision created by Social Care Future. ADASS describes it as the ‘North Star’, the symbol that guides us to our home and true purpose. The roadmap sets out the route to arrival.
The roadmap has three stages – short, medium and the long term ten years away. The short is critical. It is the radical transformation in the way professionals operate. Without it, the medium and long term cannot happen.
The transformation, required in the next year or so, will mean that decisions about the care and support individuals receive will cease to be
‘led by professionals’ through a process that is ‘bureaucratic and complex’ and which ‘impacts on people who have cause to draw on care and support with too much unmet, undermet and wrongly met need.
Practice will be transformed in a ‘re-imagined’ service where;
‘care and support is co-produced with the people who draw on it and which realises the right to self-directed support’.
It will amount to;
‘A shift away from social care as a service where decisions about what is on offer are made by local authorities, towards care and support that is rooted in clear rights and entitlements’
The practical strategy for delivery is through;
‘frameworks like Think Local Act Personal’s Making It Real’
This consists of a series of commitments for professionals to practice in all the ways delivering the vision will require.
As professional practices change, public and political views will also start to shift over time. This change in perception is expected to happen in the medium term. As a result, social care will be set on a path to gaining all the resources needed to fully achieve its long-term vision.
The Roadmap places responsibility firmly on Councils’ Directors to bring about the short term transformation of practice in their localities.
no explanation is offered as to why professionals would have chosen en masse to practice in such oppressive and dysfunctional ways.
A fundamental problem – the strategy is undeliverable
The Make It Real framework rests on the assumption that the current ‘profession centric, complex and bureaucratic’ practices have been and continue to be a professional choice. All that is required is for professionals to commit to transform they way they work.
But no explanation is offered as to why professionals would have chosen en masse to practice in such oppressive and dysfunctional ways. It is so at odds with their professional values, ethics and training. Nor why they should continue to do so despite the Make It Real strategy. This strategy is recommended by the organisation funded by government to promote the personalisation agenda, having been in place since 2012. For over ten years this has given professionals all the permission and authority they might have required to change the way they practice and yet still they have not.
There is a simple explanation for why ADASS and TLAP cling to this clearly unreasonable assumption. Their practices are, of course, not a choice. They are shaped by the system that professionals are required to deliver. And at the heart of that system is a simple and unchallengeable rule – the only needs that can be acknowledged are those for which there is resource available. Any need for which there is no resource cannot be allowed to exist or be acknowledged.
It’s a rule that serves a powerful political purpose. Not only does it ensure spend is always within whatever budget they have made available, it removes any pressure to increase funding.
But delivery of this rule makes the practices of Make It Real impossible. They are designed to shape the conversations with the individual;
‘To discover what they want from life, and the care and support to enable this’
‘to make sure we get all aspects right for them’
‘We work with people to make sure their personal plans promote wellbeing’
These are conversations carried out by the social worker. But they are not the conversations the social worker has that have the most influence. The conversations with the biggest impact take place subsequently. They are with the manager responsible for allocating resources to the person.
The responsible manager must share out the resources at their disposal as fairly as they can, whilst ensuring spend is within budget. They must also deliver the inviolable rule to acknowledge only need for which there is resource.
This is the way what is called ‘eligibility’ is determined. And once a need has been deemed ‘eligible’ it becomes a legal duty to meet.
It’s a complex task. ‘Need’ must be standardised to create a controllable flow of demand, disregarding the uniqueness of personalised need envisaged by Make It Real. Fairness is measured against levels of risk and crises, not the aspirations of individuals upon which the vision is based.
Social workers, whose moral purpose is to secure as much support for the people they serve as they can, must play the game. They calibrate their assessment to the requirements of the resource allocator. The practices required to deliver the Make It Real commitments are irrelevant.
This accounts for why practice is ‘complex and bureaucratic’ and not the person centred, aspirational practice of Make It Real.
Two possibilities suggest themselves to account for the situation;
it is a case of self-deception within the industry, possibly a case of what psychologists have labelled ‘groupthink’ that works for those in the system regardless of the realities they are facing.
a knowing strategy to mislead the public.
Making ‘Making It Real’ Real
The ADASS Roadmap is therefore not working. It is serving only to create a pretence of change, and at great effort and expense by councils following it This is graphically illustrated in Bristol.
The Roadmap’s ambition and vision are, however, unquestionably sound. But without fundamental correction to achieve the transformation of professional practice in the short term, it cannot work. The question is what it will take to make Make It Real real as the basis for professional practice.
There are only two ways it can happen;
Sufficient resource are made available to meet all needs for all in need of care and support to achieve the Social Care Future vision.
Drop the rule that need can only exist of there is resource currently available and acknowledge when resources fall short of need. Allow need to precede resource.
However desirable, the first cannot be envisaged in any foreseeable future. Pragmatically, only the second is possible. The legislation in the form of the Care Act would support it. It will require no new money. All that will be required is the political integrity for the gap between needs and resources to become known.
This system not only leads to crisis and fosters dependency, it also makes investment in prevention impossible.
Incentivising the change
There are two great ironies in the perpetuation of the status quo that would be addressed. One is professional and the other political.
The professional irony is that it is ADASS members themselves who are responsible for the political inertia over funding levels that they complain about. By disappearing all needs for which there is no resource, they are fatally undermining their own case for funding to meet a greater range of need. They are telling political leaders locally and nationally that they already have the funds to meet all needs.
And the political irony is that in serving the short termist objective of denying any gap in funding, they are preventing the professional practices that research has long shown secures the greatest value for money. This system not only leads to crisis and fosters dependency, it also makes investment in prevention impossible. We will soon publish a dossier that highlights the massive misuse of public funds and the resulting human and economic impacts.
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