Social workers play a pivotal role in the lives of the children and families they support. With almost 500,000 children in England receiving support from social workers, there is an urgent need for the very best life-changing professionals. Frontline is a social work charity developing outstanding social workers and leaders committed to significant change for children at risk of abuse or neglect.

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The practice of leadership can bring about positive change for families, influence other professionals, improve organisations and tackle deep social problems. That is why we develop the leadership of newly qualified social workers, first line managers and support fellows who have completed our programmes to have long-term impact. 

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We have an ambitious plan for 2020 that will see us working across England, improving our programmes and supporting over 1,600 fellows. This focus on growth and quality will contribute to a tipping point in improved social work practice and leadership by the end of the decade. In achieving this ambitious plan, meaningful change will be brought about for the most vulnerable children and families. In doing this, Frontline will start the new decade with a sustainable, proven and fully-scaled operation and the charity will be able to make choices about its future. But there is much work to be done before we reach that point.

 

The plan for the next three years sets out the organisation’s priorities. Like any good strategy, it will force Frontline to make choices and focus its energy where it can make the greatest difference. The plan deliberately highlights the choices that are being made to ensure maximum clarity for all of those involved in executing the plan.

 

Underpinning our ability to deliver on these priorities is a need for even greater alignment around our identity, purpose and position as an organisation. That is why the strategy starts with the fundamentals and reasserts and clarifies these points.

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Our Identity

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Frontline is a unique organisation making a distinct contribution to improving social work practice and leadership. We are a graduate recruiter, an education provider, a leadership development organisation, a government backed initiative and a third sector organisation. But we are more than the sum of these parts. As we work with more staff, participants and fellows in addressing our mission across a larger number of regions, we need to be clearer than ever about who we are as an organisation. The risk of being defined by a narrow set of activities is that we lose the benefits that come from connecting our efforts and we fail to communicate our purpose. We therefore need to collectively embrace the identity of being a mission led social work charity, first and foremost. Everyone working at Frontline needs to be an advocate of our wider mission and understand how their specific role fits into this larger organisational identity.

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Our Purpose

 

Explaining who we are also relies on having a shared understanding of how we will make change happen. Now that we are entering a phase of becoming a medium to large sized charity with lots of activity, it will become increasingly important to be aligned and focused on our purpose. Our theory of change is that the development of both excellent practice and leadership, in and outside of social work will make change happen.

 

Frontline will continue to a focus on supporting those individuals who work in statutory services as practitioners and senior leaders. As an organisation, we have expertise in social work and insight into this system. This is one of the most significant ways that we can help to improve lives for vulnerable children. For our fellows, ‘front line’ social work is the common experience they share and draw energy and frustration from. Ultimately, Frontline believes that the quality of social work practice can determine life chances for the most vulnerable. 

 

Tackling broader issues impacting children and families will also require people to problem solve outside of the social work system with a focus on improving the same outcomes. Just as Frontline is not going to singlehandedly transform social work, those working in social work alone are not going to resolve all of the underlying problems. The implication in this approach is that some Frontline participants will move outside of social work after the completion of the two year programme and that it can be a positive way of fellows making change happen. In the next period, our fellows will become the largest group of individuals that we work with and the potential to make a difference through their efforts is enormous.

 

Local authorities have a strong desire to retain staff. As such, when individuals decide to leave local authority social work we need to manage this carefully with our partners. We need to improve the sharing of best practice from those local authorities who have high retention rates and we must continue selecting partners with good enough conditions. However, we know that individuals will make their own choices and in order for us to achieve our mission we will need to support and encourage people who stay, move or leave, to continue making a difference. This is central to Frontline’s purpose.

 

 

Our Position

 

The social work landscape has changed significantly since Frontline was set up. There is now more local-authority-led innovation, a greater focus on social work practice from both the Department for Education (DfE) and Ofsted, and improved leadership is being recognised as essential to reform. This must cause us to reassess our role in the system in the coming three years.

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Frontline is also in a different position. We are now the largest single social work qualifying programme in England and we are working with over a third of all local authorities in England. This shift means that Frontline has an obligation to share more of the learning from what we do and remain open to influence from other developments in the system. To this end, we will invest in practice focused research that draws insights from our programmes for the benefit of the system. We will also grow a reputable Curriculum Advisory Group that brings rigor and broad thinking to the design of our programmes.

 

Frontline will only ever be a contributor to system change. We need to be closely connected to local authority social work and support the journeys of improvement that they are leading. The best contribution we can make is through a disciplined focus on working with high potential people to develop their practice and leadership and by doing this work at the right scale. Frontline’s explicit ambition is to be big enough to add a ‘tipping point’ to improvement in the system but to never be the main route into social work or the main development programme for managers and leaders. Deliberately working at this scale will allow us to have impact and remain nimble, brave and disruptive in our contribution to the social work profession.

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Taking this position has implications for what we choose not to do. Some of these decisions will be large and strategic. For example, the decision to not provide supervisor training for all social work managers, and the decision that we should not provide consultancy advice for local authority improvement. Sometimes these choices will be smaller scale and relate only to one individual and how they might spend their time. This is why our strategic choices have implications for everyone at Frontline and why having a clear position is so key to delivering our 2020 plan.

 

Below are illustrations of the opportunities and priorities we would say decide to do or not to do in the coming three years: