It started because I had been to a Skills for Care event and colleagues had shared information about a scheme they had set up for NQSWs across their partnership. Later, I spoke to a senior manager in our organisation and said to him that we ought to be doing something about this too. So he invited me to a meeting. I hadn’t known beforehand that senior managers were going to be there. Suddenly I realised that I was being taken seriously. The manager could have gone to the meeting alone, but he was comfortable about “leading from behind” and giving me that opportunity. One thing that helped was doing the MA in advanced social work – practice education. I’d learned about learning organisations and communities of practice. It gave me a language and a way of thinking to talk with them. Being in a specialist multidisciplinary team it had always been important to me to hold onto my social work identity, particularly what I’d learned about the values and practice of good supervision. This reminds me of how my parents wanted to honour their traditions when they came to this country.

‘Managers created a part-time secondment for me to develop a scheme locally, which I did alongside my practice manager role. I think it helped to gain the NQSWs’ respect that I was still close to practice. It was also useful that I had insider knowledge of the organisation. I wasn’t an outside consultant who was just bought in to deliver the scheme. But I had to show I could deliver. Sometimes the things I said didn’t go down well. Who was I, somebody several grades lower, to be sending reports to Heads of Service about deficiencies in the supervision and assessment practice of their managers? I think that because I had been a practice manager for many years I didn’t have a need to be liked. I just wanted us to be a learning organisation. When I reported that only one of the NQSW evaluation reports passed our quality-assurance process, I asked questions about the work and development plans of these managers, and it turned out they didn’t have them. My manager encouraged me to go directly to the head of Human Resources, who took this up with the senior management team.

Perhaps it also made people think “she isn’t going away so we’d better listen to what she is saying”. This led to me being consulted about other workforce planning issues. The thing that I am proudest about is that I have been able to influence the job description for managers to explicitly include the teaching role – making it clear that they have responsibility for nurturing the next generation of professional social workers’.