Designing a corporate governance framework anchored in organisational values for Social Work England
Introduction
We helped Social Work England redesign its corporate governance, anchoring a new framework in the organisation’s own values and behaviours so that governance reflects the culture it is building.
The challenge
Social Work England is a relatively young regulator, established to protect the public by regulating social workers in England. As the organisation has grown, so has its governance, with boards, committees and processes developing over time to meet real needs, but not always as a single, coherent system.
Social Work England’s wider ‘Shaping Success Together’ culture change programme centres on a new organisational behaviours framework. As part of it, the organisation wanted its governance arrangements tested against three simple criteria: are they clear, are they proportionate, and are they well understood?
As an arm’s length public body accountable to the Department for Education, the organisation also needed to balance a genuine desire for agility and delegated decision making with the assurance expected of a regulator.
Social Work England commissioned Kaleidoscope Health and Care to lead this work and to produce a set of practical tools the organisation could use going forward.
Our approach
From the outset our team treated this piece of work as a powerful cultural intervention, not an exercise to tactically redesign a governance framework. Rather than starting from generic best practice, we anchored our recommendations in the behaviours and values Social Work England had already defined. These became the guiding logic for how governance should work in this particular organisation, rather than a model imported from elsewhere.
We combined structured interviews across the organisation, from the chief executive and executive directors through to heads of function and specialist teams, with a thorough review of existing governance documentation. We also looked outward, reviewing the governance arrangements of comparable regulators and drawing on established frameworks from bodies including the Chartered Governance Institute and the Good Governance Institute.
Throughout, we ran collaborative workshops with staff to test our emerging thinking and co-design the products that came out of the work. This was a deliberate choice. We wanted Social Work England to help shape its own governance framework, and to feel genuine ownership of it, rather than being handed something built entirely from outside.
Results
At the conclusion of our discovery phase, we had identified lots of great practice and some areas to focus on for improvement. We worked with Social Work England to turn these insights into practical outputs designed to help implement change.
Together, we developed a set of risk-based recommendations organised around five themes: Purpose, Profile, Process, Performance and Practice. Alongside these, we produced a set of products for the organisation to adopt, including:
- an overarching governance framework and principles rooted in Social Work England’s own behaviours and values
- a visual map of the current governance arrangements
- a suite of supporting tools, including minimum standards, decision logs and review cycles, designed to give the organisation practical ways of putting the new framework into everyday practice.
Social Work England has now signed off all of these products, giving the organisation a governance framework that is not only clearer and more proportionate, but genuinely its own, built on the culture it is working to embed across the whole organisation.