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For social workers, the experience of care proceedings can be traumatic and disillusioning.

Many complain about the hostility of care proceedings, often from the lawyers representing the parents or the child, but also from critical remarks made by judges and magistrates. Others feel mistrusted and unvalued by the courts, and some express anger at being ordered to undertake further assessments or other work, often at short notice, without apparent consideration of resource limitations or the other tasks on the social worker's caseload. It can be a hostile environment.

Yet there are social workers who survive it and have been doing court work for many years - and some who say that they actually enjoy it. My study of social workers¹ came up with the following tips and strategies from those who relish the work.

An important message is that a clearly written and well argued statement can make the rest of the proceedings much more straightforward. It may even mean that a contested hearing is unnecessary. But to do this the statement must be more than just a chronology of events - it must weigh up all the factors, consider their impact on the child and show why the proposed plan will best meet the child's needs. One of the main complaints from lawyers, and some managers, was that not all statements do this. One lawyer said: "I think analysis is really what is lacking in the evidence that we are getting so far. It just seems to be a diary of what they have done - you can't see in that statement how they have come to their conclusion."

Social workers often end up doing the written work at home, late at night or over the weekend. Yet the statement and care plan are so important that social workers should write them when they are best able to think clearly and calmly, and the statement should be checked and amended if necessary. So the message is to book in sufficient time to write the statement and care plan, and to guard it as carefully as if it were an important meeting. This might sound like a counsel of perfection, but if things are left to the last minute there is no time to deal with an unexpected crisis. The advice from the lawyers is to keep them up to date with developments on the case and let them know of any problems as soon as possible. If delays occur, they might be able to negotiate an extension with the court and the other solicitors.

Another helpful strategy is to use the solicitor's experience to anticipate the sort of questions that the judge or magistrates and other lawyers are likely to put to you. What will the court want to know more about? What counter-arguments are the parents' lawyers likely to use? Anticipating these issues means that you can deal with some of them in advance, in your statement, and gives you the chance to prepare your responses to questions.

The negotiations that take place outside the courtroom, in the waiting rooms and corridors, are often crucial to the outcome of the case. Some social workers like to be fully involved in these: others expect their solicitor or barrister to come back to them with details of what is being discussed and to ask for the social worker's response. The important thing here is to be clear with your own lawyer about which way you prefer to work, and not to be bullied - by the other lawyers or even your own lawyer - into being excluded or into saying something that you are not sure about.

Beyond these practical suggestions, there are important survival secrets in the way that social workers think about care proceedings. Those who enjoy court work find the whole experience interesting - they look at people's behaviour in court, they analyse what is going on. They welcome the chance to learn from the experts and other people involved in the case. They also welcome the opportunity to explain and be held accountable for their recommendations. They recognise that the decisions being made are so important that they have to be tested by an independent tribunal, and they take a positive approach to this. As one puts it: "It's about independence and checks isn't it? All right, it is our professionalism and we believe in it - our knowledge and everything else - but it needs to be tested out, it needs to be heard, with counter-arguments. Otherwise we could just walk all over people."


Linked with that, a helpful strategy for coping with questioning from the other lawyers is to think of it as an opportunity to explain your reasoning more fully, not as a trap to catch you out. Of course, lawyers do set traps, but seeing every question in this light will make you react defensively. Taking a positive approach will help you to respond more calmly and confidently. As a manager said: "So many times in court the reasonable social worker, who is prepared to consider other options when they give evidence, is much more powerful than the social worker who is wedded to one outcome." This does not mean being unclear about your plan. On the contrary, it is because you know the case well and are clear about the plan that you can explain why the alternatives would not be suitable, rather than just rejecting them in a knee-jerk manner. It also means being prepared to be flexible on some issues to ensure the best overall result for the child.

Social workers who perform well in care cases tend to think beyond the actual proceedings, taking a long-term view. They appreciate that they, or one of their colleagues, will probably have to continue working with the family and the child after the proceedings have ended. In that context it is not always helpful to fight tooth and nail on every issue, leaving the parents angry or humiliated. These social workers retain their empathy for the parents, and try to keep a relationship with them.

Finally, social workers who survive care proceedings tend not to dwell on whether they - or their department, or the parents, or the guardian - have "won" or "lost". Their objective is to get the best result for the child - for the child to be the winner. So even though going to court is still stressful, the sense of achieving something for the child sees them through.

Jonathan Dickens is a lecturer in social work, University of East Anglia. 

References  

¹ Unpublished study. For information contact the author at j.dickens@uea.ac.uk


Legal problems  

"What we have is an adversarial system where it's 'let's knock the local authority even if they have done a good job'. Yes, you might get the odd platitudinous remark from a judge about how well the social worker has done, but the premise of the family proceedings court - and certainly the higher up you go - is that the local authority has done it wrong and poorly, and needs to be watched and scrutinised at all costs otherwise it will do something terrible." Social services manager

"You find that you have everyone coming at you from different directions...it is very, very pressurised...to me at that time, I felt as if this is not what I want to do, I want to be a social worker!" Social worker

The research

The study consisted of more than 50 interviews with social workers, social services managers and local authority lawyers in 2001-2 and was supported by a grant from the Nuffield Foundation. The interviews were in six local authorities in England equally divided between social services and legal staff.