Social work supervision: ensuring best practice through embedding our standards and values

Supervision is an essential part of ensuring high-quality professional practice, resilience, and wellbeing in social work.
Achieving and maintaining quality in standards of supervision is an ongoing challenge across the sector. The Department of Health and Social Care’s national standards for practice supervisors are expected to be employer-led and locally assured.
However, they have not been consistently implemented regionally or nationally, despite support for early implementers and funding from the Department of Education through Research in Practice’s training and resources.
Without national registration or accreditation schemes, the challenges are likely to be met at either organisational or teaching partnership levels.
As part of the session, professionals from Cheshire and Merseyside Social Work Teaching Partnership shared their learnings and insights into how social work practice could be improved through high-quality supervision, which focuses on standards and values.
Cheshire and Merseyside Social Work Teaching Partnership combines higher education institutes, local authorities and health trusts.
Gavin Moorghen from Social Work England also contributed to this session to widen the discussion and reflections by bringing the professional standards perspective to the topic.
The session concluded with a question and answer session.
Speakers
Becky Brown - Children’s Quality Assurance Manager
Jackie Sweeney - Adults Principal Social Worker, Warrington, Borough Council
Tom Woods - Adults Professional and Workplace Development Officer
Nicola Whiteside - Partnership Manager of the Cheshire and Merseyside Social Work Teaching Partnership
Gavin Moorghen - Regional Engagement Lead, Social Work England

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