Remuneration for Social Workers

I thank the Minister for the upward revision of the salary packages, especially for the social workers, and for communicating very frequently what it does for this professional group. Can the Minister confirm again that the other professionals, such as the therapists, educators and psychologists, are also paid competitively, especially across the public service sector versus the social service sector? And do the agencies, for example, reviewing these salaries have access to MOE, the Government or MOH, their salary scale data?

My next point is instead of communicating primarily what the Ministry has done for social workers, to ask the Minister not to leave the other professionals out and to communicate across the media and other groups about what it does for the rest of the sector as well.

Mdm Speaker, I thank Ms Denise Phua for her supplementary question. The answer is, yes. Indeed, when we talk about the social service professionals, we do not just include the social workers but we also include the other social service professionals like therapists, counsellors and early childhood intervention professionals. So, indeed, we take it as a collective package.

Let me just explain a bit about this benchmarking exercise. Since one or two years back, we have started a regular benchmarking exercise. We asked ourselves, for the people who join the social service sector, what would their equivalent pay be if they had opted for a similar job in another industry or in the other Government agencies? For example, medical social workers, who are also part of our social workers community, would be used as one of the benchmarks. Then there are other Government civil servants whom we also can use as part of the benchmark. So, we do collect these data and we use an independent agency to set this benchmark for us to set realistic salary benchmarks for our social service professionals.

Ever since our effort last year, we are quite confident that, for the new entrants, we have closed the gap a bit. There is still a bit more to go but, in the next phase, we are actually going to look at the mid-career entrants and also the more senior social service professionals because we find that the gap between what they would command if they had chosen an equivalent job

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elsewhere, there is still a bigger gap than the entrants. So, we will continue to work on this and, indeed, we will communicate to everyone that it is not just the social workers that we are talking about when we talk about social service professionals, we are also talking about the therapists, counsellors and so forth.

I thank the Minister again for his reply. I am sure we will see a great increase in the need for social workers with all the new initiatives that are going out, for example, the social service centres. I was also heartened to hear in the Minister's reply, when he mentioned about the Social Work Associates. In terms of reducing the pressure of recruiting new social workers, all of whom will require a degree, is the Ministry looking at expanding the role for these Social Work Associates so as to increase the talent pool of social workers but, at the same time, reduce the immediate pressure of recruiting social workers?

Mdm Speaker, I thank Dr Chia Shi-Lu for the supplementary questions and some of the suggestions. Indeed, let me explain that to attract enough people to meet the needs of the social service sector, we adopt a multi-pronged approach.

On the one hand, we try to increase the pipeline for the trained social workers and because these are usually degree holders, there is a finite number that we know we can realistically recruit from the market.

The second prong of our approach is to increase the pipeline of the social work associates. They may not go through a course with the same academic rigour as the social workers per se, but they have sufficient training to allow them to complement the work of the trained social workers. That is the second prong.

The third prong of our approach has to do with the fact that we are going to up the training of the many social service assistants, staff that are now currently being deployed at the social service offices. Previously, they undergo some training but we are going to intensify the training so that they can do more of the social service work, at least as the first line to do the triage, before we refer the more complex cases to the social workers.

In this way, we can do a triage of the complexity of the cases where the more straightforward uni-dimensional cases can be handled maybe by some of the social work associates or some of the better-trained social service staff. Then, for the more complex cases, we can hand it over to the professional social

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workers.

There is another prong of work that we are doing in order to lighten the workload of the social service professionals and this is the backend system behind the scene. Today, typically, a social worker may spend up to 40% or 50% of their time doing administrative work, meaning that they have to write the case files and transfer some of the data. We are trying to simplify this by investing in a comprehensive social service IT Masterplan which will come online, hopefully, by 2016. This will allow the social service professionals to share data at the same time to make the case management that much easier, very much akin to what we have for the healthcare system.

Minister mentioned just now that there was an average increment of 8% in terms of the increment for the salary. May I know whether MSF has set any target, to what level MSF wants to achieve in terms of increment for the salary?

Mdm Speaker, let me clarify. What I said was that the median was 8%, not the average. But having said that, it is not one specific target for the entire social service sector because there are different tiers of social service sector professionals and their pay gap has differences in the magnitude. So, for different sectors, for different tiers, we will set different targets. Our aim is to progressively close the gap between what they will command on an alternative career construct in a comparable industry.

Just a short supplementary question. Minister, I applaud and support all the steps that we are taking in this sector. I would like to ask whether the Ministry has a sense of the current shortfall of workers and professionals in this sector. I ask this because I expect that, in fact, the demand for these professionals and then other workers in this area will only grow and intensify. I hope that beyond making it more attractive for our citizens to work in this sector, if need to, we should allow the FSCs and the VWOs to also look at alternative sources outside the sector.

Mdm Speaker, let me thank Mr Seah Kian Peng for his supplementary question. Yes, indeed, we do make a projection on the needs, especially with our ageing population, the number of social workers and social work associates that we will need. So, we do have a projection. And I would say that it is particularly challenging not just for the baseline social workers but actually for what we call the specialists, those that specialise in, for example, family violence, spousal abuse. So, we need social workers not just to have the

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requisite numbers. We also need a certain critical mass of social workers with the requisite depth and skills to handle the more complex cases going forward.

On the suggestion of allowing the social service sector to have non-traditional sources of manpower, indeed, actually, that is already ongoing. Some of our Family Service Centres (FSCs), indeed, do recruit from overseas. But we understand that it is not so easy to recruit a person from overseas to work in the social service sector in our own domestic social service sector because, culturally, there are differences. Language-wise, there are also differences. Even to recruit youngsters to work in the social service sector, sometimes, our youngsters also do not have the necessary dialect skills to communicate with our elders. These are some of the challenges.

So, while we have a broad-based approach towards expanding the pipeline to recruit more people into the sector, what we also need are also niche capabilities in some of these specific areas where more attention is required.