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Running the children’s hearing system in Scotland on the cheap is undermining social workers’ ability to carry out preventive work with young people and their families, writes Derren Hayes.

Ruth Stark, professional officer at the British Association of Social Work Scotland, said she had seen under-resourcing of the system “creep in” since the mid-1980s. This was reducing the amount of time social workers spent with clients and affecting their ability to prioritise prevention work over formal interventions.

“One of the principles of the hearing system was to minimise intervention but, because the lack of resources, they [social workers] can’t do that now. We want to prevent children being catapulted into the formal system but this takes time and that’s been squeezed out of the system,” explained Stark.

She added that, as a practicing social worker in Scotland in the 1970s, she had the time to visit families whose children were subject of the hearing system and interview the children separately.

“Social workers now visit families once every three weeks and don’t have time to speak to the child on their own.”

Stark said that social workers today spent too much time “regurgitating information and filling in forms triplicate”. “We are losing the analysis about what the issues are for a family and the child.”

However, she said the profession needed to base its arguments for more resources on hard data and research showing the better outcomes that preventive work could achieve.