Most social workers are against the Home Office’s National Age Assessment Board (NAAB), a poll has found.
This follows the government’s recent backing for the social work service charged with assessing the ages of unaccompanied asylum seekers whenever there is reasonable doubt about their claims to be children.
According to border security and asylum minister Angela Eagle, NAAB, launched in 2023, will create “greater consistency in age assessment practices and increase capacity and expertise in the system”.
BASW's call to scrap board
However, the British Association of Social Workers (BASW) has long opposed the service, calling for an amendment to the current Border Security, Asylum and Immigration Bill to abolish it.Most practitioners in a recent Community Care poll seemed to share the professional body’s stance.
Just over one-third (37%) echoed the Home Office’s claims that the board works separately from asylum teams, allowing social workers to practise “in line with their values”.
‘Absence of political bias’
In the comments, a practitioner with over 12 years of working with asylum-seeking children said NAAB had become an “integral part” of conducting age assessments in their service.“Their involvement complements our ongoing efforts to build internal capacity, as we roll out training to equip our social workers with the skills to carry out these assessments in-house,” they said.
“I can confidently say that the quality of assessments has been consistently high. Importantly, their findings have not uniformly resulted in age determinations above those claimed by young people, an outcome that reinforces their objectivity and suggests an absence of political bias.”
Meanwhile, Duncan claimed that council practitioners carrying out age assessments were not insulated from political pressures.
"If BASW deems that decision making is subject to political interference then is any age assessment truly compatible with professional standards? Local authorities are elected by the public and therefore political pressure exists there to," he said.
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