Social care has a fantastic online community of bloggers, podcasters and tweeters. It can be hard to keep up with it all, so I thought I’d try and flag up some of the best bits each week.
I’m trying it for the first time so if you find it useful/useless it’d be great to get some feedback via email or Twitter. Anyway, here’s the first 5 for Friday…
1. News: Tia Sharp SCR, Dilnot u-turn and social work degree places
- Merton council announced a serious case review into the death of 12 year old schoolgirl Tia Sharp. The review is “standard procedure” and will aim to establish any lessons social services might be able to learn from the tragedy.
- In children’s social care, ministers launched an action plan to tackle witchcraft-related child abuse. Meanwhile the government has committed to implementing the Dilnot commission proposals for a £35,000 cap on social care costs for older people. Questions remain over how the care funding shortfall will be tackled.
- As students received A-level results around one in five social work degrees offered places through the clearing system. Prospective students might want to heed these words of advice about the profession before hitting the ‘apply’ button.
2. Blogs: Taking children into care, ‘Unfair’ strains on agency social workers and Dilnot reaction
- The suespicious minds blog, run by a social work lawyer, offers parents advice on ‘what to do if social services steal your children’. Now before jumping on the headline, give the post a read as it’s a nuanced look at the situation.
As suespicious minds writes: “[Taking a child into care] is certainly not done to spite the parent, or for money, or to meet targets, or any of the other conspiracy theories; ultimately it is because a professional who is responsible in law for keeping that child safe reaches a point where they no longer feel that they can keep the child safe at home.”
- On the Notsobigsociety blog, social worker ermintrude2 says she’ll be retaining her ‘sliver of cynism’ over the government’s Dilnot pledge until ministers provide details on how the care cap will be funded. With reports suggesting the burden will fall on an already stretched NHS budget, ermintrude feels “I can’t be as overjoyed as I would like to be about this u-turn.”
- A post on Our adoption story, reveals issues around a lack of support for agency social workers. Adoptive parent Gem reveals that an agency social worker assigned to her family “had not been briefed about us at all”, including the fact the parents were second time adopters, and had not seen their previous Form F assessment.
“It’s unfair on the social workers to be put in that position”, she writes. “To any agencies reading this blog I beg of you to look at your policies around using Agency Social Workers and understand that they need information about the people they are assessing.”
3. Video of the week: the disruptive social care podcast talks Winterbourne view
4. From the forums
As Russell Brand takes to the airwaves to argue that the only real type of drug treatment is abstinence-based rehab, CareSpace users debate - is he right?
5. For a tea break – Mo Farah running away from things
Following in the footsteps of blogs like Kim Jong Il looking at things and Nick Clegg looking sad, why not check out Mo Farah running away from things - as our new Olympic hero shows his pace to outrun everyone from Boris Johnson to the Tellytubbies.
Image: Mo Farah running away from things
Five image: miamism (Flickr)
Do you have any tips for blogs, or tea break games/websites to include in future pots? Drop me a line at andy.mcnicoll@rbi.co.uk
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