The future leadership of adult social services
By Catherine Needham
Professor of Public Policy and Public Management, University of Birmingham
As an academic specialising in leadership and public service, I have been updating the 21st Century Public Servant framework developed a decade ago.
Below I set out some of the ways that public service leadership has changed over that decade and key trajectories for the future role of DASS.
The title comes from a piece written by my colleagues Catherine Mangan and Christopher Pietroni, and captures the need to be ready to improvise, adapt and enjoy the role of DASS.
Resilience ++
It has been a gruelling few years, with senior leaders facing an unprecedented combination of challenges. The austerity facing public services has been felt especially keenly in local government, with estimates of a 12% fall in adult social care spending per person from 2010 to 2018.
The Covid-19 pandemic of 2020 onwards changed us all in ways that we probably do not fully understand even now. But it created new ways and places of working. It created an always-on-duty habit, which we have found hard to break away from. Working remotely has generated new opportunities (better access and inclusion for those who struggled to travel) but also challenges to team spirit and mental wellbeing.
New communication technologies – particularly social media – have changed the pace and tone of public interactions. This has led to concerns about the decline of civility, and indeed safety, in public life.
The inequalities thrown up by Covid-19, combined with international events, have drawn more attention than ever before to issues of equality, diversity and inclusion. Inequalities are also to the fore in the cost-of-living crisis that emerged from 2022/23, drawing attention to the intersection between disability and poverty.
As a DASS, you have to cope with these kinds of major challenges simultaneously. The word ‘resilience’ is over used and risks transferring all of the coping mechanisms onto the heroic individual. It is this individualised framing of leadership that leads to high turnover rates and vacant senior roles.
What makes for resilient leaders in adult social care may be something to do with individual capacities, but we need to pay a lot more attention to ensuring people are part of supportive networks (formal and informal) and part of leadership cultures that encourage learning not blame.
We need leadership that fosters belonging, connection and learning for ourselves as well as our teams. As the new CQC assurance regime beds in, the risks of blame feel high, and we need to find ways to make this an experience of showcasing the best rather than leaning into mere compliance.
Innovation and tech
Tech means so many things now that it becomes hard to say what isn’t technology. In social care it can mean anything from care workers logging their arrival times and tasks to smart kettles and from wearables and Facetime to the use of big data.
Over the next decade, social care services and working lives will continue to be transformed by technology, and you will play a key role in steering what to invest in and what to sit out.
The speed of change and the expense of start-up costs make it difficult for councils to be the first movers on this, and there will be a key role for national sector bodies to share what works – and to help make decisions about what technologies are best pursued through consumer purchasing and which can be usefully procured.
Of course, for many of us, the act of care remains a fundamentally human-to-human one, which technology will augment but not replace. As well as keeping an eye on the latest tech we need to pay attention to relationship-based innovations that can take us beyond the world of low-paid care workers popping in to microwave a ready meal.
Leading inclusive systems
Systems leadership has been on the syllabus of every development programme for a long time, but we still do not really know how to do it. Some of its key principles – lack of control, emergence, interconnectedness – remain at odds with the accountability and measurement approaches of our organisations.
You cannot tell the scrutiny committee or the local media that care outcomes are ‘emergent’ and beyond our control. A good systems leader has to have all of the capabilities of working well in complex adaptive systems – such as tolerance of ambiguity and courage to focus on the long term. Less often discussed is that they also need to have empathy and tolerance for the linear worldview of others, which is not going away.
As integrated care systems (ICS) become embedded, this may be the decade in which health and care integration comes within reach, although it will be a bumpy road. The required 30% budget reduction in running costs will mean unsettled staff and a focus on structure rather than culture. We know in theory that financial pressures can create a burning platform for innovation, but this is said much more often than it is seen in practice.
Inclusive systems involve voluntary organisations and local communities. The word ‘co-production’ is so over used as to be devoid of real meaning, but at its simplest it means giving up on the idea that doing things to people can ever be effective.
Co-production came to prominence because people realised that public services do not work without engagement from individuals, families and communities. It stayed because people recognised there was an important point of principle here, too: we should get people to plan and deliver services as much as possible, because that is fairer and more inclusive, as well as being more effective.
So, what now?
For today’s DASS and for the aspiring DASS of the near future, this is a role that requires compassion and tenacity, humour and humility, and the willingness to improvise.
It may be that the next decade is the one that finally puts social care on a sustainable financial footing, with significant public investment. But more likely is a continued tolerance of fragility, of eking out scarce resources and making the most of short-term cash injections. All in an environment where complexity is poorly understood and social care undervalued.
It requires a willingness to keep championing the values of person-centred support and the wellbeing of the whole person.
A House of Lords report into social care evoked the goal of:
a gloriously ordinary life
That remains a polestar to follow through to 2033.