‘A spokesperson for social work’: Ray Jones’s 50-year career in the sector

This article is part of a series of profiles of key figures who have shaped social work over the past five decades, to mark Community Care’s 50th anniversary. Previous interviewees include Brid Featherstone, David Howe, June Thoburn, Eileen Munro and Herbert Laming.

Few can boast a long career in social work these days.

Ray Jones, emeritus professor of social work at Kingston University, is one of the rare ones with more than 50 years of experience.

Since he qualified in 1972, he has seen the sector through many changes while wearing different hats: social worker, academic, director of social services, independent reviewer and, notably, the unofficial social work spokesperson on the Peter Connelly (Baby P) case.

He began his career at a time when, on the back of the 1968 Seebohm report, pre-existing welfare, children’s and mental health services had just been merged into unified social services departments in local authorities.

From generic social work to ‘fragmentation’

Jones, like other practitioners, became a ‘generic social worker’, handling a caseload across all ages and needs – a time he recalls wistfully, and one he wishes we’d return to.

“The reality we have now […] is services that are specialised, fragmented, segregated and separate,” he tells me.

“In 1972, we knew what was going on in the community. We weren’t handing over cases between workers when different needs arose. We stuck with people and worked within their communities with other professionals  – schools, GPs, health visitors, district nurses, police officers. I feel we’ve lost that to some extent now by the fragmentation.”

As Jones recounted in a separate article for Community Care’s 50^th anniversary, the splitting apart of adults’ and children’s services started in the 1980s, culminating in the creation of two departments, in England, through the Children Act 2004.

‘We lose trust with too many handovers’

Ray Jones in the 1970s as a newly qualified social worker

However, that fragmentation of services extends beyond this split to the way children’s services, in particular, is organised, he says

Today, children can be passed between referral and assessment, child in need, child protection,  children in care, adoption and leaving care teams.

It is something he observed in his 2023 review of Northern Ireland’s children’s services, where he highlighted that a lesson for all practitioners in the UK is the need for continuity and stability for children and families.

“I was working it out and, as a child, within a period of a year to 18 months, you could move between three to four teams. That is three to four different workers, assuming the workers within the teams don’t also change,” says Jones.

He tells me of a young person who’s had 12-13 social workers in the past two years and is currently undergoing another change.

“We’re a relationship-based profession wanting to be close to people, and we can’t do that if we have all these handovers, all this fragmentation,” he says.

“We lose the relationship and the trust, but we also lose something else – the history; the knowledge of what’s happened to a person in their recent life. We lose that journey. We’re a short-term interjection, and then we disappear and someone else interjects.”

Standing besides people in times of need

A social worker, as he puts it, should not be the one with all the answers or specialist knowledge, but someone who stands beside people in times of difficulty and engages them, helping to “create some space to see a way forward”.

He sees these as human and professional qualities that do not require specialisation. When the need arises for specialist knowledge – “say to assist someone with chronic anxiety” – he advocates bringing in an expert to work alongside the practitioner, rather than handing over the case entirely.

Jones recalls his teams at Wiltshire council, where he was a director of social services in the 1990s, as an example.

“We had multidisciplinary groups, but we would have key workers. They would be the person who would stay with the family, child or adult. Other workers might come in and do bits of activity, add expertise and knowledge, but we would have someone to anchor the person.”

If it were up to him, children’s social services would comprise only a “short-term” initial assessment team, followed by longer-term teams embedded within communities “that stuck beside the person”.

“It would bring the focus back to the community. [Practitioners would] know what’s happening in people’s lives [and] their life story, but also know about the communities they’re living in and the impact it has on them.”

A less experienced workforce

Jones served as Wiltshire’s director of social services for 14 years, starting from 1992, a tenure that was common then but rare today.

As of March 2024, the average director of children’s services (DCS) had been in post for less than three years (33 months). The rapid turnover within the workforce – including social workers and managers up to directors – has, in Jones’ view, created an environment “unstable to be building practice skills within”.

“To an extent, we have a less experienced workforce than we have had in the past, including the leadership,” he adds.

“It’s really difficult to build up a strong base of competence and confidence when you’re not around for that long, or when the people around you aren’t around that long.”

‘Change takes time’

“It’s a difficult job,” says Jones about the role of a director.

“There’s a lot of public and media exposure. You’re working in a political environment, both locally and nationally, which is unsympathetic and unsupportive of the work that we’re doing. There’s a lot of blame culture and stress.”

Yet it might be the expectation of change tied to the role that is partly to blame, he says. Directors arrive with new promises and plans, but are unable to see them through in their short tenures, leaving them burnt out.

“We need to recognise that building a culture within organisations takes time. It’s not a job that you can crack in two or three years. You need at least seven or eight to make a difference. But if you can stay beyond that, that’s even better.”

During his time as a director, Jones recalls leaders staying long enough to witness “the consequences of what they were introducing”.

In contrast, recent years have been marked by a quick-fix culture that has made it difficult to build stability, he says.

“At the moment there are too many distractions and everything is too fast. It’s creating a lot of noise without, if you like, the progress that needs to be achieved to actually build stable organisations.”

Building relationships with journalists

An inescapable lesson Jones had to learn as a director was also how to handle media attention. In social work, child deaths or older people wandering off from care homes are sometimes unavoidable, he says.

In those cases, alongside being beside his colleagues to “provide a bit of space and protection for them”, he also took on the media attention through relationships built with local journalists.

“[The media] was handled by me, not some communications officer who didn’t understand the things we needed to talk about. When something awful happened, I had a relationship with the journalist and was able to engage with them.”

‘A spokesperson for social work’

Peter Connelly, who died in Haringey, August 2007

This decade-long dance with the media proved vital when the story of Baby P broke years later.

It’s difficult to talk about Jones’ career and not mention Peter Connelly, the child whose death in 2007, and the subsequent coverage of it in 2008, has permanently marked social work’s history.

Amid the media storm and relentless targeting of practitioners that ensued, Jones – then a professor at Kingston University – became social work’s spokesperson, appearing on various channels and in newspapers to correct the narrative.

Later, in 2014, he also wrote a book, ‘The story of Baby P: Setting the record straight’.

A more risk-averse culture

The case brought an intense period of public condemnation for the sector and a sharp  rise in the annual number of care proceedings, with the number of care applications seeing a 70% rise between 2008-9 and 2012-13  linked to a risk-averse culture that, Jones argues, has yet to ease.

The decade of austerity ushered in by the coalition government in 2010 did not help the sector get back on its feet either.

“We had the double-whammy of the media slam in 2008, and then the government withdrawing resources from us and the families,” says Jones.

“It has made it very difficult to do the work we need to do. We’ve remained largely focused on risk assessment and management, and the job has gotten more difficult. The exposure has increased but the opportunity to do what we need to do has been even more restricted [due to a lack of resources].”

However, despite the hardships, Jones’s belief in the sector remains unwavering. He affirms that what social workers do is “as important now as it’s ever been”.

His parting advice: “We don’t have the resources, but let’s try and calm it down and stick with the job, rather than churning it up as often as we do at the moment.”