What CPD means to Bolton Council transcript

Jennifer

Hello, my name is Jennifer. I'm a social worker in the safeguarding adults team at Bolton Council.

Emma

My name is Emma Massey. I'm the principal social worker for adults at Bolton Council.

Heidi

I’m a family placement social worker from Bolton local authority.

Marshelle

Hi, my name is Marshelle, I’m a social worker in the community. I work for Bolton Council.

Gemma

Hi, my name is Gemma, I’m a team manager at Bolton Council and I manage a social care team.

What does CPD mean to you?

Heidi

I found CPD to be really important in giving me the time to reflect my own knowledge base, and to identify and address any knowledge gaps. To upskill, to learn from others, and to develop specialisms relevant to my area of practice, and sometimes driven by service needs.

Marshelle

CPD is important part of my practitioner role in terms of gaining further knowledge and awareness of how this fits into my practice.

Gemma

CPD is important to me as a leader because I think it's really important to set a good learning culture. Set the example for learning, and be positive about learning. Social care is ever changing, and it's really important to me that myself and the team I manage feel equipped.

Jennifer

CPD is really important to me. It's helped me expand my knowledge in different areas that would be useful to all different service use types.

Emma

The aim of all of our work is to enable the best outcomes for the people that we work with. And to get there, that's really enhanced by not only the training offer, not only having high functioning and performing teams, but our continued professional development across the board for all of our staff.

What does CPD look like at Bolton Council?

Gemma

The way I facilitate learning is to keep it at the forefront of discussion, really promote it in a positive way. I help staff focus on what they can get from learning.

Jennifer

Within my time at the council, I’ve been able to do lots of different types of CPD, including my assessed and supported year in employment, practice educator training, best interests assessor training, and access webinars and Microsoft Teams meetings around different areas of practice.

Heidi

As part of my CPD, I've sought out experience of the full spectrum of children services. I've been supported to work with cases from the initial contact all the way through to adoption, to gain a holistic understanding of the service and of children and families’ experiences. This has been a really valuable learning experience for my own professional development, but also in being able to better support the service and children and families.

Marshelle

It helps me to recognize my skills, the skills that I've already got, and the skills that I would like to develop. I use supervision, training, the Research in Practice tool, and also team meetings, to share experiences, to gain that further knowledge.

Jennifer

My employer has facilitated my learning by encouraging me to go on as many courses as I can to expand my knowledge and development. They've offered me different opportunities to learn in different teams, and to be able to push myself to expand my skills. It’s been a really good opportunity to be able to mentor students, to expand my own professional leadership, and to widen my horizons in terms of social work practice.

Emma

From a strategic point of view, when we talk about continuing professional development, it is always important in our team to keep that as a fresh offer. So not only do we need to be working on integrating it into everything that we do, but also coming up with new ways of doing that.

Heidi

As I have a specialist interest in trauma, I had the opportunity to attend a day long virtual international trauma symposium with speakers from all over the world. Who shared their experience and their expertise, as well as current pieces of research.

Gemma

I really try and encourage people to see what they will get out of that learning, and really move away from the language of ‘well, you have to’ or ‘you should’ or ‘you must.’ I really try to encourage staff to want to go, because that’s how you get the best. I want them to engage; they’re there by choice. And then in supportive supervision discussions, I always make a real effort to ask that person what they've got from that session, to try and tease that learning out of them. And they know those questions are coming, so they do think what am I getting from this?

Emma

It's not one size fits all. There's a suite of different things that will appeal to different people at different places.

Heidi

As CPD is valued by my local authority, I've been fortunate in being given the time and the space to attend CPD courses of interest to myself, and then to be able to feed this back to the learning of others.

Gemma

We're always learning. We learn from each other. It's about sharing learning. I think having a competent, confident workforce makes sure that the people we work with, that we support on a daily basis, feel like they’re getting the very best service from Bolton Council.

Marshelle

I wanted to say thank you for listening and I hope you benefit from my perspective.

Jennifer

I hope you have had an insight into what it's like to be a social worker within Bolton Council.

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