Social work services

Tender description

The Department is looking to appoint an assessment content partner to generate and maintain content for the National Assessment and Accreditation System (NAAS) to support the national rollout of NAAS scheduled to commence in spring 2020. Initial rollout of NAAS began in a 2-phased rollout in July 2018 (Phase 1) with a small group of volunteer local authorities. Feedback to date has been positive and rollout is on track with our expectations. We expect Phase 2 to start in spring 2019 with a larger, more demographically diverse group. Subject to successful implementation of Phase 1 and 2, we would expect full national rollout of NAAS from spring 2020. This contract is an exciting opportunity to join the innovative work in the social work reform Programme to support the national roll out of NAAS. Our aim is to help improve the practice of child and family social workers with a view to improving outcomes for vulnerable children and families. The purpose of the contract is to appoint an assessment Content Partner who will deliver a service that generates, validates and maintains sufficient volumes of high-quality assessment content to support the national roll out of NAAS, scheduled to commence in spring 2020, and achieve its objectives. The current assessment for NAAS is made up of 3 main parts and is based on the knowledge and skills statement (KSS) for child and family practitioners (ACFP) and child and family practice supervisors (ACFPS). The KSS are now post-qualifying standards. It includes: — practice endorsement against the KSS/post-qualifying standards undertaken prior to the assessment: social workers will review their practice with their manager to decide, jointly, whether they are ready for assessment, — knowledge assessment: an online assessment of multiple choice and multiple response questions based on general and applied social work knowledge and — simulated practice assessment: two practice simulations, a reflective assessment and a written assessment. The practice endorsement is undertaken within the local authority, as it is their judgement whether and when to put forward individuals for external assessment. The remaining parts of the assessment are undertaken by highly qualified and trained assessors. We anticipate the core process for the generation, validation and maintenance of NAAS content to be in 6 stages: 1) Review and analysis of previously generated content, assessment methodology and content performance data, 2) Generation of new assessment content, 3) Validation of all content generated, including knowledge questions, simulated practice, reflective and written assessments, 4) Collation of test sets, 5) Preparation of content for assessment platform and transfer to the delivery partner, 6) Ongoing performance monitoring.