The Department for Education are launching a national Practice Supervisor Development Programme (PSDP). This programme will be for those social workers taking up their first role in which they are responsible for supporting and developing the practice of others.

Research in Practice will be responsible for running this new programme working with a number of local delivery partners including the South Yorkshire Teaching Partnership, drawing on the expertise of several highly respected organisations including Tavistock and Portman NHS Foundation Trust, University of Sussex and Goldsmith’s University of London.

This programme will have a strong focus on embedding key knowledge and skills, including those set out in the knowledge and skills statement for practice supervisors. It will focus on key aspects of management and leadership, and equipping participants with the confidence to lead their teams, manage practitioner workloads and wellbeing and develop practitioners’ own knowledge, skills and confidence.

The programme will also have a focus on embedding learning within organisations. Extensive engagement with the sector will inform the final programme design. We expect the programme to reach approximately 700 newly promoted practice supervisors over the next two years.

South Yorkshire Teaching Partnership recruited two training facilitators in the summer and they are Gordon Jelley (Rotherham Local Authority) and Kerry Byrne (Rotherham Local Authority).  The Training Facilitator Team also includes Simon Howard (Sheffield), Dave Bosworth (University of Sheffield) and Lynda Hughes (University of Sheffield) who have also been involved with the design of the programme.