It’s not about cash

    More than improved salaries, social workers
    need a better press and a return to the type of practice that
    allows them to develop relationships and skills rather than police
    clients, writes Bob Holman.

    “Degree threat as social work crisis deepens”.
    So runs the headline in The Sunday Herald as it reveals
    that the number of Scottish social work graduates has fallen by a
    third since 1996. The drop is occurring throughout the UK and the
    knock-on effect is that some social work departments and social
    services departments are finding it difficult to recruit staff.

    Kingsley Thomas, executive
    chairperson of social work at Edinburgh Council, believes that
    social work salaries of £22,000 are not high enough to attract
    future workers. I do not think that the full explanation for the
    crisis rests in salary levels.

    More
    important is the unpopular image of social workers. Child abuse
    inquiries inevitably lead to press witch-hunts which blame social
    workers rather than other professionals. In Easterhouse, Glasgow, I
    know of numbers of residents who have social workers. They may join
    in the media condemnation while praising their own social worker as
    helpful. The trouble is that it is the former that deters potential
    recruits.

    Further, some social workers are
    disillusioned by social work, particularly by the dominance of
    child abuse and by its huge bureaucracies. Professor Chris Jones,
    delivering the 18th Duncan Memorial Lecture at Liverpool University
    last year, drew out the implications. First, social workers are
    pushed into monitoring roles and can’t develop the kind of
    relationships exercising their particular skill. Second, they feel
    they function within an oppressive work environment. Some give
    up.

    What
    can be done? I recommend the creation of family departments, which
    are smaller than social services and social work departments and
    which are sufficiently resourced to allow social workers to make
    supportive and frequent relationships with families. In short, let
    social workers do social work.

    Social
    work needs a better press. Tony Blair should praise social workers
    as much as he does police, doctors, nurses and teachers. Recently,
    former social worker and now government minister, Tessa Jowell,
    gave a long interview in The Guardian (April, 15).
    Disappointingly, she said much in the favour of the royal family
    but nothing about social workers. The BBC should allow some social
    workers to air their views alongside the establishment look-a-likes
    on the panels of Question Time and Any
    Questions.

    In the
    short-term, recruitment for training could change. In the 1960s,
    council children’s departments faced a recruitment crisis. In
    stepped one of my child care champions. Clare Winnicott had been a
    youth worker, evacuation social worker, and lecturer before she
    organised emergency child care courses for older candidates who
    lacked the qualifications or universities. Within six years the
    number of students rose from 174 to 805.

    I
    became an assistant tutor at the two-year course at Stevenage
    College of Further Education. The students, all older than me, had
    opted for a change in career. Nearly 40 years on, I am still in
    touch with some of them. Did it matter that they lacked academic
    bits of paper? Not according to their achievements. I can think of
    students who became a director of a social services department, a
    social services inspector, senior social work staff, deputy
    director of a large voluntary society and so on. Just as
    importantly, they endured. They made a serious commitment and
    stayed in social work until they retired. Today, if social work
    courses cannot recruit young people to do degrees, why not bring
    back the emergency courses?

    One
    student introduced herself as “I’m Bron Soan, I’m a socialist and
    an atheist”. A highly qualified nurse, she considered that social
    work enabled her to be even more useful. Years later, by then a
    Christian socialist, she spent six months of each year as a social
    worker and six months as a nurse in El Salvador – often working
    under heavy fire. As a pensioner, she still does it.

    Soan,
    like many of those students, was driven by deeply held convictions
    which are now less in evidence. The crisis in social work is a
    reflection of the crisis in society. If the values and practices of
    equality, mutuality and public service are revived then more people
    will want to be social workers and society will be more
    appreciative of them.

    Bob Holman is a community worker and
    the author of Champions for Children. The Lives of Modern Child
    Care Pioneers, Policy Press, 2001.

     

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