Ian Vinall - Video Profile
Transcript
Certainly from my perspective West Sussex has a certain feel about it, I guess in terms of the way in which it does its work, which is positive, and certainly in terms of support and training and all of those things which are really, really important, I think. West Sussex has been really quite impressive in that sense. Certainly for practitioners that I have responsibility for and work with - they range from non qualified staff through to qualified staff - there's always a sense, I feel, that there's opportunities for non qualified staff to progress in terms of career development. That's been really, really positive so we've had some good examples of practitioners who have worked in a range of different settings but have then progressed into their social work career. There's a culture I believe in West Sussex around children and young people and families actually being the focus of the work that we do and it's actually quite impressive in the way in which social workers and practitioners work together in meeting the needs of children and young people. We've done an awful lot of work over the last few months to work with partners and other agencies and I do really, really feel we've joined up our services much, much more appropriately to serve the needs of children, young people and families in our area. From my experience, I think we're one of the vanguards in some of that work. We've been working very closely with local government and government offices to deliver something different to children and young people in terms of rural social work, if that's the right term, as well as urban social work. They are equal challenges in some of that work and I think it brings a certain interesting aspect of working in West Sussex when you've got both rural and urban parts which are equally challenging. The experience I've had has been very positive and obviously I've progressed in my career in West Sussex and opportunities have arisen which I've taken but also in terms of the training development opportunities. We have a wide range of opportunities for staff to develop their skills and knowledge and experience and certainly the training arrangements in West Sussex have been some of the most impressive I've been part of.
