SSSC Chief Executive, Lorraine Gray said:
‘This year has seen a focus on concluding the final Register parts, support workers in care at home and housing support. We now have 216,000 entries on our Register. We continue to work hard to improve our customer’s experience to serve our expanded Register by developing our online registration platform MySSSC.
‘Our achievements in 2019-20 in support of a safe and skilled workforce include publishing revised Standards in Social Work Education and piloting new approaches to a supported year for newly qualified social workers. These will improve the learning experience of the workforce and protect the people who use social services. We also laid the foundation for the final part of the registration phase which would see all groups set out in legislation registered by 30 September 2020.
‘Although this report is for our work in 2019-2020, we can’t help but reflect on the impact of COVID-19 on this sector and the people they care for and support. The pandemic has highlighted the passion and dedication of people working across social care, social work and early years and also concerns with the way our society values both the work that they do and the people they support. We await the outcome of the review of adult social care in the new year and will continue to work with our partners across the UK to influence the discussions on the future for this sector.
‘Our staff worked tirelessly throughout the year to make sure that people who use services can count on skilled and safe people to provide support and care. As an organisation our business transformation continued throughout 2019-2020 and allowed us to immediately offer the same service to our registrants from our kitchen tables and spare rooms the minute we went into lockdown in March.’
Highlights from our 2019-2020 Annual Report.
- In December 2019 we reached the milestone for our final group, support workers in care at home and housing support services to submit their applications for registration. During 2019-2020 the number of registrations and renewals granted increased in line with our forecast, with 77,507 applications registered, and 13,219 renewals processed.
- We continue to focus on the learning and development of the social service workforce. During 2019-2020 we assessed 678 qualifications for registration. Our Open Badges web platform continues to be a success with 5,342 Open Badges awarded during 2019-2020 compared with 4,000 in 2018-2019.
- We received 4,122 fitness to practise referrals in 2019-2020 compared to 3,617 the previous year. This increase reflects the rapid expansion to the Register over the period. We launched a dedicated case management system to manage fitness to practise referrals. We recruited more staff to our intake and engagement team and designed new processes to complete preliminary investigations before opening a case, allowing us to close 1,848 concerns at the screening stage.