26 October 2022
Marcus Hawthorn, NRCPD CEO, presented at VLP's 2022 Storytelling Conference on Sunday 16th October 2022. Here is a condensed and edited version of Marcus' talk at the conference about NRCPD, our story, where we are going to next and what lies ahead for us.
"I'm here today to tell NRCPD's future story, where we're going to next and what lies ahead.
If we look at other professions such as lawyers and doctors, we can see we share many common features: a professional association or two, a regulator, a union, established routes into professions, and a Code of Conduct. But the similarities with other professions are limited to the large structural elements of our sector, and we are still well behind them in other ways.
We lack the inherent support structures for mentoring that other professions have; we don't have a clear body of practice policy or best practice. Professionals have variable cultural standards and values that very much depend on their backgrounds.
We behind in understanding how to ensure culturally appropriate professional practice, and we need the resetting of equality and diversity across the professions and how that affects us all.
Professionals have a variable relationship with the lives and rights of deaf people: some still believe they are there to help deaf people or to fight for their rights or to meet their need; others regard themselves as allies and others regard interpreting as a job with a transactional approach to it.
And the tension between professionals in this sector is unusual - the age of social media holds a mirror up to us. In the professions I am most closely familiar with outside of language services: the military, healthcare, and the law, it is unthinkable that professionals would routinely launch into critical and sometimes bullying behaviour on social media at the expense of the reputation and mental well being of the target. There is clearly something missing in the thinking of some professionals that this treatment of colleagues is considered ok to do and to tolerate. Where should this be picked up? Where should professionals be learning that this is not acceptable behaviour? How do we change this?
The prevalence of freelancing means that many are left to their own devices with no policies, no training framework, and no inherent mentoring, especially soon after qualifying. Many have the initiative to put all that in place for themselves, but many are not. Employment structures provide support, development, and wellbeing as a team effort and in the duties of managers. If this is absent, it's no surprise that freelancers struggle at times.
Professional associations play an important role, but with all-volunteer officers it's difficult to provide a responsive service. People do their best and organise regionally in smaller support groups and there is availability of supervision services, but I would argue not enough.
With complaints, other professions can normally expect help and support from their professional association or union if there is one. But in my 4 ½ years at NRCPD, I have not seen any meaningful evidence of support to professionals from their associations in this process. I have offered in the past to train officers in the associations to provide support as I feel this is important, but the challenge in volunteer organisations is to stick with something as boards and priorities change.
As a very small sector, we have a very high number of professional associations. These reflect differences of approach and philosophy within the professions, but the extent of this fragmentation tells me we have a long way to go to sort out many of those internal differences.
I suggest that between those organisations there is not enough money to go around for every organisation to be as effective as it would like to be. Perhaps further maturing means there is a rationalising of organisations.
It's not for me to say how that should work, but some might think of joining forces or possibly merging. Those that do, can achieve a critical mass of membership to afford paid staff to support the volunteer structures and resource wider services. With limited annual growth, in the number of professionals, the achievement of the minimum baseline for every organisation will be difficult. Arguably only NRCPD has got to that point.
Fragmentation gives us another challenge - there can be too many conflicting voices with the result that to the outside world no one has a credible voice.
NRCPD now has regular and open channels of communication with Ministry of Justice, Home Office, DWP, Cabinet Office, NHS England, the Police and Crown Commercial services - these networks are important because it gives us leverage. NRCPD are easy to deal with for these bodies because we turn up and we have a clear and unitary idea of what we want based on a sound strategy. I think when they look across at the number of other bodies, it is just too difficult for them to engage.
An area, I would really like to see progress is for NRCPD to have a better handle on recruiting levers. We are a bottom-fed sector, so everyone comes in via a qualifying course - there are few who join at a higher experience level. This means that recruiting into our professions is all about how many places are available on those courses and the success of campaigns for those places to be taken up. Long-established professions are more tightly aligned on shaping that recruiting pipeline and we have some way to go on this. The positive story about what a future career holds is crucial to attract potential recruits - it is owned by professional associations, registers, agencies and so on, but their input to that recruiting effort is sporadic at best.
And we need to be able to turn the recruiting effort to those under-represented communities too else the diversity gap will keep growing.
Our organisations compete with each other to recruit, but strategically that is a waste of resource - I feel that we should grow the professional population and not fight over it.
A step on from recruiting into the professions is how we make sure that the qualifying courses reflect the latest best practice, the lessons and experiences from frontline working or research. How do we do this consistently across all courses? And post-qualification, what practice policies can professionals use as a guide? We started the practice policy project last year with the aim of putting this resource in place. The existing policies are held in different places, by different bodies - but surely this resource is combined and available to all?
So, what's the big prize? Statutory regulation is often seen as the essential end game and it is tempting to agree that it will solve all issues, but we need to think carefully about what it means, how we get there, what the cost is and who has the money. NRCPD's income is around £360k annually - it isn't that much and it's not enough to implement in one go all the changes we need for a credible bid to become a statutory regulator.
Our next stage requires projects to be resourced. For example:
There are constant clamours for these and many more. If I felt that you, the professionals, could/would take the burden, I would double registration fees and properly resource the transformation we need. But that is not the reality and like any other business or charity, we need to carefully tailor what we spend to what we get in income. Each of these projects is important in their own right: each will improve things for deaf clients, the registered professions and for regulation.
They are the stepping stones to the bigger prize of statutory regulation.
They also have something else in common - they are a challenge for the entire sector: for professional associations, deaf clients, charities, and qualifications providers. But what mechanism is there for developing a sector-wide perspective on some of these? Currently, I think only NRCPD has the will to do this, but no-one really has the capacity or resource to do this at speed.
On the one big thing that NRCPD has always, and will continue to, stand by - statutory regulation, maybe it's time for new thinking. If I went today to the Department for Business, Energy, and Industrial Strategy (who are responsible for professional regulation in the UK) and said 'please, can NRCPD be a statutory regulator?'; they would want to know who else wanted this and where our sector partners are - and if there's only NRCPD in the room, it will be a very short meeting.So, we need to rethink this and take statutory regulation as destination where the whole sector comes on the journey. What do the professional associations want? What do the charities want? Is there cost-sharing? Is the end state NRCPD with a special badge or is it a wholly new charter body replacing existing registers? Is there an interim state we want to get to first? Does it include all the professions?
The established professions have effective mechanisms for organising themselves on strategic issues. A sign of our professions maturing would be that we have the channels for strategic dialogue between partners to determine the collective journey we want to go on. It's an ability to take a long-term sector view and not a parochial view that is short-termist. It is important to focus on detail (such as those projects I listed above), but that is often at the expense of crowding out those important strategic discussions.
The state of the country suggests to me that society will just be getting angrier and more divided, and there will be less to go round. It is up to us to take the opportunity now to knit together, work together, identify the future we want for the sector and unify efforts behind that. Now is the time to start the dialogue about statutory regulation and its not just a question for NRCPD, it's a question for all of you too.
I am an unfailing optimist, so the story of our maturing professions continues from this point forward with a coming together of all the key organisations across the sector, to try and determine a common way forward for regulation, based on the BSL Act 2022.
In this story, we amicably manage to resolve enough philosophical differences between organisations to rationalise, to strengthen our voice and to enable the money to go further. We celebrate the completion of a comprehensive body of practice policy and guidance that helps professionals throughout their careers, and we have built into it the effective mechanisms to support trainees and the newly qualified especially ...
... We develop a good understanding of what a career through the professions might look like and everyone is proud of their place in that and can have meaningful hopes for getting on. We have mostly eradicated the tension between professionals and replaced it with unconditional respect and support for our professional colleagues; we have a population of professionals that reflects the diversity of this country and who are sensitive to culturally appropriate professional practice.
... We actively market the professions and are involved in recruiting, and we have the mechanisms in place to feed emerging best practice back into the qualifying courses and practice assessments. And of course, those NRCPD projects I listed are all delivered.
How the story goes from here is for all of us to write. I see a possible start being a sector-wide strategy conference sometime in 2023/4 to get this moving.
As I leave NRCPD after 4.5 extraordinary years: taking us out of Signature, through COVID-19, up to eight staff, widely linked-in across government and the sector, and with a strong strategy putting foundations in place for future success, I reflect on the opportunities offered by the BSL Act 2022, the greater awareness of your importance as professionals in the public conscience, the continuing growth in numbers and say that the conditions now are good for a unified effort to seize these opportunities.
It's been a privilege to serve in this sector, you have my best wishes going forward and I urge you to recognise and make the best use of what I believe will be a relatively short window to mobilise effectively."
