Remaking Social Work with Children and Families

Paul Michael Garrett

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2004
• ISBN:
  9781134427529
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Medicina
• Subtopic: Teoria, pratica e riferimenti medici

Remaking Social Work with Children and Families provides a sustained examination of the 'modernisation' of this area of social care. It analyses some of the key themes introduced by the administrations of John Major and Tony Blair and provides a critical exploration of contemporary policy initiatives and issues. These include: · the Looking After Children (LAC) materials
· The Framework for the Assessment of Children in Need and Their Families · 'working together' to protect children
· the mainstream approach to 'race' and ethnicity in social work
· the implications for social work of the emergence of 'personal advisers', mentors and related professionals.The author argues that political and ideological factors need to be taken into account in order to understand the dominant discourses and evolving practices of social work with children. Potential fixation with ensuring that young people are able to 'fit' into their allotted roles in a market economy and an overarching concern about children and criminality have been crucial in this respect. He concludes that while social workers and educators should be prepared to embrace change, they need to be critical agents in the process of change, recognising the ever present need to promote and foster democracy within the sphere of social welfare.This timely book will be helpful to all students, educators and social care professionals who are seeking to develop their theoretical and practical understanding of a changing profession.

1: INTRODUCTION: Thinking critically about social work with children and families in the early twenty-first century

In Britain, being asked to describe the shape of social work with children and families presents an immensely difficult task. In the early twenty-first century, on account of the bewildering rapidity of change in this particular sector of social care, it is almost like being asked to describe the finer detail of a speeding motorway driver’s wristwatch whilst stood in an adjacent field. None the less, this book will attempt to provide a series of critical snapshots of key features of contemporary social work with children and families.¹

Currently, this area of social work can be associated with a range of dominant preoccupations. These include:

• The fragmentation of local authority social work and the creation of new organisational forms of intervention in the lives of children and their families (e.g. the Sure Start initiative, Youth Offending Teams, the Connexions agency, etc.). Changes are also taking place across the adult and community care sector (see, for example, the editorial ‘Under health, by stealth’, Community Care, 8–14 November 2001: 5).
• The proliferation of ‘performance targets’, ‘outcome’ measures and other types of quantitative data demanded by the New Labour administration (Ward and Skuse 2001; see also Clarke and Newman 1997; Newman 2001; Arkin 2001; Travers 2001). Related to this has been the introduction into practice of a plethora of centrally devised ‘tools’, which have had an impact on the process of social work with children and families.
• An emphasis on agencies ‘working together’ and ‘joined up’ approaches.
• A renewed emphasis on the centrality of child adoption, particularly as an option for children who are in public care, or ‘looked after’ under the Children Act 1989.
• Poor morale and a staffing recruitment crisis. Only 4,703 people applied to the social work admissions system for courses starting in 2001 compared with 11,526 in 1995: a fall of 59 per cent (see the editorial ‘A boost for students’, Community Care, 3–9 October 2002: 5). This crisis prompted, in 2001–2, in a series of advertisements in the national press (Department of Health 2001a; Unison 2002).
• The publication of National Occupation Standards and reorganisation of social work education (Orme 2001).
• The introduction of a new regulatory structure for social work and social care. Related to this has been the installation of a new, or reconfigured, panoply of quangos and ‘alphabet agencies’, including the General Social Care Council (GSCC), the Training Organisation for Personal Social Services (TOPSS), Social Care Institute for Excellence (SCIE), the National Care Standards Commission (NCSC) and, more recently, the Commission for Social Care Inspection (CSCI).
• The continuing public inquiry examining the circumstances relating to the death of Victoria Climbie (Department of Health 2001b). Furthermore, there is, of course, speculation about the impact of the inquiry on child protection services (Association of Directors of Social Services 2002a; Kendall and Harker 2002; Local Government Association, NHS Confederation, Association of Directors of Social Services 2002). In the early twenty-first century, concerns were also expressed about social work responses to other children – including Chelsea Brown, Ainlee Labonte and Lauren Wright – who were killed by their carers.

Clearly, this list is not exhaustive and some of the preoccupations and themes relate to social work, in general, and not simply to social work with children and families. It might also be suggested that some of these developments are situated in a wider public domain (for example, the Climbie case) whilst others (for example, the increasing use of centrally devised ‘tools’ for practice) are, perhaps, of interest and concern only to social workers and related staff. None the less, at the time of writing, these remain some of the main issues and they will provide part of the substance of the book, or part of the backdrop for the ensuing discussion.

A central contention in this book is that we are witnessing the remaking of social work with children and families. Furthermore, the focal aim will be to critically analyse this process. In short, how did social work with children and families come to look the way that it does in the early twenty-first century? What assessments, moreover, are we able to make about its future trajectory and shape? The intention will not be to try and mount a reactive defence of ‘old’ ways of working or anachronistic organisational forms. There can, for example, be no going back to the social work of the pre-Thatcherite period and to the economic and social circumstances which gave rise to the particular character of social work then. This is not a volume that nostalgically yearns for a return to a ‘Golden Age’ of pure and benevolent social work endeavour (see, in this context, Strangleman 1999). Moreover, there will be no forsaken attempt to represent social work as an entirely benign – or ‘empowering’ activity – which has become freshly contaminated by political and managerial imperatives. In examining the remaking of social work with children and families, the book’s focus will largely be on local authority social work in England and Wales. It is, however, suggested that developments here are apt to have implications for social work theory and practice elsewhere in Europe and even farther afield. Indeed, the ‘ways of seeing’ social work being promoted here – and the operational modalities which these visions give rise to – tend to lead to changes to social work processes in other national settings. For example, cultural artefacts (the plethora of protocols, schedules and assessment ‘tools’ devised in England) frequently become exports. Furthermore, the export potential of the various ‘systems’ and ‘frameworks’ for social work and social welfare is enhanced in the context of more embracing global transformations (Pugh and Gould 2000; see also Jameson 2000; Mann 2001). Important here is also the fact that the new states comprising the former Eastern Bloc are frequently seeking to model theory and practice on British and American approaches (Iarskaia-Smirnova and Romanov 2002).² The materials associated with the influential Looking after Children: Assessing Outcomes in Child Care project (LAC), for example, are now being deployed amongst, we are advised, ‘Aboriginal peoples in Western Australia and the Inuit of Labrador’ as well as being used with children and families in Canada, Sweden, Hungary and Russia (Ward 2000b: 134; see also Parker et al. 1991; Gray 2002: 193–4). In brief, some of the issues at the heart of this book, although relating to social work in Britain, will have resonance across national boundaries.

The fluidity and ambiguity of ‘social work’

As an activity ‘social work’ is, of course, socially constructed and culturally and historically unstable (see also International Federation of Social Workers 2000). Consequently, changes in the modalities of social work intervention, reflected in, for example, the LAC system and the Framework for the Assessment of Children in Need and their Families should not surprise (Department of Health, Department for Education and Employment, Home Office 2000).³ Bar-on (1999: 9), for example, in his discussion on the development of social work in Africa, points out that social work training in Botswana originally took place in ‘an agricultural college where students were taught ‘cooking, knitting, vegetable gardening and the like’. In short, the activity constructed and identified as ‘social work’ – here entirely abstracted from, for example, a preoccupation with ‘frameworks’ and schedules – was partly shaped and determined by the context in which it took place and evolved.

In a European context, however, Zygmunt Bauman (2000a), commenting on the ‘proceduralisation’ of social work, evidenced by the increased use of centrally devised schedules and ‘instruments’, has expressed concern that ‘daily practice’ is becoming ‘ever more distant from its original ethical purpose’ (Bauman 2000a: 9). He reminds his readers that ‘social work, whatever else it may be, is also the ethical gesture of taking responsibility for the fate and well-being of the Other’ (Bauman 2000a: 10). He goes on:

Clarity and unambiguity may be the ideal of the world in which ‘procedural execution’ is the rule. For the ethical world, however, ambivalence and uncertainty are the daily bread and cannot be stamped out without destroying the moral substance of responsibility, the foundation on which the world rests.

In a humanistic sense, therefore, this tension between the ‘original ethical impulse’ and ‘procedural execution’ might be viewed as the focal point for a range of dilemmas which confront social workers, particularly in a context where – as we shall see – micro-engagements with the users of services are increasing being plotted by centrally devised assessment schedules and measured by quantitative performance indicators. Nonetheless, it could be countered that Bauman’s magisterial overview, although welcome because his comments run counter to the hegemony of managerialism and the practitioner cynicism it is apt to engender inside welfare bureaucracies, is not entirely convincing on account of the way he perceives the ‘original’ ethical purpose of social work.

In Britain, it could be argued that the motivations, impulses and preoccupations of the Charity Organisation Society (COS), the forerunner of modern social work, were more complex than his analysis would suggest (see Jones 1983). To be sure, there was a concern about ‘the Other’, but how the recipients of services were constructed – in the language of the day as the ‘industrial residuum’ (Dendy 1895) – suggests a project far less benign and more regulatory and disciplinary. From these early days, social work interventions were intent on reinforcing particular economic and gender relations. Even during this early period, marking the beginning of professional social work, there was also an early fixation with proceduralisation (see Richmond 1917). Furthermore, this understanding also relates to the notion that ‘British child welfare practice has suffered from a lack of historical reflection’ (Stevenson 1998: 154). Indeed, perhaps social work needs to be more attentive to the historical dimension.⁴ Clearly if there is a failure to interrogate the collective professional past, social work will be ill equipped to analyse and respond to more contemporary ‘blueprints’ for practice such as the highly influential LAC system.

Reviewing the radical critique(s)

In Britain, in the late 1970s, many social work academics and practitioners did begin to re-examine social work’s role in society and the way in which it functioned. Central here was an emerging recognition that the tasks of social workers could only be properly understood in the context of the political economy. A range of ‘radical’ texts, therefore, identified social work as part of the capitalist state’s ideological apparatus (Simpkin 1983; see also Althusser 1971). These contributions remain insightful, but the more vulgar variants of Marxism were, perhaps, too economically reductive and insufficiently attentive to structural discrimination and oppression also rooted in racism (Dominelli 1988) and patriarchy (Kemp and Squires 1997). More recently, within social work, there have been attempts to evolve more inclusive counter-discourses and strategies and these can be associated with ‘anti-discriminatory practice’, ‘anti-racist practice’ and ‘anti-oppressive practice’.

All these ideas did not, however, evolve in a social and economic vacuum, but were a by-product of the struggles, throughout civil society and stretching back into the late 1960s, of a range of social movements which had alternative visions of how the world might be organised (Harman 1988). Contestations, taking place in the industrial West and elsewhere included: a reinvigorated struggle, partly informed by Marxism, but also more libertarian currents, for workers’ rights and industrial democracy (Meiksins Wood 1995); the battle for women’s equality (Segal 1987; Brah 1992: 34–40) and for gay liberation (Segal 1990: ch. 6); the fight for racial equality in the metropolitan centres and for national self-determination for ‘subordinate’ nations confronted by imperialism and neo-colonialism (Dooley 1998). This period also witnessed the birth of an inchoate ‘politics of disability’ (Oliver 1984) and a mental health system ‘survivors’ movement (see Rogers and Pilgrim 1989).

Another critique of the idea that social work is a deeply ethical – even liberatory or ‘empowering’ – activity has, more recently, been provided by those influenced by post-structuralism and particularly Foucault (1977; see also Rojek 1986; Webb and McBeath 1989; Parton 1991; Rodger 1991). This approach perceives social work as one facet of ‘disciplinary power’ which Foucault associated with the evolution of the ‘psy professions’ (psychology, psychiatry, criminology) and the spread of new discourses and technologies of treatment and surveillance (see also Donzelot 1979; Cohen 1979, 1985; Rose 1985, 1989). During the 1990s, the related social theory of postmodernism also had some impact on social work theorising (see McBeath and Webb 1991; Nuccio and Sands 1992; Gorman 1993; Howe 1994; Pardeck et al. 1994; Parton 1994; Pozatek 1994; Parton and Marshall 1998; Pease and Fook 1999; Fawcett et al. 2000; see also Carter 1998). However, social work’s belated postmodernist turn had little real impact on field social work, as perceived by its practitioners. Perhaps more fundamentally, the more ‘extreme’ or ‘sceptical’ postmodernist orientations have been cogently criticised from within social work (Peile and McCourt 1997; Smith and White 1997; Ferguson and Lavalette 1999; Williams 1999).⁵

‘No space of innocence’? Governmentality and social work

The contribution of Foucault remains significant for those trying to grasp the meaning and intent of social work. For him, ‘government’ needed to be conceived in the broad way in which it was viewed in the sixteenth century. During that period ‘government’, therefore, did:

not simply refer to political structures or the management of states; rather it designated the way in which the conduct of individuals or states might be directed: the government of children, of souls, of communities, of families, of the sick … It did not cover only the legitimately constituted forms of political or economic subjection … To govern, in this sense, is to structure the possible fields of action.

(Foucault in Harris 1999: 30; see also Rose 1996: 38; Dean 1999)

Foucault’s contribution and the subsequent literature influenced by it can, therefore, be viewed as helpfully expanding our understanding of what constitutes ruling and ‘governance’ (see also Rose 1998: 10–18). This conceptualisation and its ‘analytics of government’ would perceive social work as complicit in the strategies of governance (Johnson 1993) – part of the assemblage of micro-practices which comprise contemporary modes of government (see also Fraser 1989: 17–35).

The autonomy of experts and expertise is, however, important for governmentality theorists. Rose and Miller (1992: 180), for example, argue that ‘Liberal government identifies a domain outside of “politics” and seeks to manage it without destroying its autonomy.’ This is made possible through the ‘activities and calculations of a proliferation of independent agents’ including social policy formulators and practitioners, such as social workers. Here, ‘political forces’ seek to ‘utilise, instrumentalise and mobilise techniques and agents other than those of “the state” in order to “govern at a distance’” (Rose and Miller 1992: 181). However, experts and expertise – embodying neutrality, authority and skill – fulfil a crucial role because they ‘hold out the hope that the problems of regulation can remove themselves from the disputed terrain of politics and relocate into the tranquil seductive territory of truth’ (Rose and Miller 1992: 188).

More recently, Rose (1993: 285) in articulating the concept of ‘advanced liberal rule’ has stressed the relocation of experts within a ‘market governed by the rationalities of competition, accountability and consumer demand’ (see also Rose 1996: 40–1). It might, of course, be countered that expertise and experts are no longer, in a ‘risk society’, unquestionably accepted as possessing unimpeachable attributes of authority and skill (see Beck 1998). However, Rose (1993: 295) has, in part, acknowledged this shift in that his conceptualisation of ‘advanced liberal rule’ recognises the ‘dialectic of hope and suspicion today attached to experts and their truths’. For him, this development can be associated with a ‘reconfiguration of the political salience of expertise’ and ‘a new way of “responsibilizing” experts in relation to claims made upon them other than those of their own criteria of truth and competence’ (Rose 1996: 55). A number of writers, not associated with the governmentality approach, have also looked at changes taking place with regard to the professions and professional identities. Some have specifically examined the implications of ‘responsibilising’ for the welfare professions as a whole (Foster and Wilding 2000; Malin 2000), or particular fields of welfare, such as probation (Nellis 1999; Robinson 2001; Sparrow et al. 2002).

Importantly, those influenced by the governmentality literature exhibit a certain pessimism. Despite the claims of ‘radical social work’ throughout the late 1970s and early 1980s (Jones 1983), Amy Rossiter (2000: 32), a social work academic based in Canada, has argued that there is no ‘space of innocence’ which permits the choice of being ‘an agent of social change or being an agent of social control’ (Rossiter 2000: 32). Problems are further compounded because social work has ‘barely begun the work of understanding its construction within power’ (emphasis added). Hence it continues to seek to rely on ‘notions of innocent helping to legitimate its presence’. However, for her, there is ‘no help … outside of governmentality’.

Having accepted that the governmentality literature helps to promote new insights, it is, therefore, also important to recognise that there are problems associated with this conceptual approach. Fitzpatrick (2002: 14) has asserted that the theorists of governmentality resemble ‘foreign correspondents’ who are reporting, but ‘unwilling to intervene’. On account of this orientation, the ‘dispossessed’ are likely to regard ‘post-structuralist non-intervention as affluent self-indulgence’ (see also Harris 1999: 27). More fundamentally, because of an antipathy for anything resembling ‘meta-histories of promise’ and a preference for ‘militancy grounded in scholarly moderation’, some of the leading intellectual interventions associated with governmentality theory appear to rule out the possibility of human agency and fail to appreciate the significance of counter-discourses and oppositional practices (see, particularly, Dean 1999: ch. 3).

The notion of ‘governing at a distance’ and expert autonomy is perhaps questionable when applied to local authority social work, in Britain. As we shall see, throughout the 1990s and early twenty-first century, there have been concerted attempts to render social work – the ‘invisible trade’ (Pithouse 1998) – more visible and less autonomous. Furthermore, as the LAC system, the Framework and the whole ‘competences’ approach central to social work education indicate, social work – not only with children and famili...

Table of contents

• COVER PAGE
• TITLE PAGE
• COPYRIGHT
• ACKNOWLEDGEMENT
• LIST OF ABBREVIATIONS
• 1: INTRODUCTION: THINKING CRITICALLY ABOUT SOCIAL WORK WITH CHILDREN AND FAMILIES IN THE EARLY TWENTY-FIRST
• PART I: MAJOR DEPARTURES? SOCIAL WORK WITH CHILDREN AND FAMILIES, 1990–1997
• PART II: THINGS CAN ONLY GET BETTER? NEW LABOUR AND SOCIAL WORK WITH CHILDREN AND FAMILIES
• NOTES
• BIBLIOGRAPHY