Social Work Policy Panel newsletter June 2025

This month the Policy Panel heard from the Scottish Government team developing policy options to overhaul eligibility criteria. 

A System Under Scrutiny

At the heart of this reform lies a fundamental question: how will Scotland ensure that people receive community care and support based on their individual needs and human rights when budgets are consistently under pressure?

The Independent Review of Adult Social Care (The Feeley Review) in 2021 called for barriers to access, such as the current eligibility criteria and charging regime, to be fundamentally reformed and removed to allow a greater emphasis on prevention and early intervention. This recommendation is reflected in the Joint Statement of Intent for Adult Social Care 2022-23, in which the Scottish Government and COSLA committed to the overhaul of the current mechanism of eligibility criteria to ensure an approach to social care support that is based on human rights and needs. 

The Current Environment

Over the past year the team has built on work commissioned from Dr Emma Miller and others to understand the different uses and impacts of eligibility criteria in Scotland. They have found:

• Resource management tool: Eligibility criteria has become a mechanism for managing limited resources amid increased demand and financial pressures
• Geographic inequality: There is local variation across Scotland in how criteria are applied
• Access barriers: Many people feel that eligibility criteria prevent people from accessing care when they feel they need it
• Professional impact: Social workers increasingly feel they have become "gatekeepers" rather than enablers of support
• Assessment challenges: The current framework can make it difficult to adopt strengths-based approaches to social work assessments
• Workforce concerns: Morale amongst many social workers is low, with concerns that eligibility criteria can reduce professional autonomy and may contribute to ‘time and task’ methods of delivering social care.

The team is committed to ensuring reform is informed by those who work within the system, as well as by people with lived experience of accessing social care services.

Building Toward Solutions

The policy team has been gathering views and evidence to inform policy options from:

• Stakeholder engagement including
  • Service recipient experience: Speaking directly with people who have lived experience of accessing social care and representative organisations
  • Insights from professionals: Consulting with social workers and others involved in providing social care, organisations that represent workers and others working and researching the sector
• Current practice mapping: Examining how eligibility criteria are currently applied across Scotland
• Best practice analysis: Researching different approaches to understanding and meeting people's care needs evident in Scotland, elsewhere in the UK and beyond 

The Path Forward

The ambition is to create a mechanism for determining access to community care and support services that genuinely reflects people's individual needs and outcomes while upholding their human rights. This is part of a wider aspiration for social care reform to prioritise person-led care and enable people to access the right care at the right time for them.  

Options for overhauling eligibility criteria will be thoroughly appraised and evidence-based. 

Discussion

The panel raised the following points:

• Increasing frustration about the gatekeeping role that social workers now perform
• Importance of early intervention and helping people in their own communities but concerns the discussion about this has led to little change thus far
• Social workers want to be enabled and empowered to do their job as per their ethics, values and training
• The dominance of the NHS in HSCPs, and its primacy in Government policy, means that the focus of most social work activity is on delayed discharge –  a symptom of a failing system – with higher demand and fewer resources available for relationship based early help
• Current eligibility criteria reinforce deficits rather than strengths-based interventions
• The current social care system is complex and overhauling eligibility criteria is one part of a system-wide reform that’s needed. Local authority funding is another important part of the equation

How to Get Involved

All members of the policy panel were emailed a link to a post meeting survey which includes free text comment boxes. We would encourage all members to complete the survey.

About the Social Work Policy Panel

The panel exists to build bridges between frontline social workers, and the organisations and projects which develop and implement policy and practice for the profession.

It’s jointly run by the Scottish Association of Social Work, the Office of the Chief Social Work Adviser, and Social Work Scotland. 

Any social worker including, student or newly qualified social worker is welcome to join as a one-off on a particular topic of interest, or as a regular – it’s a space for you to ask questions, share your experience and views, talk to colleagues across Scotland, learn about how policy affects day-to-day practice, and develop closer links between the work you do and the future of social work. 

As a social worker, we know you’re busy and facing lots of competing pressures, so taking time out to engage with the wider issues facing social work means a lot, and you might not always find the time. That’s why we want to make the panel as meaningful to you as possible.

What you told us

We asked you what we should be covering in our future sessions and you told us:

• Workforce
• Disparities in role focus (i.e. adults vs Childrens) and rural vs urban
• Self-Directed Support implementation

You also told us that it was important to ensure that the impact of policy on social work identity is explored in these sessions. We will ensure that we do this in all future sessions.

If there are any topics that you wish to nominate for future session, please let us know through the panel mailbox: SWPP@basw.co.uk 

You also told us that a facilitated conversation after a presentation is your preferred format for the sessions but that there are session where breakout rooms are more effective for you. We will ensure that future sessions are designed with these preferences in mind.

Free coaching service for all social workers and social work students in Scotland 

What is the Social Work Professional Support Service (SWPSS)?

• A FREE and independent peer coaching service by and for social workers
• Has an ambition to have an impact on the culture of practice enabling social workers to be able take care of yourselves
• Facilitated by experienced and trained social work coaches who volunteer their time
• Provides you with a safe and empathetic space to think through any professional and/or personal challenges you may be facing
• Offers a confidential peer to peer listening space
• Supports self-care, wellbeing and empowerment
• Funded by the Scottish Government

The service is geared to provide coaching support whether you are a student, social work practitioner or manager. We have coaches from different fields and the whole range of experiences - choose your own coach and set up a session at a time that suits you.

Social workers have used the service to talk through their career planning and development needs, the impact of the work role on their personal life/health, placements, to gain confidence, to process the experience of being bullied/racially targeted or to manage change/turbulences in the organisations they work for.