Assessing a Specialized Educational Program to Build Competency in Public Child Welfare Practice

BACKGROUND & PURPOSE: Child welfare workers are at the front lines of providing services to vulnerable children and families. The quality of the services can only be as high as the competence of the child welfare worker (Ellett, 2009). To improve the quality of child welfare services, states collaborate with Schools of Social Work to use Title IV-E federal funding to recruit and prepare BSW and MSW students for professional child welfare practice (Clark, 2003). Some IV-E students come to the program already having some experience with child welfare. There were two research questions for this study: 1. Will attitude, knowledge, and skill based competencies for child welfare practice increase after participation in a specialized educational program? 2. Is prior child welfare experience associated with higher levels of perceived competency prior and following participation in the Title IV-E program? METHODS: This pre-post test design used a competency assessment with 334 MSW Title IV-E students who agreed to participate in the program evaluation from 2003 to 2009 (7 cohorts of students). Of these participants, 78% (n = 261) reporting having some public child welfare experience prior to participation in the program. This exploratory study assessed for child welfare competence acquisition measured by a 13-item (skill areas) self-perceived child welfare competency survey (developed for the MSW Title IV-E program) and assessed for the impact that prior child welfare experience had on these competence skills. Title IV-E students were assessed for self-perceived child welfare competency at the beginning and end of the academic year. For research question #1 a series of 13 paired samples t-tests were conducted. For research question #2 three one-way ANOVA analyses were conducted to explore pre and post-training scores as well as total change in scores for students who did and did not report prior public child welfare experience. RESULTS: Findings indicate that perception of child welfare competency skills increased following participation in the IV-E program. Overall, students improved their self reported competency after participating in the IV-E Program across all of the 13 domains with a range of .89 and 1.81 point higher scores between pre and post test. Prior experience in public child welfare was found to be associated with higher initial competency [F (1, 259) = 14.483, p = .008], but following program participation those students with and those without prior experience did not have differing levels of competency [F (1, 259) = .701, p = .701]. CONCLUSIONS & IMPLICATIONS: The findings from this study suggest that skill based training can be beneficial to all workers, even those with previous experience. This suggests that training programs such as the Title IV-E program, can provide skill based training, pre-employment preparation, and build competency for a career in public child welfare. Findings from this study influenced decision-making at the organizational level to permit IV-E graduates, who demonstrate child welfare competence, to take mandatory state child welfare competency exams during their educational program and to exempt out of mandatory pre-service training.