Overview of the feature
We previously wrote about our thinking behind the areas of practice feature, the user needs underpinning it and our approach to designing the navigation.
The purpose of this feature was to ensure child and family social workers have an understanding of:
- the variety of areas of practice in child and family social work
- the possibility of moving between areas of practice as a means of sideways career development
- transferable skills and experience that can be transferred across areas of practice
We also wanted to provide social workers with clear steps for applying for new roles.
Designing the content
We highlighted just over 10 areas of practice within child and family social work and wrote initial drafts for these.
Our initial drafts were based on desk research of job adverts, and information from social work websites and previous user research sessions.
We structured the content based on our existing roles pages to provide consistency and enable users to easily understand the responsibilities and requirements of working in a particular area of practice, including:
- what you’ll do
- skills and knowledge
- how you’ll work
- who you’ll work with
- current opportunities
The ‘how you’ll work’ section was intended to provide users with information on likely working conditions within each area of practice. For example, social workers in adoption teams are likely to undertake a lot of travel to meet and screen potential adopters.
Due to the complexity of having all these pages reviewed before our initial release deadline, we decided to review and release them in batches. The first batch was a group of 4 core areas of social work practice:
- assessment and intake
- child protection and safeguarding
- courts
- youth justice
Reviewing and testing the content
We asked policy teams with expertise in specific areas of practice to view our content. We were also signposted to policy teams at the Ministry of Justice (MoJ) and Youth Justice Board (YJB) to review content for our youth justice page.
In user testing we found that social workers responded positively to the structure and ease of navigation. Team names were mostly recognised but can be highly variable across different local authorities. We iterated on these to ensure we were using the most widely recognisable terms.
Most users recognised the areas of practice even if their local authority didn’t have a team specifically serving that area. Users highlighted 3 areas of practice – domestic abuse, substance misuse and mental health – that are not served by specific teams, but by specialist workers sitting across teams. On that basis we removed these.
Users reported that some sections we not detailed enough and provided insights to make these more detailed and specific. They also reported that the ‘skills and knowledge’ sections lacked emphasis on the importance of understanding social work theory that underpins daily practice.
Users reported that the information in the ‘how you’ll work’ section was too variable between local authorities to be useful. We decided that after removing the variable information what was left lacked specificity to be useful to users, so removed the section altogether.
Users also highlighted instances of ‘non-transactional’ language (language that implies that a relationship between a social worker and child or family is not interactional) to be changed.
Next steps
After iterating on these initial 4 areas of practice we successfully released them to our live site. Our next goal is to develop the next batch to be released and have them reviewed by relevant policy teams and tested with users.
We will also develop a strategy for integrating domestic abuse, substance misuse and mental health as specialist functions of child and family social work, while making it clear they are not specific areas of social work practice.
We will continue testing with users and iterate on the findings.