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The green paper Every Child Matters rightly devotes a chapter to workforce reform. It acknowledges that social work is not attracting sufficient staff and makes useful suggestions to improve the attractiveness of the occupation. Yet the chapter fails to perceive that major reforms proposed elsewhere in the report may increase job dissatisfaction.

The main recommendations are that local authority education and social work children's services should come under one director and that, eventually, they should be joined by other services to form children's trusts. The report's authors do not consider that the resultant huge bureaucracies and the more procedures and paper work will make the job less attractive. Staff will feel more distant from management. By contrast, I believe that social workers thrive in agencies small enough for them to feel a personal part of the unit and when they are known by senior management.


Furthermore, the authors seem oblivious to evidence that staff benefit from attachment to place, in particular to neighbourhoods. A project worker is about to leave the local community group in which I am a volunteer. She is the first to leave for another post in eight years. Staff tend to enjoy an identification with a neighbourhood and its residents. The closeness enables them to more fully understand both the difficulties and strengths of the area. Often they develop a loyalty to the place that makes them want to stay in that post.

It will be countered that the above comments apply to voluntary projects. But they are also relevant to statutory ones. During the 1980s, about a quarter of councils initiated community social work in which they decentralised social service teams into neighbourhood patches.

Child care staff not only undertook statutory duties but also worked with community groups and opened their premises as drop-in centres. Critics anticipated that it would lead to neglect of child protection work. Far from it. For instance, on the Canklow estate in Rotherham, the numbers of children in care and on the "at risk" register declined. The presence of social workers in the community enabled them to spot family difficulties at an early stage and to mobilise local resources to help. Such work gave satisfaction to the staff. Unfortunately, most community social work disappeared when centralisation became the vogue.

Community social work also allowed social workers to undertake both prevention and protection. When I was employed by a children's department in the 1960s, child care officers dealt with adoption, fostering, private fostering, visiting residential homes, approved school aftercare as well as receptions into care, protection and prevention. They were child care specialists yet had a spread of cases that required a variety of skills.


Today many child care social workers deal almost exclusively with children considered at risk of abuse. Some complain that they monitor families rather than relate to them. Their task is of great social importance yet its intensity and sameness can be overwhelming. Not surprisingly, many social services departments are short of staff. Their work would be more enjoyable and effective if they had a range of different tasks.

My idea of satisfying child care social work is of staff in modestly sized organisations, working - where possible - in neighbourhood teams, and with a varied caseload that allows them to exercise differing skills. These reforms would be as important as the increases in salaries and changes in training suggested by the green paper. In short, social workers need improved work environments and cultures not just improvements in pay and education.

Lastly, I am surprised that the media accepts the assertion in the green paper that the government is tackling child poverty by "ensuring work pays through the national minimum wage and the introduction of tax credits for working families". The levels of these payments - not to mention income support rates - only remove poverty according to the government's miserly definition of what constitutes a reasonable income. If Tony Blair and Paul Boateng, who both write bland forewords to the report, lived in deprived areas it might dawn on them that thousands of families are overwhelmed by debt precisely because the government has not taken them out of poverty. Social workers should put pressure on the government to ensure that all families have sufficient income to provide their children with a decent lifestyle.

Bob Holman is author of Champions for Children: The Lives of Modern Child Care Pioneers, Policy Press, 2001.