Centre for Social Work Practice

facilitating development in social work practice

Public lecture series

Does social work need to be adopted?

John SimmondsDirector of Policy, Research

and Development: British Association forAdoption and Fostering

16th February 2007

Does social work need to be adopted?

“I want to be free of my past,better than my present,and always ambitious for my future.

The only thing that can help me get there is funding and my own will power”

Care Leaver, member of the BeHeard Mobile Phone Texting Paneland quoted in the Government Green Paper “Care Matters”

Does social work need to be adopted?

‘Social workers twist your words and stop you doing things’

‘Get rid of the penguins and send in normal people’

‘I like my social worker because I rarely see her’

‘All the social workers I had were rubbish’

‘I’m me, he’s him’

Does social work need to be adopted?

‘My social worker found me a good school’

‘My present social worker is great’

Does social work need to be adopted?

‘Having diagnosed what is required, social workers generally focus on coordinating services. We see a few examples of social workers who use their skills and relationships to work directly with children and their parents to alter the balance of behaviours in families and achieve changes to enable the child to stay with the family. But it has become exceptional for mainstream children’s social services teams to provide these services for any length of time.’ (Para 6.36)

Does social work need to be adopted?

‘The evidence of our survey on skills assessment supports our main finding in relation to teaching and learning. In neither college based modules nor practice learning is there any expectation that a generic preparation for the social work profession ought to involve students in being assessed in direct communication with children. Unless child observation is taught and assessed, scrutiny of student performance in direct communication with children, including in simulated exercises, is often fortuitous.’ (pp82)Luckock, B., Lefevre, M., Orr D., Jones M., Marchant, R., Tanner K., (2006). Teaching, Learning and Assessing Communication Skills with Children and Young People in Social Work Education, London: Social Care Institute of Excellence

Care Plan

Social workers have so consistently failed in their duties as corporate parents by failing under every one of the Parenting Capacities on the Assessment Framework, failing to participate in training, giving more attention to their own organisational needs than the child’s that it is in the best interests of children to be placed in another organisation and to become their life long responsibility – in other words to be adopted.

Care Plan

The privatisation of social workers into independent social care practices whereby social workers would be ‘incentivitised’ to stick by their children because profits they might make from caring for them would end up in their own bank accounts – a sort of financial adoption support package.

Identify the required skills and knowledge base of the new corporate parents and say that they need to be more like Danish, German or French social pedagogues because they do stick around for longer, have more status and job satisfaction and understand the young people they work with because they are trained to have a more holistic perspective on children’s needs.

Children should be given a stronger voice to challenge or object to the care they receive from their new parents by setting up children’s panels in local authorities to scrutinize whether they are doing a good enough job.

Care Plan

Create a heavyweight system of independent scrutiny for local authority social workers – Independent reviewing officers, Independent advocates, independent visitors, Lead members in local authorities, Designated teachers, Virtual head teachers, Named health workers

Central Question

How has the profession of social work become so identified with the characteristics of the very people that it is meant to help that the government’s proposals for reform in relation to social workers actually seems more like Care Plan for a seriously neglectful parent.

Core Characteristics of Helping Relationships

Accurate Empathy Non Possessive Warmth Non Judgemental attitude

'Professionalism' implies

1. The acquisition of a specialism - knowledge and skills not possessed by untrained workers. This isolates the social worker from the population at large.

2. Social workers come to see themselves as part of an accepted specialist group on a par with doctors and lawyers.

3. The introduction of businesslike career structures, where 'correct' and 'professional' behaviour (such as 'detachment' and 'controlled emotional involvement') is rewarded with advancement.

Clearly, such an approach is welcomed by the ruling class.

Casework

One important tool of professional social work has been casework - a pseudo-science - that blames individual inadequacies for poverty and so mystifies and diverts attention from the real causes - slums, homelessness and economic exploitation. The casework ideology forces clients to be seen as needing to be changed to fit society. ….Professionalism is a particularly dangerous development specifically because social workers look to it for an answer to many of the problems and contradictions of the job itself - i.e. being unable to solve the basic inadequacy of society through social work. It must be fought at every opportunity.

The social worker’s role

might be understood to be integrative – opening the door of the State and welcoming the client in to join society and take up a range of available roles – as parents, as employees, as partners, as community members in a better functioning, more fulfilled way.

From Case Con’s point of view

this integrative, hierarchical role was clearly a serious act of bad faith and oppressive in its effect. It was ‘an iron fist in a velvet glove’.

The client was in the position they were because of class inequalities in society.

There were powerful vested interests in maintaining the status quo and the rich were not interested in sharing any more than they absolutely had to.

Does social work need to be adopted?

‘Everybody hates you. You’re employed to butt into a family’s private business, and you’re paid to be mistrustful. Because you’re empowered to do dreadful things such as take children away from their parents, you’re perceived as a threat. No one looks forward to you popping by. You routinely confront either raging hostility or artificial, brown nosing ingratiation, and either way it’s hard to get straight answers in, what – 20 minutes? You can’t spend long on a case, because you have a whole rota to get through in one day. How many of the people you are trying to help will not answer the door or treat you like rubbish? How many of these cases will be deeply depressing? ’ Lionel Shriver , Independent on Sunday 11.2.07

Does social work need to be adopted?

‘Working together’ or ‘Cooperative effort’ at a joint task is not easy

Why will he not cooperate?

1. Small infants both expect and detect sensory order in their interactions with the world around them.

2. When these expectations of sensory order are violated the infant will become distressed.

3. Biologically and neurologically the infant is pre-programmed to interact with the people that he or she comes into contact with.

4. The infant needs to be sufficiently stimulated by these interactions in order to develop but not over stimulated

Why will he not cooperate?

5. Too much neural activity and the system will crash. If the infant’s neural networks crash, it will like any computer system stop working or at least go into a protective mode.

6. While infants differ in their temperament and the point at which they become overloaded – with some infants it seems to be relatively easily triggered and others seem to be able to take quite a lot of stimulation for this to be so. It is a key part of the mother’s role in interaction with her infant to sufficiently stimulate his or her senses – look, feel, sound, taste smell - but not to the point of overload.

Affect Regulation

The development of the capacity in the individual to self regulate arousal and emotion is one goal of human development.

Developing the capacity to regulate arousal and emotion takes place in interaction with other human beings

The capacity of the mother (and the father) to regulate arousal and emotion in their infant and child is a key parenting capacity.

The problem

Is the mother’s need for stimulation and a reassuring relationship with him is at odds with her son’s need for calmness from her.

What this tells us is that

Working on the boundary is not a static exchange between what is inside one person and what is inside the other.

Fulfilling the responsibilities you have in relation to your role involves a dynamic exchange between perception, wishes and needs in relation to yourself and the other person and much of this may not be particularly conscious.

The key

to establishing helpful, cooperative, problem solving relationships is the interactive regulation of overwhelming emotion

When social workers find themselves

Representing the State and its awesome powers and responsibilities,

Being exposed to the client’s suspicious or hostile feelings about this

Trying to get alongside one parent or the other parent, the child, or

other children in the family, the grandparents, the community

With what purpose protecting the child from their parent or the

parents from each other or the family from the State or the parents from another professional

or changing the clients perceptions or behaviour in relation to any of these.

A new vision based on

A deeper understanding of the role that social workers have in society

That they stand at the boundary of the State and its citizens

That working on the boundary is really difficult because being on the boundary stirs people up

A new vision based on

What gets stirred up are powerful feelings that centre around love and hate, belonging and betrayal, inclusion and exclusion, growth and decay

That these feelings impact on and are experienced in the relationship between the social worker and the client

That the interaction regulation of intense emotion in human beings normally is learnt and developed in relationships

That this requires understanding the principles of establishing cooperative working relationship at an agreed joint task

A new vision based on

That social work organisations need to pay attention to what gets stirred up on the boundary

That they need to recognise that this is not helpfully managed by avoidance or resistance or rigid forms of organisational control

That what happens on the boundary even though its is painful to think about, is a source for bringing about change

That a safe, explorative organisational space is critical to supporting social workers in feeling that are understood and valued for what they do

A new vision

That there needs to be active, thoughtful engagement with society at large about what social workers do, the role they have and conditions that need to be place to support this.