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I recently attended a meeting at a school on a new case. I introduced myself to the head teacher with my first name. She did not give me hers, so I continued to call her Mrs Brown.* She sat on a high chair behind her desk while the foster carers and I slouched in armchairs. Mrs Brown spent most of the meeting telling me how to do my job, where my predecessor had gone wrong, and how lucky the children were to be attending her school. I think she perceived me as having a lower status than her and treated me accordingly.


This is a common experience. In court, the lawyers and judges frequently seem to assume that because they are paid more than me they are also worth more than me. My professional opinion on a case, based on months, if not years, of working with everyone involved, is worth nothing compared with the views of an expert witness who has spent a few hours interviewing the parents and reading my case recordings.

Any newspaper will tell you that this lowly perception of social workers is also held by the public at large. We feature only as the subjects of blame and derision. No wonder no one wants to be a social worker any more.

Why have we sunk so low? Although most people will need a social worker at some time, they don't like to think about it. We mostly work with people at the bottom of the social pile, at the lowest points in their lives.

Compare us with France, where social workers have a higher social standing. It has been argued this stems from the relationship between the state and the individual. In France, raising children is considered a duty the good citizen performs to benefit society, so the state has the right to intervene, and the citizen has a duty to comply with such intervention. Genuine partnership with families is possible.


Here, the Englishman's home is his castle, with the drawbridge raised. Raising children is a job women do for their men, and everyone else can keep out of it, thank you. So society's support for social work intervention is much more ambivalent, and the work becomes more about finding evidence to justify acting than about working together.

The Children Act 1989 tried to change this by replacing the language of parents' rights with responsibilities. But the responsibility is due to the child, not society as a whole, and intervention is seen as a last resort.

Now the General Social Care Council is here to generate confidence in social work by registering and regulating us and "championing social care". Will this be enough? I suggest what we need is a shift in the way our society views its responsibility to its most vulnerable members.

* Not her real name.

Clea Barry is an adoption social worker