Front Line Focus

Mark Drinkwater is a community worker and Community Care's practice adviser.

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by Steve Rogowski, a social worker (children and families) with a local authority in NW England

'Tis the season to be cheerful, and for many children and families it will be. But such a sentiment does not always apply to the children and families social workers are involved with. They are having to pay the price for what the academic George Lambie calls the 'debacle of neoliberalism' (see 'From Recession to Renewal' edited by Joanna Richardson). They had no part in causing the economic and fiscal crisis facing the globalised, capitalist world, and yet are facing cuts in services and welfare benefits. There is also ever more job insecurity and anxiety, even if people manage to find increasingly scarce employment. Christmas will be a stressful time for many, though social workers and others will be doing their best to make a positive difference.

Skeleton staff

Although children and families are facing the brunt of austerity measures, social workers are not immune. Many local authority offices only open with 'skeleton' staff over the Xmas/New Year period. They will have to cope with increases in domestic abuse referrals, often related to the stress caused by the current economic and financial catastrophe. There will also be instances of family breakdown. For example, young people falling out with parents/carers and deciding (not a real 'choice' in the current jargon) to leave home. Because of austerity measures they will be unable to turn to local authorities or charities for assistance. Homelessness always becomes a more important issue over the festive period.

Twist in the tale

More positively perhaps, managers praise the fact that 'everyone' has worked hard over the preceding year - targets have been met, outcomes for children have been positive, and good inspection reports have been written. But there is a twist in the tale - next year is 'going to be challenging' with ever more resource constraints and efficiency savings needed. The need is to 'get more for less'.

The unspoken narrative is that there will be continued job losses and reductions in services. While social workers might feel secure, thinking that support and other staff are in the firing line, this should not be overstated or taken for granted.

An ideological problem

The key problem is ideological. The Conservative-led coalition is using the economic crisis as a front to reduce the role of the state in meeting citizens' needs unless they happen to be 'troubled' families needing 'trouble-shooters'. Other than this, people are expected to rely on themselves, family, friends and charity. If this project succeeds the danger is it will take us back to Victorian times.

But perhaps all is not lost. Ed Miliband has spoken about what comes after the neoliberalism, this echoed by academics who talk about the 'post-liberal world', one where notions of social justice and equality will be more to the fore. Then there is the Social Work Action Network conference in Spring of next year focussing in 'cuts, crisis and resistance', together with the need to build alliances in social work and social care. This is with a view to working towards a different world.

A season to be cheerful it may well be and, despite the doom and gloom, there may be hope on the horizon.   

by Nigel Leaney, manager of a mental health residential service

This is a hello, goodbye moment but I'll spare you a Beatles singsong. Next week is the last print edition of Community Care magazine, to make way for an exclusively online version. The fact there are now 300,000 online users of communitycare.co.uk is clear evidence of its success, as well as it being the largest specialist site for social work jobs in the UK.

Clearly the magazine will be missed. The aesthetic and practical experience of reading printed paper is different to looking at a screen. Until I was given a Kindle as a gift I was a luddite when it came to e-books. Now, much to some colleagues' amusement, I'm a fan. Not that I'm arguing for the demise of the printed book, more of a co-existence.

Moving with the times

In cash-strapped times, the like we've never seen in living memory, local authorities will inevitably question, and have a duty to do so, placing a printed advertisement in a magazine when the same outcome can be delivered through cyberspace for better value. Community Care has to move with the times, and as a respected brand there is every reason to be positive.

Apart from the squeezed readers' letters, magazines are pretty much autocracies having little to offer for encouraging a democratic, inclusive approach with their readership. An online Community Care has an opportunity to get the voices of social care professionals heard. And heard loudly. If this isn't an important time for this to happen then George Osborne doesn't need an abacus for Christmas.

Challenging the market forces

We need this website as an opportunity for all of us to challenge the market forces that are out to destroy social care. Not because they have to but because the government are cynical opportunists who are able to exploit the times to further their ideological taste for disaster capitalism as propounded by Milton Friedman et al.

When governments and their poodles start to exploit, devalue and rubbish the staff that are their responsibility, then we all sacrifice the care we purport to provide to vulnerable people in a supposedly civilised society, and then serve notice on the meaning of our professional identity and our ultimate existence.

An online Community Care with the contributions of its massed readership can hold central and local government to account, catch them in its web! It can give them a conscience, wanted or not.

Perhaps we need a minute's silence for the end of a wonderful publication then raise our glasses - okay cyber ones - to the new web future. Community Care is dead, long live Community Care!

by Sybil*, a children and families social worker

This autumn I found myself, like many others, watching the 16 year olds on Young Apprentice bossing their peers around and trying to impress Lord Sugar with their management and profit-making skills. The message is quite clear: only the personal qualities matter, not the background or education and, rather disturbingly, it's less important what strategy the project manager employs to achieve the goal, as long as they are successful.
 
I have also always thought that social work management has to be, by its nature, completely different to this type of corporate management. The purpose of our work is helping people change their lives, protecting vulnerable children and adults and, in some cases, taking part in life-changing decisions. Surely these delicate matters are less predictable than a business plan would require?

Yet, to my horror, I realised that many believe that it does not matter if you deal with people or potatoes, the workflow management is the same. It was the start of my acquaintance with the principles of corporate management in social work.

Timescales and budgets

In the past few years I've seen a strong shift towards performance management as the key part of the social care manager's role. The central government's obsession with statistics and reports has filtered down to all levels of social work management, creating a frenzy of targets and performance indicators. A good manager is seen as the manager who ensures that all paperwork is up to date, all statutory tasks are in timescale and the budget at the end of the year is not overspent. Poor quality of work might be forgivable, poor stats are not. And yet, we all know that bureaucracy does not keep children safe.

The best managers I have known stood out through their excellent people skills, their knowledge of their team's cases and their knowledge of their workers strengths and weaknesses. They were not afraid to disagree with the senior managers and they certainly would not have put a price on a child's life or welfare. They did not necessarily get on well with technology but they never started supervision with "Let's see where you are with your stats" but with "Tell me about this child". This made the workers trust them when they made a decision and their professional expertise was often consulted. Sadly, many of these managers were driven away from frontline practice as outdated, and replaced with others that seem content to spend all day at the computer looking at data, completely out of touch with the team that is crumbling under their excessive workloads.

Special person

I always thought that being a frontline team manager is the most difficult job in the whole local authority, requiring professional expertise and people management skills as well as a fully developed sense of leadership and personal accountability. It takes a very special person to fulfil this role successfully. Unfortunately what many managers seem to have forgotten is that while it might take a short course to learn performance management, it takes a whole career to become a good social work manager.

*name changed

by John Grier, a team manager at Bradford Royal Infirmary

In these hard times of more for less we all need techniques to keep us going - to maintain that precious work-life balance. Perhaps the best stress-buster tool I've come across is flexitime, a humble unsung administrative procedure perhaps, but it can offer us a lot.  If you already use it all I can say is make the most of it, if you don't, read on.

Still with me? Then you are probably working to some sort of time off in lieu system, the good old "TOIL".  In my first qualified job the team leader had her own belief that social workers' pay included an unspoken allowance for overtime. To make a case for TOIL you had to confront her in her office, persuade her to take the TOIL book out of her desk on then argue for every hour you worked over. Needless to say not many people had the stomach to claim.

Horror stories

Since becoming a manager, however, I've seen the other side of TOIL, hearing horror stories of staff putting in claims for weeks worth of vaguely justified and recorded overtime, often at the most inconvenient times for team cover.

For both managers and staff TOIL can be a chore to record and monitor, so often genuine time owing is lost for the sheer hassle of writing it all down and totting it all up.

May I recommend flexitime as a handy off the peg system that is easy to use, tried and tested widely and has some inherent benefits? I've worked both systems and know which I prefer.

Getting the message

Log on in the morning and log off when you finish work, noting time taken for lunch - it healthily encourages you to take at least ½ hour - and you will see at the end of the month if you are in debit or credit - most of us will find it's the latter.  The work/life balance it promotes is based on if you build up more than a day per month you lose it, so most people get the message and take their time back.

Flexitime mitigates against the worst of the "martyr" culture where people parade their dedication by working longer hours than their colleagues. I suspect it also mitigates against work-related stress by encouraging hard-working staff to take regular "breathers".  It even makes your precious annual leave go further as you can add any flexitime hours when you want to book a longer break or family holiday. You can even "borrow" up to a days worth of flexitime - just so long as you pay it back!

It's not perfect or a total remedy for the intense demands many of us are under. Like any system it needs managing and monitoring. However, it's one example of computers working for us, not the organisation, as you see all your long hours being counted for you with the promise of a precious afternoon or whole day off. Just make sure you occasionally take it as "me" time, not just for family duties!

by Steve Rogowski, a social worker (children and families) with a local authority in NW England

Frontline social workers have always used humour as a way of coping with their day-to-day work. It is a form of gallows humour, a type that still manages to be funny in the face of stressful situations. As Sigmund Freud once put it when writing about this subject, 'The ego refuses to be distressed by the provocations of reality, to let itself be compelled to suffer'. 

Child protection social workers are particularly prone to such humour, but all social workers and social care staff face ever increasing pressure and resulting stress as public expenditure reductions bite home. Services to the most vulnerable are either being cut to the bone or are no longer available. As a colleague said 'many social workers develop quite a dark sense of humour to be able to cope with what can be extremely upsetting and difficult circumstances'.

Drawing the line

Some may frown upon the use of such humour because it minimising people's difficulties. Admittedly, there may be odd occasions where it is used inappropriately, thereby being disrespectful of users and amounting to oppressive practice. However, most practitioners know where to draw the line, only using humour as a way of 'release'. Having a joke about a situation relieves tension, and a less tense social worker can surely deliver a better service.

After all, the benefits to laughing are well known. These including relieving stress, even depression, and again this can only be beneficial to workers and users alike.
Furthermore, humour can actually be part and parcel of good practice. It can be used to develop rapport with difficult to reach users, for example. Similarly, it can be particularly helpful in building relationships with children and young people.

Not robots

It has to be remembered that social workers practise in social settings with real people. They are not robots working in a sterile environment. They do have a duty to uphold respect for the individuals they work with, but if using humour in appropriate ways helps in doing the job, it should not be called into question.

As another respected colleague said, 'Humour plays a part of daily social work life and interaction.  We are committed professionals who strive to improve the life chances of the children and families we come in to contact with. However, there are clear pressures which, if not balanced with time out to talk about experiences and laugh at situations, would lead to more people leaving the profession through stress or simply being off sick.'

Returning to Freud, the ego 'insists that it cannot be affected by the traumas of the external world; it shows, in fact, that such traumas are no more than occasions for it to gain pleasure.' Perhaps the old master has it just about right.

A few weeks back I led a tour of voluntary sector organisations providing social care locally. With shrinking public services, these providers are central to the delivery of adult care and this excursion was a response to requests from statutory professionals - from the local authority, primary care and mental health trusts - who wanted to know what voluntary sector resources were available locally.
 
We stopped off at six projects for around 20 minutes each on a circular tour that took us no further than half a mile from the town hall (much to the chagrin of those who were hoping to journey farther afield). What we found was truly inspiring: voluntary sector organisations providing some great services with limited resources.

But much of what we discovered was disheartening. Our tour started at an advice centre where staff reported that enquiries had nearly doubled in recent years, with precious little increase in their resources. We also met with a learning disability provider who had lost a number of supported housing projects through competitive tendering processes. While they had picked up a few new contracts in their place, the unintended consequence of these changes in providers was that many service users had endured a protracted period of instability and insecurity.

The greatest challenges were perhaps faced by an older people's project. Earlier this year, they lost a large day-care contract with a neighbouring local authority. A further blow came when they failed to retain a home care service they provided; the contract was re-tendered and they were outbid by cut-price provider. Faced with a 65% drop in annual income they had just completed an agonising restructure which had made many of their highly-skilled staff redundant.

Like others on this tour, this provider saw little cause for optimism about the current climate in social care where brutal cuts are being introduced and commissioners favour ever-cheaper providers.

By Helen Bonnick

The notion of social work as vocation is an old one; the idea of an occupation to which someone feels called and to which they are suited by skills or personality. The pioneers of social work often made great personal sacrifices in their service to the community, whether from a church or political background. Most of the social work codes of ethics or conduct speak of protecting the dignity and rights and interests of service users, as well as personal integrity and honesty. Student applications often refer to a sense of debt to society, or a deep, long held determination to serve others. The old reasons that individuals were drawn to social work hold good today.

And yet here social work stands, not with a sense of a lifetime calling, but with an average retention rate of eight years.

It often seems remarkable that people continue to stream to social work in the face of the much-publicised frustrations of those already in the field. What started out as a noble profession all-too-soon starts to feel like a technical task: driving a computer, the setting and measurement of targets, swamped by paperwork so that there is no time for face to face contact with service users. Within social care, we are familiar with the great pendulum swings: care or control, generic work or specialist teams, the alignment of children's services with adults or with education.

But while there are, sadly, plenty of unhappy social workers, as I travel around the country I also meet those whose teams are fully staffed and well-managed, where the work is calm and fulfilling and where a sense of purpose - and even of vocation - prevails. We need to be honest with those coming into the profession about what they face. But I am heartened, as I read the placement applications of prospective students, to see that the notion of calling and vocation remains.

Helen Bonnick is a social worker and practice educator

by Natalie Wyatt, a children and families social worker

With the Family Justice Review due to be published next month there is a renewed focus on the courts and the professionals working within them: solicitors, guardians, judges, expert witnesses and social workers. With so many different professionals with varying views, functions and levels of status it is easy to forget that we are all working to promote the best interests of the child. Conflicts can arise and professional egos can get hurt but is this always a bad thing? Thinking of it from the child's perspective would you rather your future be decided based on the evidence produced by one individual or would you rather your future had been rigorously debated and plans scrutinised to ensure you receive the best possible outcome?
 
Timely decision making

Of course delay is a huge issue within the family courts and the aforementioned rigour and scrutiny must be balanced by swift, timely decision making. Social workers can help this process along by ensuring the assessments completed prior to proceedings are as evidenced-based and thorough as possible, clearly reflecting the wishes and feelings of the child. Given the quality of some assessments making their way into the court arena and a common paucity of parallel planning it is understandable that guardians and solicitors can be critical of social workers.
 
Authorities' independence

What is less understandable however, is the widely held belief that local authorities somehow lack independence. The commissioning of expert assessments (in my experience the biggest cause of delay in public proceedings) often happen in response to claims that local authority assessments are not independent enough. This argument ignores the fact that local authorities have no vested interests in bringing children into care.

In fact it is the opposite, over the course of a child's lifetime, placement costs can run into hundreds of thousands of pounds. Bearing in mind this huge cost and more importantly the poor outcomes for looked after children it is clear local authorities do not enter into proceedings rubbing their hands together waiting to be lavished with some invisible reward. In my experience the feeling one gets when entering in to the court arena is never pleasurable but you do it in the belief it is the morally right thing to do.

Valued and respected

In the course of writing this piece I was asked if I feel my input at court is valued? Given that I've yet to be taken on in cross examination and that the requested order has always been obtained, yes I feel my statements are valued and respected. But when the day comes that I'm slaughtered on the stand or an 'independent' social worker is appointed to repeat the work I thought I'd already done maybe I will refer back to my opening paragraph and try to see it from the child's perspective.

By Stuart Ayris

In 2009 I was given the opportunity to manage a community mental health team, having spent the previous 12 years of my career as a psychiatric nurse working on the wards.  

Although I have been a nurse for 14 years, I have never defined myself by my profession. The first thing that struck me about my social work colleagues was how important being a social worker was to them; their passion for what they do, the oft expressed belief that all decisions should be considered within an ethical and moral framework. Phrases such as "in the spirit of the Act," and "the best interest of the client" echoed around the walls of my newly inhabited office. These people were proud of their profession.  

The first time I was told, "you should have been a social worker," I was a little bemused. All I had done was remark that medication isn't always the answer. Did that imply nurses only consider pharmacological interventions and that social care has a monopoly over right and wrong? When a student nurse asked me what it was like being a social worker, I began to look deeper at what was going on. Me, being mistaken for a social worker? The cheek.

Working with my social work colleagues has been very much a learning experience. Not only have I had to learn the language but, in my role as team manager, I have had to negotiate the labyrinth that is the council HR and payroll policies. More importantly though I have also been obliged to let go of the years of pre-conceptions that had crept into my consciousness as I toiled away in the acute admission ward.

About a year into my new post, I began to see that what underpins our professions is nothing more complicated than values. The austere economic conditions have forced us, due to increased referrals and reduced budgets, to bridge those historical gaps between the professions. I am not talking about generic working but of one shared value - that of compassion.

If I were a client, I would not care if I were shown a name badge stating "social worker" or a name badge stating "community psychiatric nurse". What I would want to be shown is compassion. And compassion is not the proviso of any one profession. It is beholden upon all of us, social workers, nurses, psychologists, doctors and allied health professionals so show compassion for each other and for those whom we try so hard to help.

So I guess being mistaken for a social worker isn't such a bad thing after all. Not any more. Now that is one hell of a compliment.

Stuart Ayis is a community mental health team manager