King's College London

Shibeal O’ Flaherty took up a post as a research associate with What Works for Children’s Social Care (now known as Foundations) in 2019 and began working on the issue of social worker wellbeing.

Shibeal engaged with both local authorities and social workers themselves to understand the core issues affecting wellbeing, issues which had been exacerbated by government spending cuts and, during the course of her research, the onset of the COVID-19 pandemic.

Drawing on her background in behavioural science and previous work with the Behavioural Insights Group at Harvard Kennedy School, Shibeal set about designing and trialling a group of interventions to test whether improvements could be made to wellbeing without incurring cost.

Interventions included symbolic awards tailored to individual social workers as recognition for their work, goal-setting interventions to assist with time pressures, social support messaging to remind workers of available resources, and messages of thanks featuring care leavers.

Shibeal said: “The overall conclusion of the research was that light-touch interventions can produce meaningful effects but, if you’re asking social workers – who are already time poor and stressed - to spend time or effort doing additional tasks, it’s not going to be received well and could even backfire.

“Local authorities hadn’t done work in this area before and there is more research needed but it was clear that these interventions require really careful planning and resource to make sure they are well received.”

Shibeal, who studied with the Department of Political Economy at King’s, successfully defended her thesis following a rigorous examination from a panel of academics (known as a viva voce), in July.

Since completing her studies, Shibeal has since taken up a post as an evaluator with the Office of Evaluation Sciences in the US, working with federal agencies to build and use evidence in their policy-making.

Her PhD supervisors were Professor Michael Sanders, from the Policy Institute at King’s, and Professor Peter John.