Supervision: A contested space for learning and decision making

Abstract

Supervision is a core activity in social work in the UK and elsewhere, widely associated with a range of positive outcomes for service users and professionals, while Public Inquiries and Serious Case Reviews have identified poor supervision as a factor in some child deaths. While there is agreement on the nature and value of ‘good’ supervision there are debates on the possibilities of delivering it in today’s pressured, poorly resourced working environments and a lack of data on what actually happens in supervision. This article presents some findings from interviews with social workers and their managers drawn from a wider study on how social workers make decisions in child protection work. They suggest that supervision is an important site for evaluating practitioner accounts and thereby constructing knowledge and making decisions about cases against a background of uncertainty and complexity. However, the ways in which these processes were negotiated shed light on supervision as a complex social process with a range of unofficial, tacit functions, embedded in the webs of social actions and exchanges that created and sustained the identities of the practitioners and their teams. What also emerged were the complex skills experienced supervisors developed in challenging and refining practitioner accounts, skills which novice supervisors struggled to acquire.

Keywords

Supervision decision making child protection

Background

From a policy perspective in the UK, there is agreement that good quality supervision is essential to good outcomes for service users and to developing practitioners’ expertise and job satisfaction. Despite all the changes to social work practice supervision’s importance remains unquestioned (Phillipson, 2009). In his report on the protection of children in England, Laming (2009) argued that good supervision should take place in a supportive learning environment and foster ‘deliberate, reflective social work practice’ (p.32). Supervision was a central element of the Newly Qualified Social Work (NQSW) programme in the UK (Carpenter et al., 2012a) while its successor, the assessed first year in employment (ASYE) emphasises the importance of critical reflection fostered by supervision (Skills For Care, 2012). In her report on UK Child Protection systems, Munro (2011) argued that supervision was essential in enabling social workers to review their practice and develop reasoning and decision making skills. Using supervision effectively is a key element in the government’s statement on knowledge and skills for child and family social workers (Department for Education, 2014), echoing Munro’s argument that reflective supervision hones reasoning skills and enables good judgements to be made from often uncertain or conflicting information. Research shows that supervision increases workers’ skills in case management and analysis and is associated with reduced staff turnover and increased job satisfaction (Carpenter et al., 2012b).

Conversely, studies of child deaths in the UK have highlighted poor or absent supervision as a factor when social workers become overwhelmed by complex, demanding cases that can impair judgement and critical thinking (Brandon et al., 2012; Reder et al., 1993).

The evidence base linking good supervision with a range of positive outcomes is not strong. Literature reviews by Carpenter et al. (2013) and Manthorpe et al. (2015) highlight the lack of robust studies on its effectiveness. A number of the key studies are quantitative, focusing on frequency rather than quality, and provide little evidence of what actually occurs in supervision sessions (Beddoe, 2012; Carpenter et al., 2012a; Manthorpe et al., 2015)

Both the frequency and the quality of supervision have been questioned though childrens’ social workers seem to get it more frequently than adult workers (Manthorpe et al., 2015). Beddoe (2010) argues that the organisational interest in supervision stems from preoccupations with risk management. With time and resources under pressure the managerial, case-oversight function of supervision has come to dominate, turning much supervision into an exercise in compliance (Morrison and Wonnacott, 2010; Munro, 2011) that fits with neo-liberal and post-welfarist discourses (Noble and Irwin, 2009). Munro (2011: 133) characterises the front-line worker’s experience as one of heavy caseloads and limited supervision. The situation on the ground may be more varied. There is clearly a policy commitment to critically reflective supervision (Skills For Care, 2012) however partially carried out, and there is evidence that skilled supervisors can balance its conflicting demands (Bourn and Hafford-Letchfield, 2011). There is a long tradition in social work of ‘street level bureaucracy’ (Evans and Harris, 2004) and bureau-professionalism (Harris, 1998), affording practitioners considerable discretion, and while this has been curtailed in recent years, practices will always vary as situated actors work within local rationalities and values (Kemshall, 2010).

The competing functions of supervision

Supervision is described as having a range of functions – administrative, educational, developmental – and to be of good quality it should cover them all: ‘good’ supervision goes beyond case and task management to offer developmental and emotional support in a safe space (Munro, 2008; Carpenter et al., 2013). Yet these functions have long been seen as potentially incompatible (Hughes and Pengelly, 1997; Hair, 2013; Manthorpe et al., 2015). Beddoe (2012) draws on the work of Bernstein (1999) to argue that these functions require radically different forms of discourse – ‘horizontal’ discourses using everyday ‘common-sense’ knowledge forms organised in an unsystematic, tacit way and ‘vertical’ discourses favouring systematically and hierarchically structured knowledge forms with explicit rules governing access and distribution. While this reflects the diversity of social work’s knowledge base (Pawson et al., 2003) it suggests that moving between the different functions of supervision is not straightforward: even ‘good’ supervision occupies a contested space within which different narratives (those of supervisor, supervisee, service user, carer, other professionals) compete, leaving the formalised space of organisational supervision hardly able to contain them (Noble and Irwin, 2009). However, few supervisors receive training – most become supervisors on becoming managers and rely on their previous experience of being supervised and working with service users (Hair, 2013) though more training is now provided for newly qualified workers (Carpenter et al., 2012a). Phillipson (2009) argues that the traditional one-to-one model enshrines implicit assumptions about power and expertise that may be inimical to supervision’s developmental functions and may be obsolete in today’s practice as more and more workers only get informal supervision. In multi-professional contexts social workers may be supervised by other professionals who may not share social work values (Hair, 2013; Manthorpe et al., 2015). One-to-one supervision may be complemented by group supervision and peer discussion which can be better for discussing and rethinking decisions (Munro, 2008).

Supervision, then, is a difficult and contested activity – because of the range of functions it is meant to encompass, the nature of social work practice and the nature of the organisations within which it occurs. Adding to the limited knowledge of what actually takes place in supervision in day-to-day practice is clearly important.

Supervision and decision making

My particular interest in this study was to explore supervision’s place in decision making. As suggested, supervision may be important for reflecting on the emotional demands of the work, reducing practitioners’ burn-out and the impairment of their judgements. It may also be a site for developing good reasoning skills and constructing arguments.

The task characteristics of social work suggest practice is rooted in uncertainty, complexity and intractably ‘wicked’ problems (Devaney and Spratt, 2009):

poorly defined problems

uncertain, fast-moving situations

large numbers of indicators presented rapidly or simultaneously

fallible indicators that are hard to measure objectively or reliably

action-feedback loops rather than linear cause-and-effect

time stress: the need to make decisions quickly

(Helm, 2011; Orasanu and Connolly, 1993; van de Luitgaarden, 2009)

Making decisions quickly in uncertain, dynamic situations favours naturalistic or intuitive decision making (Hammond, 1996) which often works well but is prone to some well-established biases as decisions are based on previous experience after considering only a limited range of options (Gigerenzer and Goldstein, 1996; Tversky and Kahneman, 1974). A crucial bias is over-confidence in initial decisions and a failure to reconsider them in the light of new information (Munro, 1999). Failures to consider research-based evidence, relevant theories or consider alternative hypotheses have also been noted (Benbenishty et al., 2003; Broadhurst et al., 2010). Supervision can offer a protected space for more analytical thinking where a fuller range of options is carefully considered, perhaps by means of decision trees: a lengthy process rarely possible in daily practice (Helm, 2011; O’Sullivan, 2011) but which may be essential in correcting biases, appraising research-based evidence and theory and reflecting on service users’ perspectives (Taylor, 2013).

Lack of good supervision may be understood as a systemic error. Practice uncertainty means errors cannot be eradicated but may be reduced in organisations where there is an emphasis on good supervision and critical thinking enabling learning to be made from mistakes (Munro, 2008; Thompson and Dowding, 2009). It may be individual workers who make mistakes but these are often only the immediately identifiable result of deeper organisational problems which remain latent in the system until activated by certain circumstances (Reason, 2000; Rzepnicki and Johnson, 2005). Heavy workloads and tight timescales resulting in rushed practice in which there is little room for reflective supervision have been identified in situations where child deaths have occurred (Reder et al., 1993) but also in ‘normal’ practice (Broadhurst et al., 2010).

The study

The data discussed here is drawn from a study of how social workers made decisions in child protection work. Observations and semi-structured interviews were carried out over a five-month period across two social work teams in Northern England. One was a local authority child protection team dealing with initial referrals and the other a voluntary organisation undertaking in-depth family assessments for the local authority. The aim was to explore how social workers’ decisions were made in everyday practice characterised by high levels of referrals, complex cases requiring rapid decisions, the need to make sense of a mass of complex information whose reliability was difficult to ascertain and significant levels of stress and uncertainty: conditions which as suggested favour intuitive decision making and could activate any latent system errors such as poor supervision.

The teams were treated as case studies, a good method for exploring situated complexity in depth (Stake, 2003). While generalising from case studies must always be cautious the work of these teams was not unrepresentative of busy social work teams in the UK and it was anticipated that some careful theoretical generalisations (Silverman, 2010) could be made. Some months after the fieldwork was concluded the local authority was inspected by Ofsted. Comments about supervision – a mix of positive (it took place regularly and was valued by staff) and negative (little evidence of sufficient challenging and reflection and some poor managerial oversight) – suggested that supervision in the authority was neither unusually good or poor.

The study was designed methodologically to get close to the everyday routines of the work, the taken-for-granted aspects of the culture (Lofland et al., 2006), to understand the informal rules shaping practice, constructing knowledge and informing decision making (Scourfield and Pithouse, 2006). Routines are regularly repeated activities and this repetition gives them “a degree of intrinsic significance” (Hammersley and Atkinson, 2007: 169) in the social order. Lofland et al.’s (2006) typology of social settings was used to conceptualise supervision as a complex social encounter embedded in the working culture with a range of unwritten as well as formal functions not just a means to an organisational end.

A realist perspective was useful in providing theoretical understandings of detailed local data. Miles and Huberman (1994) emphasise that causality is localised and contextual: whatever wider influences exist it is the here and now that is locally important. A realist perspective suggests that it is not interventions themselves that ‘work’ but how people act upon and interpret those interventions (Pawson and Tilley, 1997), suggesting that supervision will vary locally. A detailed analysis of localised data is needed to provide an account which does not simplify the processes (Mason, 2002).

Relevant literature suggested that supervision would be a key aspect of decision making and several questions on supervision were included in the interview schedule. As these were semi-structured interviews some variation in initial and associated follow-up questions was acceptable and participants discussed their experiences of supervision both in general and in respect of specific cases, generating rich and detailed data drawn from their experiences (Charmaz, 2014).

Interviews took place in private rooms within the offices, lasted between 50 and 80 minutes each and were digitally recorded and transcribed verbatim.

Twenty-one interviews were carried out. In the local authority team 10 social workers and 4 managers, including 1 senior manager who oversaw the team’s work were interviewed with 3 further interviews on a specific child protection referral occurring during the study. Four interviews were carried out in the smaller voluntary organisation team with 3 social workers and 1 manager. One of the social workers was newly qualified but all the rest had at least 2 years post-qualifying experience, in some cases considerably more. All but one were female.

A significant element of the study involved approximately 45 hours of qualitative or participant observation of intake or ‘duty’ sessions, team meetings and general team talk (Saltiel, 2015). I observed 3 one-to-one supervision sessions but I did not use the field notes from these sessions as it was apparent my presence disturbed these intimate meetings, raising issues about observing small-scale social encounters (Lofland et al., 2006). However, I used these observations to refine my interview questions about supervision. My extended presence as an observer created a degree of rapport which, I believe encouraged participants to provide rich and nuanced answers (Kvale, 2007).

As well as the verbatim transcripts analytic memos (Hammersley and Atkinson, 2007), recording hunches and hypotheses were written after the interviews then rewritten in greater detail during the transcription phase and formed an invaluable step in analysis (Corbin and Strauss, 2008)

Transcripts were hand-coded and Burnard’s (1991) method of repeated re-reading was followed in order to develop the coding into more thematic categories. Codes were both deductively derived from a reading of relevant literature, and inductively based on a repeated reading of the data. Data were analysed thematically (Gibbs, 2007).

It is important that qualitative studies are written reflexively so that the researcher’s own stance in the research process is clear (Charmaz, 2014). As a former social worker who has been a supervisor and supervisee I was both insider and outsider – a difficult balance to keep (Humphrey, 2013). At times it was difficult not to over-identify with the participants. At others my requests that participants explain certain forms of social work jargon they assumed I would understand met with some resistance.

The study was ethically approved by my university.

The following sections are structured to differentiate between data drawn from supervisees and from supervisors. The key themes that emerged for both groups are elaborated in the Discussion section. Data from participants in both organisations have been amalgamated as, while there were some differences, the findings and themes were very similar.

Quotes are identified by LA = local authority, VO = voluntary organisation.

Findings

The supervisees

While a number of the social workers pointed to problems in their supervision they all said that they found it extremely useful. No-one complained that they did not get enough supervision and there was a culture within both teams and their wider organisations whereby supervision was valued and occurred regularly. More than one experienced worker described how she might have left the profession, overwhelmed by its demands, if the supervisor had not supported them and given them space to, in some cases, simply cry about the work. Supervisors who were calm and approachable, who set the right ‘tone’ and contained their own personal issues were valued - several had stories of supervisors who had been preoccupied with their own problems.

Workers often said that they appreciated being able to discuss cases and the issues they raised: being able to talk over situations, to bounce ideas around, to think about how they might have done things differently.

…just talking about that case and talking about what plans I feel we should be doing…what things in the case I should be doing and just bouncing that off your manager and getting their feedback or something else to try or another suggestion that you might not have thought about before. (LA3)

Advice from the manager was not seen necessarily as the correct answer but as a fresh perspective to think about. Workers valued the space and time supervision could afford:

(It’s) good to be able to sit and have someone else’s whole attention for an hour. (VO2)

‘Reflection’ was the word used by a number of workers to describe this process of exploring practice rather than checking that procedures were being followed and cases processed. However, often there was not enough time and then neither reflective discussion or the more analytical discussion of evidence that supervision can offer occurred and supervision came to mirror the quick-moving intuitive decision-making of practice:

we don’t get a massive amount of opportunity (to review decisions) because it’s like a conveyor belt – one in, one out, one in, one out…that’s what it feels like. (LA2)

For workers involved in difficult cases where children had been seriously injured or died supervision’s administrative functions were valued – keeping managers informed and ensuring they underwrote the decisions being made, sometimes daily. It was immensely reassuring that situations could be reviewed frequently and managers take responsibility for decisions:

This was a daily thing – either seeing the child, seeing the parents, liaising with police – and we would feed back a lot of that to our manager and have debates about where we would go next really, step by step really, so that everyone was clear about what our plan was. (LA4)

Less experienced workers also valued directive supervision. One, describing a time when she was newly qualified, said:

I think…. I mean when I first started in the team when, you’d do an assessment and then you’d think you’d finished it, you’d think you’d spoken to everybody and then X’d say “well, have you spoken to this person and have you shared information with this person?” And you’d say “No I haven’t” – “well you need to go and do that and I’ll not close it until you’ve done it.” and then you’d think “Oh God, you know, that’s gonna be another piece of work and it’s gonna be open for another week”, and then you’d do it and then you’d think “well actually, that’s the right thing to do… (LA3)

But workers did not always want managers to make decisions for them. Some supervisors were criticised for simply telling them what to do when they wanted more discussion:

we explain what’s gone on, what I think, she chews it over and she makes that decision. (LA1)

As workers developed skills and experience they wanted to play a more active part in decisions. Some learned that to achieve this they had to think strategically about how to present a case so the supervisor would see it in a particular way:

We’re choosing to tell (the supervisor) the information we want to tell her about a case….and we’re presenting it in a certain way which will affect the decision making, so for example I could sit here and say Oh you know, Dad’s still drinking, and I’m worried about this and ooh, you know whatever, or I could say Dad’s had a couple of drinks but actually on the whole he’s doing really well and that immediately creates a different kind of attitude. (LA1)

Some workers were critical of supervisors who made decisions without meeting the families:

because you know seeing things in black and white, on paper, is very different from meeting the family and having a relationship with them and understanding all of these family dynamics. (VO2)

But others said they liked to be challenged, seeing this as a key function of supervision: being ‘put on the spot’:

being put on the spot…. she’s very like that and will, you know, put her pen down and say ‘go on then’, and expect you to explain and I think that’s really good and really important because it’s making you think through everything. (LA2)

or being kept organised:

supervision always gives us a to-do list which is really good and because it’s monthly it means you’re keeping on top of everything basically, nothing’s drifting. (LA6)

Several workers said that being challenged helped them improve their ability to argue a case and they valued supervisors being prepared to spend time with them like this. This contrasted with supervisors who simply told them what to do.

The supervisors

Like the supervisees, the supervisors emphasised the importance of setting the right ‘tone’: of being calm, consistent and confident so that workers’ anxieties were contained and decisions made clearly.

you have to feel quite confident that you are making decisions on a daily basis that are consistent. If you’re not consistent it creates anxieties I think for the rest of the staff team because if you know where your manager’s levels are that helps you filter out stuff in duty, it helps you make decisions. (LA14)

A major theme was being able to assess and question the quality of the accounts of cases workers brought to supervision. These were mainly verbal accounts: there was less mention of written accounts such as casenotes and reports. The less experienced managers found this very difficult.

sometimes you wish you could sit and look at every case and read the case events to get a good clear picture of what’s happening in the household…you don’t physically have time to do that so you’re very dependent on information that’s given to you. As a supervisor it becomes, you know, third party information, you’re relying on somebody else’s judgement. (LA11)

One described having accepted a worker’s pre-birth assessment without challenging it. The case had been closed but concerns about the baby’s development from other professionals caused it to be reopened

I hadn’t explored things enough in supervision…. I hadn’t checked the case recording, asked more questions…and ultimately it was, you know, it was me that said ok this case can close…so again it’s my decision making so you get worried about it and it does…. certainly for me it’s been a massive learning curve. I would never close a case just before a baby’s born…which is I think the basics - you know if there’s concerns up til eight month let’s monitor a bit longer and see how things go after the baby’s born. (LA12)

The supervisor says she accepted the worker’s account so unquestioningly that she made a ‘basic’ error. She also had to discuss with the worker the poor quality of her assessment.

it was quite difficult because obviously you don’t want to cause anxiety to social workers but it’s also about a learning curve and that’s the way that we looked at it. I think that helped them to say maybe they could have done things differently without saying you know oh this was all wrong. It’s always easier to look at things in hindsight. (LA12)

The worker was quite angry at being questioned and the supervisor decided to discuss the case as an experience from which they could both learn while emphasising how difficult it was to make judgements (even though she said this had been a ‘basic’ mistake). The supervisor knew she was reframing the discussion in a way that she and the supervisee found less uncomfortable.

Another inexperienced supervisor commented:

you’re dependent on whoever is coming in for supervision, you’re dependent on them, their understanding, their views, their thresholds…and then you make a decision about what needs to happen and I think that is quite scary. (LA11)

This supervisor was also faced with rethinking an account she had accepted too quickly and was aware she used a strategy designed not undermine her relationship with the worker – that there hadn’t been sufficient information:

so I don’t think she felt undermined in any way – I hope that the way I said it was, you know, you’d got the information you’d got, unfortunately they came with extra information that we hadn’t got….is the way I played it, and it seems to have been ok – we’ve still got a very good working relationship. (LA11)

Experienced supervisors were aware of this problem but were more confident about assessing the status of practitioners’ accounts:

well obviously I can’t meet every service user, every child, it would be impossible so people are going out and doing an assessment and coming back and talking to me about what they’ve observed…You’ve got me trying to make sense of this family through this social worker’s eyes and to be able to think well why do you think that and what leads you to believe that and why do you think that’s true or what evidence have you got for that? (LA14)

This supervisor suggests the importance of getting to know practitioners’ strengths, weaknesses and biases and seeing the case through a phenomenological filter – what Smith and Osborn (2008) call a ‘double hermeneutic’ (p. 53): trying to make sense of how someone else makes sense of the world. One supervisor spoke of visiting families themselves occasionally, but only in very serious cases: normally she would not have time to do this.

Other experienced supervisors spoke about the skills they had developed in questioning practitioners and trying to develop their ability to argue and analyse cases. They did not see themselves as experts with the ‘right’ answers – because this was complex work where there might be several perspectives – but they did recognise their expertise in questioning and reflecting with their supervisees.

being open to doing things better rather than thinking you know it all which I don’t and never will. So yeah being open to other people’s ideas and getting social workers to have the confidence to say what they feel, to get them to make decisions…So I have to be aware of that as well because I….have to be aware to give them the space to actually say what they feel the decision should be and also encourage them to use their assessment skills…and if we have a disagreement to be able to talk that through and come to some…solution. (LA14)

This supervisor talks about deliberately stepping back and giving practitioners space to be reflective and analytical: a skilled and active process:

because I think they all know what the word “analysis” means and it isn’t just again describing what you’ve done, it isn’t again just repeating what you’ve just described earlier on in the assessment. It’s…. “what does this mean?”. (LA14)

Another experienced senior manager talked about helping workers to observe carefully and not take service user accounts at face value:

Is she really going to tell you, a social worker with all the powers she thinks you’ve got and when you’re investigating the quality of parenting to her child, is she actually going to say to you “yes I do drink 2 or 3 bottles a night love”? (LA13)

The same manager talked about encouraging workers to project their arguments into the future: perhaps this parent can care adequately now but will they be able to do so in five years time?

These responses from experienced supervisors about how they challenged workers to develop their reasoning and observational skills came with an understanding that there must be a relationship, a rapport, for such challenges to be successful. This was based on a mutual understanding that the work was demanding and mistakes could easily be made.

….most of us at some time have done something that wasn’t the best decision but to be able to admit to that and not be in a situation where you feel judged. There needs to be a relationship between supervisor and worker. (VO4)

It has been suggested that group supervisions and peer discussions can also be helpful, sometimes more helpful, than one-to-one supervision. Informal team talk was observed throughout the study, particularly in the local authority team which occupied a large open-plan office but had arranged its desks and work spaces so as to facilitate communication. Cases were often discussed in the group, experiences shared and feelings ventilated. This talk was valued by most (though not all) team members and provided a looser, less hierarchical, more experimental way of testing ideas. Some voices in the team were more vocal than others and some managers worried that some team members were disseminating views that they considered wrong or poorly argued.

Discussion

An overarching theme emerging from these findings is of supervision as a complex social encounter taking place in demanding, stressful working contexts: a repeated, routinised practice embedded in social work’s professional culture with immense significance for the professional identities of the actors involved. It is often through such routines, and their associated rhetoric, that workplace knowledge is constructed (Scourfield and Pithouse, 2006). Supervision was a key site within which the diverse, uncertain sources of knowledge the social workers drew upon were evaluated and reconstructed. Atkinson (1995) argues that it is through revisiting cases and discussing them repeatedly that a shared language is created. While this incorporates wider policy and evidential perspectives it is also locally and socially produced.

Here was another key theme: that of social actors artfully negotiating what they would talk about and how they would do so. Central to this was a negotiation about the status of practitioner accounts. The frequent absence of uncontested facts and the prevalence of uncertain, potentially fallible information meant that there was often no uncontested way of understanding a case and so supervisors and supervisees worked to produce versions of cases that could be ‘sold’ (White, 2003) to their organisation and to other professionals. These negotiations took place in a social context. Pithouse (1998) suggests that team harmony and morale rests on ‘a collective notion of a company of equals’ (p. 74): that the social order is managed so as to promote a sense of equal collegial competence and avoid uncomfortable scrutiny – a rule of ‘minimal scrutiny-maximum harmony’ (p. 74). He argues that while supervision is a mechanism for opening ‘invisible’ work to examination this scrutiny should not undermine team morale. So it takes place in private and even there the supervisor must show loyalty to the team and take the path least likely to disrupt the assumption of equal competence.

This could be a tricky business. Supervisees could be defensive about their work as well as artful in their decisions about what to bring to supervision and while some appreciated that supervisors’ distance from practice gave them a fresh perspective others felt this distance meant they did not have the workers’ insights. Novice managers found that their own experiences as practitioners did not help them when evaluating workers’ accounts. Conscious of the need to maintain team cohesiveness, they tended to treat them at face value, only interrogating them when it became necessary because concerns had been raised by other professionals and then framing the challenge in the least uncomfortable way. It was clear that serious errors could go unchallenged as a result.

The more experienced supervisors in this study had developed ways of addressing practitioner accounts more critically. They created within supervision space for practitioners to reflect upon and analyse their work. One spoke of seeing cases ‘through the workers’ eyes’ – exploring how workers made sense of situations – while others attempted to extend workers’ reasoning skills. Benbenishty et al. (2003) argue that social workers are able to use ‘basic’ arguments but not more extended arguments such as qualifying claims, searching for disconfirming evidence and considering alternative hypotheses. Gambrill (2010) draws attention to the risk of ‘propaganda’ in social work: ‘encouraging beliefs and actions with the least thought possible…..including hiding well-argued alternatives and lack of evidence for claims’ (p. 302). Supervision can be valuable in developing reasoning skills (Munro, 2008) and more deliberative analysis (Helm, 2011). While this takes time, which was not always available, there was evidence that experienced supervisors could encourage supervisees to consider a wider range of hypotheses, project their analyses into the future and consider more methodical, sequential analysis rather than simply confirming their intuitive decisions. These experienced supervisors understood the need to establish supportive relationships with supervisees for their supervision to be successful. While it is argued that supervision should provide support and a safe reflective space it might be suggested that Pithouses’s minimal scrutiny-maximum harmony rule remained important even for these more experienced supervisors. Helping practitioners to uncover the biases and errors in their reasoning and develop more analytical and extended arguments are complex cognitive skills and it may be that the pressures to reduce supervision to exercises in management compliance prevent supervisors developing and extending expertise in these strategies.

Team talk seemed to provide support for some team members and strengthen some team relationships but others were marginalised. The talk I observed seemed to have an important function as emotional labour. Hochschild (2003) argues that emotion work, which becomes emotional labour when it becomes part of professional work and thus has commodity value, involves managing public displays of feelings according to complex social rules. Emotions become networks of social transactions, producing public displays that make others feel, for example cared for or looked after. Team talk may be very useful in providing support and testing ideas but, like supervision, it takes place in a social context and is enacted according to sets of informal rules.

Conclusion

This was a small study whose limitations are acknowledged but it may be useful in helping develop a more interactionist model of supervisory processes. Supervision is a complex and contested activity which tries to cover a range of arguably incompatible functions and which often struggles to survive in pressured work environments. It is also a core routine at the heart of social work culture, of great significance in developing and sustaining professionals’ identities. It is important to know more about how supervisors and supervisees actually ‘do’ supervision – what they discuss, how they discuss it, how they negotiate with each other, how they construct knowledge and make decisions. Whatever expectations there are of supervision in terms of wider policy it also a localised activity taking place between social actors who make a range of choices about how it will be enacted. Given the value of supervision in producing good outcomes for service users and professionals we should seek to know more about how it actually happens on a day-to-day basis.

In this study, newly promoted managers struggled with some of the demands placed upon them. Relying on their own experiences as practitioners was of limited usefulness. More experienced supervisors had learnt to attend to supervisees’ accounts, challenging them using a range of strategies that made practitioners analyse and reflect on their work. This required different skills from those which supervisors had used when front-line workers and may be crucial both in producing better decisions and, equally importantly, in maintaining team morale and identity. It also required different skills from those necessary to meet supervision’s managerial-oversight functions. This could be a prime focus for the training new supervisors should receive.

Footnotes

Declaration of conflicting interests

The author(s) declared no potential conflicts of interest with respect to the research, authorship, and/or publication of this article.

Funding

The author(s) received no financial support for the research, authorship, and/or publication of this article.

References

Atkinson

(1995) Medical Talk and Medical Work, London: Sage.

Beddoe

(2010) Surveillance or reflection: Professional supervision in ‘the risk society’. British Journal of Social Work 40(4): 1279–1296.

Beddoe

(2012) External supervision in social work: Power, space, risk and the search for safety. Australian Social Work 65(2): 197–213.

Benbenishty

Osmo

Gold

(2003) Rationales provided for risk assessments and for recommended interventions in child protection: A comparison between Canadian and Israeli professionals. British Journal of Social Work 33(2): 137–155.

Bernstein

(1999) Vertical and horizontal discourse: An essay. British Journal of Sociology of Education 20(2): 157–173.

Bourn

Hafford-Letchfield

(2011) The role of social work professional supervision in conditions of uncertainty. The International Journal of Knowledge, Culture and Change Management 10(9): 41–56.

Brandon M, Sidebotham P, Bailey S, et al. (2012) New Learning from Serious Case Reviews: A Two Year Report for 2009–11. Available at: https://www.gov.uk/government/publications/new-learning-from-serious-case-reviews-a-2-year-report-for-2009-to-2011 (accessed 15 September 2013).

Broadhurst

Wastell

White

(2010) Performing initial assessment: Identifying the latent conditions for error at the front-door of local authority children’s services. British Journal of Social Work 40(2): 352–370.

Burnard

(1991) A method of analysing interview transcripts in qualitative research. Nurse Education Today 11(6): 461–466.

10.

Carpenter

Patsios

Wood

(2012a) Newly Qualified Social Worker Programme: Final Evaluation Report (2008–11), London: Department for Education.

11.

Carpenter J, Webb C, Bostock L, et al. (2012b) Effective supervision in social work and social care. Available at: http://www.scie.org.uk/publications/briefings/briefing43/ (accessed 1 June 2015).

12.

Carpenter

Webb

Bostock

(2013) The surprisingly weak evidence base for supervision: Findings from a systematic review of research in child welfare practice (2000–2012). Children & Youth Services Review 35(11): 1843–1853.

13.

Charmaz

(2014) Constructing Grounded Theory, 2nd ed. London: Sage.

14.

Corbin

Strauss

(2008) Basics of Qualitative Research, 3rd ed. Thousand Oaks, CA: Sage.

15.

Department for Education (2014) Knowledge and Skills for Child and Family Social Work, UK: Department for Education.

16.

Devaney

Spratt

(2009) Child abuse as a complex and wicked problem: Reflecting on policy developments in the U.K. in working with children and families with multiple problems. Children and Youth Services Review 31(6): 635–641.

17.

Evans

Harris

(2004) Street level bureaucracy, social work and the (exaggerated) death of discretion. British Journal of Social Work 34(6): 871–895.

18.

Gambrill

(2010) Evidence-informed practice: Antidote to propaganda in the helping professions? Research on Social Work Practice 20(3): 302–320.

19.

Gibbs

(2007) Analyzing Qualitative Data, London: Sage.

20.

Gigerenzer

Goldstein

(1996) Reasoning the fast and frugal way: Models of bounded rationality. Psychological Review 103(4): 650–669.

21.

Hair

(2013) The purpose and duration of supervision and the training and discipline of supervisors: What social workers say they need to provide effective services. British Journal of Social Work 43(8): 1562–1588.

22.

Hammersley

Atkinson

(2007) Ethnography: Principles in Practice, 3rd ed. London: Routledge.

23.

Hammond

(1996) Human Judgement and Social Policy, New York: Oxford University Press.

24.

Harris

(1998) Scientific management, bureau-professionalism, new managerialism: The labour process in state social work. British Journal of Social Work 28(6): 839–862.

25.

Helm

(2011) Judgement or assumptions? The role of analysis in assessing children and young people’s needs. British Journal of Social Work 41(5): 894–911.

26.

Hochschild

(2003) The Managed Heart: Commercialisation of Human Feeling, Berkeley, CA: University of California Press.

27.

Hughes

Pengelly

(1997) Staff Supervision in a Turbulent Environment, London: Jessica Kingsley.

28.

Humphrey

(2013) Dilemmas in doing insider research in professional education. Qualitative Social Work 12(5): 572–586.

29.

Kemshall

(2010) Risk rationalities in contemporary social work policy and practice. British Journal of Social Work 40(4): 1247–1262.

30.

Kvale

(2007) Doing Interviews, London: Sage.

31.

Laming

(2009) The Protection of Children in England: Action Plan, London: Stationery Office.

32.

Lofland

Snow

Anderson

(2006) Analyzing Social Settings: A Guide to Qualitative Observation and Analysis, 4th ed. Belmont, CA: Wadsworth Cengage.

33.

Manthorpe

Moriarty

Hussein

(2015) Content and purpose of supervision in social work practice: Views of newly qualified social workers, managers and directors. British Journal of Social Work 45(1): 52–68.

34.

Mason

(2002) Qualitative Researching, 2nd ed. London: Sage.

35.

Miles

Huberman

(1994) Qualitative Data Analysis, 2nd ed. London: Sage.

36.

Morrison T and Wonnacott J (2010) Supervision now or never: Reclaiming reflective supervision in social work. Available at: http://www.in-trac.co.uk/reclaiming-reflective-supervision.php (accessed 14 August 2012).

37.

Munro

(1999) Common errors of reasoning in child protection work. Child Abuse & Neglect 23(8): 745–758.

38.

Munro

(2008) Effective Child Protection, 2nd ed. London: Sage.

39.

Munro

(2011) The Munro Review of Child Protection: Final Report: A Child Centred System, Norwich: The Stationery Office.

40.

Noble

Irwin

(2009) Social work supervision: An exploration of the current challenges in a rapidly changing social, economic and political environment. Journal of Social Work 9(3): 345–358.

41.

O’Sullivan

(2011) Decision Making in Social Work, 2nd ed. Basingstoke: Palgrave Macmillan.

42.

Orasanu

Connolly

(1993) The reinvention of decision making. In: Klein

Orasanu

Calderwood

(eds) Decision Making in Action: Models and Methods, Norwood, NJ: Ablex.

43.

Pawson

Tilley

(1997) Realistic Evaluation, London: Sage.

44.

Pawson R, Boaz A, Grayson L, et al. (2003) Types and Quality of Knowledge in Social Care. Available at: www.scie.org.uk/publications/knowledgereviews/kr03.asp.

45.

Phillipson

(2009) Supervision and being supervised. In: Adams

Dominelli

Payne

(eds) Practising Social Work in a Complex World, Basingstoke: Palgrave Macmillan.

46.

Pithouse

(1998) Social Work: The Social Organisation of an Invisible Trade, 2nd ed. Aldershot: Ashgate.

47.

Reason

(2000) Human error: Models and management. BMJ(320768–770.

48.

Reder

Duncan

Gray

(1993) Beyond Blame: Child Abuse Tragedies Revisited, London: Routledge.

49.

Rzepnicki

Johnson

(2005) Examining decision errors in child protection: A new application of root cause analysis. Children and Youth Services Review 27(4): 393–407.

50.

Saltiel

(2015) Observing front line decision making in child protection. British Journal of Social Work. Epub ahead of print 18 December 2015. DOI: 10.1093/bjsw/bcv112.

51.

Scourfield

Pithouse

(2006) Lay and professional knowledge in social work: Reflections from ethnographic research on child protection. European Journal of Social Work 9(3): 323–337.

52.

Silverman

(2010) Doing Qualitative Research, 3rd ed. London: Sage.

53.

Skills for Care (2012) The Social Work ASYE. Available at: www.skillsforcare.org.uk (accessed 1 June 2015).

54.

Smith

Osborn

(2008) Interpretative phenomenological analysis. In: Smith

(eds) Qualitative Psychology: A Practical Guide to Research Methods, 2nd ed. London: Sage.

55.

Stake

(2003) Case studies. In: Denzin

Lincoln

(eds) Strategies of Qualitative Inquiry, 2nd ed. London: Sage.

56.

Taylor

(2013) Professional Decision Making and Risk in Social Work, 2nd ed. London: Sage Learning Matters.

57.

Thompson

Dowding

(2009) Essential Decision Making and Clinical Judgement for Nurses, Edinburgh: Elsevier.

58.

Tversky

Kahneman

(1974) Judgement under uncertainty: Heuristics and biases. Science 185(4157): 1124–1131.

59.

Van De Luitgaarden

(2009) Evidence-based practice in social work: Lessons from judgement and decision-making theory. British Journal of Social Work 39(2): 243–260.

60.

White

(2003) The social worker as moral judge: Blame responsibility and case formulation. In: Hall

Juhila

Parton

(eds) Constructing Clienthood in Social Work and Human Services, London: Jessica Kingsley.