
Intervention and Skills
Use judgement and authority to intervene with individuals, families and communities to promote independence, provide support and prevent harm, neglect and abuse.
Social workers engage with individuals, families, groups and communities, working alongside people to assess and intervene. They enable effective relationships and are effective communicators, using appropriate skills. Using their professional judgement, they employ a range of interventions: promoting independence, providing support and protection, taking preventative action and ensuring safety whilst balancing rights and risks. They understand and take account of differentials in power, and are able to use authority appropriately. They evaluate their own practice and the outcomes for those they work with.
Practitioners at this level should:
- Communicate skilfully and confidently in complex or high risk situations. Model and help others to develop communication skills.
- Sustain and model engagement with people in fluctuating circumstances and capacities, including where there is hostility and risk.
- Be able to gather information quickly and effectively so as to inform judgement for interventions including in crises, and in response to challenge, or in the absence of complete information.
- Use assessment procedures discerningly so as to inform judgement.
- Maintain and expand a range of frameworks for assessment and intervention.
- Demonstrate skilled use of a range of frameworks for assessment and intervention.
- Actively support and initiate community groups and networks, including professional ones.
- Contribute to the development of the organisation's information strategy and systems.
- Model and help others with appropriate information sharing.
- Model and help others to manage changing circumstances.
- Recognise and appropriately manage the authority inherent in your position.
- Anticipate, assess and manage risk, including in more complex cases, and support others to develop risk management skills.
- Undertake assessment and planning for safeguarding in more complex cases, and help others with safeguarding skills.
Evidencing your capabilities:
At the Experienced Social Worker level, you will need to think carefully about the complexity of the work in which you are involved. Consider those cases which involve higher risk and where you have perhaps had to adapt your approach to assessment and intervention in order to make progress. Also consider those cases where you have modelled good practice for others.
You will need to draw on a wide range of evidence which describes your communication, assessment and intervention skills, perhaps involving different assessment methods or utilising different skills, particularly where there isn't much information to go on or where information is conflicting. Varied case examples would help you to do this. In addition, this domain requires some evidence of what you do to help service users. You should try to consider those examples from practice which show what you have done to improve the circumstances of service users and where you have collected evidence of your success. Recording systems and processes might also provide some useful material on which to draw.