Events | 2009.12.12
No one likes us social workers. We care | Julia Slater
Ed Balls is right to want to improve the status of social workers. We have long been unappreciated
People have never liked social workers. In 1969, when first mentioned I was thinking of being a social worker, the response was not encouraging. Friends would look at me suspiciously, and not say much, except for edgy jokes like: "Going to be a goody-goody, eh?" The most common reaction, then and subsequently, was: "I could never do that job – I\'m too sensitive; I\'d worry about the people I was seeing; I couldn\'t sleep nights." The implication being, of course, that anyone doing it was totally insensitive.
So it\'s good to see children\'s secretary Ed Balls acknowledge that the status, training and conditions of social work need reform . It is a profession subject to peculiar public perceptions. Most people who disapprove have no idea what social work consists of; it\'s not like teaching or medicine, where everyone has been on the receiving end.
Children\'s social work is largely restricted to the most deprived section of society – but mental and physical illness and disability occur in all classes. So many people do have contact with social workers, but few mention it, even if they think their social worker is really helpful, not to say indispensable. When I was working in a psychiatric hospital, patients would refer to their GP or counsellor but rarely to the social worker, even when that would be the professional they saw most. Possibly, having a social worker is perceived to be a sign you are simply not coping with life, something people are frightened of admitting.
Yet when sociology became popular as an academic subject in the 60s and 70s, a large number of the graduates went into social work, particularly mental health. Exciting reform was in the air. We made 10-year plans, confident that social problems would gradually evaporate. I remember a social work tutor saying: "Your task will be to work yourself out of a job."
I find it hard to imagine the heroes who are choosing to be social workers now, subject to endless criticism and blame from government, media or the general public. The worst nightmare in social work is when a child you have professional responsibility for is killed by the people in charge of him. You may know the child well, so be extremely upset, and at the same time be experiencing the anguish of asking yourself whether you could have prevented the death. Blame culture has added the acute fear of being splashed all over the newspapers. It is difficult for your managers to support you because they are in the same high-anxiety state. The unwritten mission statement of modern social service departments must be, "Never figure on the front page of the tabloids."
Mistakes are made by people in all jobs. The errors made by health and social care professionals are on the same level, but by their very nature they can have tragic consequences. It is impossible to eradicate human error or misjudgments. Every time there is a childcare or mental health inquiry there are recommendations made – based on circumstances that will never happen in quite that way again.
Admitting to being a social worker is never easy when out socially – but this may be an entirely British phenomenon. On a visit to Chile to talk about mental health, everyone I met involved in social services would introduce themselves as a social worker, whatever level they were on. This would be unimaginable in the UK.
The amalgamation of social services in the 1970s introduced a good career structure for social workers, with lucrative jobs at the top. But the people who shot into these posts were mostly men who wanted to be managers; there was little competition from the majority of social workers who had entered the profession to do the job, not to manage others. The speed with which some still become managers is alarming. They are not practising long enough to learn caution about drawing quick conclusions and making hasty interpretations: people and their relationships are so very complicated.
Balls has now accepted the recommendations of the Social Work Taskforce , including that employers should listen to frontline practitioners (and pay them more). But my professional life has been punctuated by bodies making that recommendation, and it never happens.
For more information, please visit
http://www.guardian.co.uk/commentisfree/[...]03/social-work-reform-ed-balls
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