What does it mean to be regulated?

Across a wide range of sectors, hundreds of thousands of professionals in the UK pay to be registered with a regulator just to be able to work. We often get asked by social workers about what they get for their registration fees and what the role of Social Work England actually is. In this blog, we aim to demystify what regulation is, why it matters and where your money goes.

Here Phil Hallam, executive director of registration, quality assurance and legal, sets out why regulation matters.

When someone asks me "what does regulation do for me?", my answer is that regulation helps emphasise the importance of the work of social workers. It provides them with specialist standards to meet so the public can see how they will act and gives everyone confidence that those on the register maintain their skills and knowledge. Above all, it allows all of us to be assured that the public, including some of the most vulnerable people in society, remain protected.

Many different professions and activities are registered and regulated, from pharmacists to air traffic controllers, legal executives to gas engineers, and architects to security guards. Regulation is a public good, and it works to protect us all.

I often describe regulation as the (often unnoticed) framework created where society has decided a particular job or task is of special importance or risk. This framework makes it easier for the public to identify who can do the job, to be confident they are appropriately trained and have kept up their skills, and to be reassured that those who do the job have to meet certain standards.

In 2001, society decided that the importance of social work, and the potential risks to the public arising from how social workers train and practise, meant that the profession should be regulated. Like many other professions, legislation is used to set out how this regulation should be carried out. For social workers in England, this is the Children and Social Work Act 2017, which gives Social Work England an overarching duty to protect the public. Our legislation also describes the objectives we should pursue to achieve that protection; to protect, promote and maintain the health, safety, wellbeing of the public, and the confidence of the public in social workers in England, and to promote and maintain proper professional standards. These objectives are all equally important but helping to increase public confidence is of particular value as this is where the activities we undertake as the regulator can often have most impact.

To achieve our objectives, we:

• Set professional standards, including those for proficiency, conduct and ethics.
• Set standards for, and approve, education and training courses.
• Maintain a register of around 100,000 social workers in England.
• Run a fitness to practise system, ensuring social workers have the skills, knowledge, character and health to practise safely and effectively without restriction.
• Ensure and assess continuing professional development (CPD).
• Approve post-qualifying courses.

Our role is broadly the same as those for other regulated professions. However, we also have a unique opportunity to use our regulatory powers and functions to work with everyone who has an interest in social work.

Often people think of regulation in terms of complaints, or fitness to practise. While it is true that investigating concerns is an important and visible area of our role, it is only one aspect of how we meet our objectives.

As we understand more about why people raise concerns with us, we will use this learning to work with everyone involved in social work to raise standards and improve outcomes for people with lived experience. This will also increase the understanding, and confidence, of society in the work and skills of social workers in England.

And through research, engagement and asking questions of everyone involved in social work, we’re in the best place to deepen our understanding of the different ways that social workers carry out their work, and to use this learning to create a responsive, bespoke approach to how we regulate on behalf of the public.  

Some of this has already meant a new approach. For example, the way we have linked the CPD requirements in our regulations to our annual renewal process means that we can work with social workers to ensure that the public understand, through the register, how the profession maintains and develops its skills and knowledge.

We will continue to use our regulatory powers, and our unique overview of the social work profession, to look at how social workers are trained, and once registered, continue to develop their skills. We are acutely aware of the issues and opportunities that will enable us to shape improvements in education and training.

Over the coming months, we will continue to engage in lots of conversations, research and activities to help us work with the sector to describe and achieve our ambitions. All of this activity will help us to work to meet our objective to protect the public.