What is Social Work?

Contexts and Perspectives

Nigel Horner

• Publisher: Learning Matters
• Year: 2018
• ISBN:
  9781526413925
• Edition: 5
• Topic: Social Sciences
• Subtopic: Social Work
• Index: Social Sciences

Following the lives of four fictional time-travelling characters, it examines the changing functions of social work by unpicking the changing social and political responses to their needs. From its historical roots to the modern and fast-moving profession it has become, this book looks in detail at how social work has evolved as a profession, what social work looks like in recent years and where it is heading. There arekey chapters onworking with different service user groups including vulnerable adults, children and families and those with learning difficulties or having to live with mental distress. There are also chapters that cover social work as a profession, including current services, practices, themes and debates.

1: Introduction and the core themes

What is social work? The purpose of the book

As you are reading this book, you may have some ideas about how to answer the question ‘What Is Social Work?’, but presumably you are motivated to explore the subject further. This book is written for student social workers who are beginning to develop their skills and understanding of the subject in order to meet the requirements for practice. While it is primarily aimed at students in their first year or level of study, it is hoped that the material will be useful for subsequent years, depending on how your programme is designed, what you are studying and especially as you move into practice learning. The book is also intended to appeal to people considering and exploring a career in social work or social care, but who are not yet studying for a social work degree. It will assist students undertaking a range of social and health care courses in further education; nurses, occupational therapists and other health and social care professionals will be able to gain an insight into the new requirements demanded of social workers. Finally, experienced and qualified social workers, especially those contributing to the development of others by fulfilling the role of practice educators, will also be able to use this book for consultation, teaching, revision and to gain an insight into the expectations raised by the qualifying degrees in social work.

Whatever your situation or your motivation to read further, we hope this book will achieve its purpose – to equip you with a greater understanding of social work, in all its forms and in all of its complexities.

Beginning to answer the question

It has to be acknowledged from the outset that the question ‘What is Social Work?’ is not an easy one to answer. If we had started with the question ‘What is Social Care?’ we might have felt on somewhat firmer ground. After all, ‘social care’ has emerged as the preferred term to encompass the range of personal interactions and services – including caring, supporting, assisting, tending, enabling – that are offered to people to promote and further their well-being, but which do not fit under the umbrella of ‘health care’.

Some people need extra care or support – practical or emotional – to lead an active life and do the everyday things that many of us take for granted. The government is working to provide a social care system that provides care for those who need it, and which enables people to retain their independence and dignity.

Gov.uk, Policy Area: Social Care (https://www.gov.uk/government/topics/social-care)

An increasingly large number of people are engaged in the business of social care, which today has an estimated 1.45 million workforce (as stated in the Skills for Care Report, The State of the Adult Social Care Sector and Workforce in England, March 2015). The total workforce has grown by 9 per cent since 2009 and today women occupy 80 per cent of the posts, 80 per cent are ‘white’ and 10 per cent hold non-EEA nationality. That said, there is a continual shift from local authority posts into the private, independent, not-for-profit and charitable sectors. As at September 2017 there were 109,300 adult social services jobs in local authorities in England (held by around 105,300 people), which represents a decrease of 50,100 local authority jobs since 2011 (31 per cent). The most frequently cited reasons for these decreases between 2016 and 2017 were restructures and service closures (Personal Social Services: Staff of Social Services Departments, England, 2017; published in February 2018 by National Statistics).

The State of Care Report expresses concerns about the workforce as a whole, its sustainability and its future shape. These concerns are based on the evidence of inspections and other information sources received from an oversight of the social care market and trends in data.

The fragility of the adult social care market is now beginning to impact both on the people who rely on these services and on the performance of NHS care. The combination of a growing and ageing population, more people with long-term conditions and a challenging economic climate means greater demand on services and more problems for people in accessing care (CQC, The State of Health Care and Adult Social Care in England, 2015/16).

There are about 284,000 members of staff employed by local authority children’s services and adult care services, with about 550,000 people working for independent sector care homes and domiciliary care providers. The State of Care Report 2010/11 (CQC, 2011) states there are 4,608 care homes with nursing and 13,475 care homes without nursing. (The number of residential care services fell by 10 per cent between 2004 and 2010, while during the same period, the number of agencies offering care in people’s homes went up by more than a third.)

For the general public, social care – which includes such activities as caring for older people in a residential care home, providing home care support or working in a day-care setting with people with learning disabilities – generates generally positive images, allied as it is to other caring professions such as nursing. But our primary concern here is with social work and with those who do social work – namely, social workers – and with actions undertaken by them in the course of fulfilling others’ expectations of the social work role.

As of May 2018, there are 96,571 social workers registered with the professional regulator, the HCPC (Health and Care Professions Council). At 30th September 2017, 28,500 full time equivalent posts are located in Children’s Services, representing an increase of 3 per cent on the previous year. There are 109,300 people employed by Local Authority Adult Social Services in England as of September 2017, amounting to a 31 per cent decrease of jobs (50,100) jobs since 2011, largely accounted for by restructures and service closures.

There are 19,500 full time equivalent jobs for qualified social workers, of which 83 per cent are in local authorities, 12 per cent in NHS structures and 5 per cent in voluntary organisations (Skills for Care, 2018).

Social work sits within the broader range of the social care sphere, but generates significantly different reactions. In this book we will see that, by its very nature, social work is a controversial business, and that the crux of this controversy often arises from the operation of powers as sanctioned by legislation. By being invested with such powers and duties, it is inevitable that social work attracts public opprobrium when it is seen to do too little or to do too much. Little notice is taken of what it does ‘right’, while public outcry inevitably follows when social work is seen to get it ‘wrong’. As an activity, it has come to sit at the interface between the rights of the individual and the responsibilities of the state towards its citizens. It is an evolving, complex and dynamic arena of social intervention. As Parton (1997, p6) argued some time ago, social work is in an essentially contested and ambiguous position, and our contention is that the intervening decades have not seen a lessening of this contested position – if anything the opposite. This makes it a very confusing profession to readily understand. We cannot help but agree with Thompson (2005, p12), who suggests that anyone looking for a simple, non-controversial answer should (therefore) prepare to be disappointed! Yet the original motivation for this book resides, in part, in the requirements for a mode of social work education that were issued by government in 2002, and therefore we shall begin to examine the nature of social work by considering the definitions enshrined in these new requirements.

Requirements for social work education

The Modernising Social Services agenda (Department of Health, 1998b), and the ensuing Care Standards Act of 2000 saw social work education undergo a major transformation since the beginning of the twenty-first century, designed to ensure that qualified social workers are educated to honours degree level and to develop knowledge, skills and values which are common and shared. A vision for social work operating in complex human situations has been adopted as part of the degree requirements (Quality Assurance Agency for Higher Education (QAA), 2000, updated in 2008). This is reflected in the following definition from the International Association of Schools of Social Work and International Federation of Social Workers, 2014:

Definition one

Social work is a practice-based profession and an academic discipline that promotes social change and development, social cohesion, and the empowerment and liberation of people. Principles of social justice, human rights, collective responsibility and respect for diversities are central to social work. Underpinned by theories of social work, social sciences, humanities and indigenous knowledges, social work engages people and structures to address life challenges and enhance wellbeing.

(IFSW, 2014)

While there is a great deal packed into this short and pithy definition, it encapsulates the notion that social work, as a profession, concerns itself both with individual people and with wider society. Social workers engage with people who are vulnerable and who are struggling in some way to participate fully in society. Social workers walk that tightrope between supporting and advocating on behalf of the marginalised individual, while being employed by the social, economic and political environment that may indeed have contributed to their marginalisation.

Given the dual functions, social workers need to be highly skilled and knowledgeable to work effectively in this liminal space and complex context. For the past decade, the reform of social work education has been undertaken with the explicit aim of making the profession more effective, more efficient and more accountable. But in order to improve the quality of professional social work in all its complexity, it is crucial that you, as a student social worker, develop a rigorous grounding in and understanding of theories and models for social work. Such knowledge helps social workers to know what to do, when to do it and how to do it, while recognising that social work is a complex activity with no absolute ‘rights’ and ‘wrongs’ of practice for each situation, and that what is being seen as ‘good practice’ is not a ‘truth’, but is a function of political, moral and economic trends and fashion.

When introducing the reform of social work education, the former Minister championed the practical focus of social work, while appearing to be sceptical of the value of theory, of critical thinking and analysis.

Definition two

Social work is a very practical job. It is about protecting people and changing their lives, not about being able to give a fluent and theoretical explanation of why they got into difficulties in the first place. New degree courses must ensure that theory and research directly inform and support practice.

The Requirements for Social Work Training set out the minimum standards for entry to social work degree courses and for the teaching and assessment that social work students must receive. The new degree will require social workers to demonstrate their practical application of skills and knowledge and their ability to solve problems and provide hope for people relying on social services for support.

(Jacqui Smith, Department of Health, 2002b)

When considering the two definitions above – from the International Federation and from Jacqui Smith, representative as it is of recent UK government policy – some commentators and theorists might criticise the former for its failure to emphasise the ‘control’ element of social work practice, which involves the use of statutory powers to intervene in relation to offending behaviour, to protect vulnerable children and young people, to enforce mental health treatment and services and to protect vulnerable older people, while others would question the simplistic pragmatism of the latter, with its emphasis on the appeal to ‘common sense’, its focus on social work as a rational-technical activity and its inherent anti-intellectualism.

Definition three

One of the outcomes of the Social Work Taskforce (2009), as referred to in the Preface and examined in detail in Chapter 9, was to produce a Public Description of Social Work, which provides us with a third definition, as follows:

Social work helps adults and children to be safe, so that they can cope and take control of their lives again. Social workers [can] make life better for people in crisis who are struggling to cope, feel alone and cannot sort out their problems unaided. (See Appendix 7 for the full text definition.)

The Executive Summary of the Task Force Report further comments on the description, by stating that:

This description makes a strong case for the value of the profession not only for the individuals who use social work services, but also for the whole of society. If they are to be able to live...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Half Title
• Publisher Note
• Title Page
• Copyright Page
• Contents
• About the author
• Series editor’s preface
• Preface to the fifth edition
• The Professional Capabilities Framework
• Acknowledgments
• 1: Introduction and the core themes
• 2: The beginnings of social work: ‘the comfort of strangers’
• 3: Social work with children, young people and families
• 4: Working with people with learning difficulties (or learning disabilities)
• 5: Social work with people experiencing mental distress
• 6: Social work and older people
• 7: Formalising and consolidating social work as a profession
• 8: Current services, practices and social work education issues
• 9: Summarising remarks and signposts
• Appendix 1 Professional Capabilities Framework
• Appendix 2 Subject Benchmark for Social Work (QAA, 3rd edition, 2016)
• Appendix 3 A code of ethics for social work (BASW) values and principles Updated: October 2014
• Appendix 4 Mapping services in modern social work and social care settings
• Appendix 5 Timeline of the development of social work
• Appendix 6 Summary of recommendations from the Munro Report
• Appendix 7 What is social work?
• Appendix 8 The seven principles of public life, also known as the ‘Nolan principles’ (published May 1995)
• Resources and useful websites
• References
• Index