The Essential Social Worker

An Introduction to Professional Practice in the 1990s

Martin Davies

• Verlag: Routledge
• Jahr: 2021
• ISBN:
  9781351890595
• Auflage: 3
• Thema: Sciences sociales
• Thema: Travail social

The third edition of The Essential Social Worker has been radically revised and updated and contains an entirely new chapter providing a clear outline of the historical and policy-related framework within which social work operates in areas of particular practice - child care, disability, mental health, old age and criminal justice. The Essential Social Worker defends the idea of a broadly based profession seeking to maintain disadvantaged people in the community. It bravely confronts the shallowness of many short-term fashions and argues that social work is a uniquely humane contributor to the achievement of welfare in the 1990s and beyond. A careful reading of The Essential Social Worker will ensure that the student gains an understanding of the role of social work in a complex urban society and develops an awareness of the debates which surround it. Social work is often subject to public criticism, but, as the author shows, it has continued to grow in scale and in influence throughout the 20th century and although its structure will continue to evolve, social work will remain essential in any society which regards itself as democratic and humane.

Part I

A framework for the 1990s

1 The historical context

By the year 2000, the practice of social work will be four or five generations old. Its beginnings lay in the work of the 19th-century poor law officials who moved destitute people into and out of the workhouse – or, when they misbehaved, into the police court and the local bridewell (or lock-up).

At the beginning of the 20th century, in London and other big British cities home visitors from the Charity Organisation Society dispensed alms, encouragement and advice to needy families; police court missionaries were called on by magistrates to help offenders in trouble; school-board men tracked down truants and returned them to their classes; and a host of voluntary organisations, often linked with the churches, made it their business to help orphans, pregnant girls and destitute women. Help for people who were old or psychiatrically ill, or who had physical or learning disabilities, always lagged behind, but existed in some degree. (The terminology of the time was, of course, different: ‘lunatics, imbeciles and cripples’ were unashamedly viewed as a class apart.)

In the 1930s, the beginnings of social work professionalism could be detected, and by the 1950s, probation officers, child care officers, hospital almoners and psychiatric social workers all enjoyed an independent existence, with the first university-based qualifying courses firmly established. During the 1960s, the common elements in social work training programmes were widely acknowledged, and generic preparation for practice became the norm.

Scotland led the way towards a new unified superstructure with the establishment of social work departments in 1968. In England and Wales, the Seebohm Report (1968) similarly recommended that most social workers should be brought together in the same public sector organisation, and the policy was enacted in 1970 with the creation of social services departments under the control of local government. In England, Wales and Northern Ireland the probation service alone remained independent, but in Scotland it too was absorbed into the local authorities.

There are many social workers now practising who were not even born when the Seebohm Report was published, but the structure that was created in its wake has held firm – and this despite many changes of emphasis, of style and of substance. In the United Kingdom, social workers are overwhelmingly employed either by local authorities or, in the case of probation officers outside Scotland, by committees made up largely of magistrates. United Kingdom social workers are almost all public servants and find themselves working for much of the time within a tightly defined legislative framework, or rather three legislative frameworks. The probation service operates within the system of criminal justice; work with children and families is governed by child care legislation and especially by the Children Act 1989; and almost all other categories of client fall within the purview of mental health legislation, the National Assistance Act 1948 and the National Health Service and Community Care Act 1990.

The power of the legal statutes and the different kinds of demands that they make on social work in the 1990s mean that the short-lived generic tradition is under threat. Although the boundaries between the three legislative categories are not absolute, it seems increasingly likely that social work at the millennium will have committed itself again to the value of specialist skills suitable for use in different settings.

Growth within any organisation tends to lead to greater specialisation of focus and function, and social work has certainly grown steadily since the creation of the new local authority departments in 1971 (Table 1.1).

Table 1.1
Central government expenditure in the public sector: growth/decline in real terms 1971–1991

	1971–76	1976–81	1981–86	1986–91
	%	%	%	%
Defence	−12	+ 18	+ 10	−27
Education	+ 26	−5	−10	−2^*
Health service	+ 38	+ 29	−5	+ 13
Social security	+ 22	+ 50	+ 30	−24
Housing	+ 125	−46	−86	−60
Personal social services	+ 150	+ 32	+ 1	+ 10
* Only the 1989–1990 figure is available for education at the time of writing, and the statistic is adjusted accordingly. Source: Monthly Digest of Statistics, HMSO.

The personal social services had an enormous boost in expenditure immediately following the implementation of the reforms prompted by the Seebohm Committee’s Report; its growth was second only to social security in the quinquennium 1976–1981. In the first half of the 1980s, like most other areas of public expenditure, its expansion was tightly squeezed (though not so much as education); and in the period from 1986 to 1991, only health and social services were allowed any real-term growth. Of course, compared with the other spheres of public expenditure, the personal social services started from a low baseline, but by 1990–91, the total level of expenditure on them had risen to £5.6 billion, compared with £28.6 billion on the health service and £53.8 billion on social security. But, taking the 20-year period as a whole, British social work has grown in budgetary significance and the trend shows no signs of losing steam.

The real nature of the expansion is illustrated in Table 1.2, which shows that the total number of staff employed in local authority social services departments grew by 32 per cent from 1975 to 1991, that the number of social workers there rose by 50 per cent in the same period and that the number of probation officers increased by 43 per cent. Bearing in mind that the period has seen high levels of unemployment in all corners of society, one fact becomes clear: social work has offered one career opening that provided continuing opportunities for new recruits.

Table 1.2
Workforce in statutory social work offices 1975–1991

	1975	1985	1991
Social services departments in England: total numbers employed (or whole-time equivalents)	179 070	217 013	236 043
Social services fieldwork staff employed in England	20 400	24 773	30 675
Number of probation officers in post (wte) in England and Wales	4 998	6 220	7 153
Source: Statistics issued by the Department of Health and the Home Office.

It is simply not possible to say in any absolute sense what an appropriate level for social work expenditure is in any particular economic climate. Rising standards of living mean that expectations of welfare also rise; and an escalating total population combined with longer life-expectation, higher divorce rates, increased levels of crime and a growing number of people who survive life-threatening illnesses means that the client-groups traditionally targeted by social work are burgeoning. In most local authorities, the social services department is now second only to education in the scale of operations.

Understandably, the Treasury tends to get nervous about such expansion and to insist on the need not only for quality control but for clearer targeting of resources. The 1990s are a time for continuing debate about the respective merits of a needs-led or a resource-led programme of welfare provision. In truth, of course, needs are ultimately unassuageable, and social workers, both individually and corporately, are liable to identify expectations of service far beyond a level that will be politically or economically feasible. Hence the primacy, in a democratic society, of parliamentary authority; the only ‘absolute’ level of provision possible in the public sector is the one from time to time determined by government – and that, of course, is not absolute at all, but related to social, political and economic considerations operating at the time.

The emergence of a mixed economy of welfare in which the allocation of public resources sits side by side with market-led provision by commercial or non-profit-making voluntary operators is likely to lead to further changes in the shape and direction of social work during the 1990s. Notwithstanding criticism from the New Right, however, the role of social work in modern society is rarely challenged at the highest levels of politics; on the contrary, concern on all sides about child abuse, teenage crime, loneliness and vulnerability in old age, and homeless people sleeping on the streets of the nation’s cities tends to lead to arguments for more and better social work intervention rather than less.

The collapse of the Iron Curtain between East and West Europe has exposed a particularly intriguing historical episode, one whose implications have not been lost in social work circles. Romania in the 1950s had a perfectly satisfactory social work system with a focus on child and family care not dissimilar to that found elsewhere. However, the country’s autocratic dictator, President Ceausescu, decreed that, because under his rule there were no social problems, there could accordingly be no need for social workers either. As a result, for 25 years until the revolution in 1989, no child welfare was practised and many of the children in greatest need were banished to crudely administered orphanages shut away behind closed doors. No social workers were trained and none were employed; no community work was practised. When, in 1990, UNICEF agents arrived on the scene following world-wide television exposure of horrific images from the ill-resourced orphanages, it quickly became apparent that the outlawing of social work had created a situation which could only be rectified by a major programme of training and the employment of a new generation of professionals.

The irony of the fact that it was the failure of a regime based on socialist ideology which has provided the ammunition to counter New Right scepticism about the legitimacy of social work in society will never be lost. On the contrary, it splendidly illustrates a fundamental assertion: social work is incompatible with dogmatic ideological perspectives, whether they emerge from Left or Right.

Social work reflects a centrist policy commitment, concerned to hold the balance between vulnerable individuals and a compassionate state. It is not a comfortable or complete relationship and it is one which is always open to exploitation. But my own involvement in the Romanian renaissance has reinforced my view that social work will never be redundant in an urban world. I accept, however, that it is both politically and economically important to ensure that social work always maintains an appropriate and properly budgeted approach to the specific tasks allocated to it.

Above all, social work can never be a law unto itself.

2 The policy context

Child protection

written with Elsbeth Neil

The great majority of child care social workers are employed by local authorities and are expected to carry out statutory duties. Although there are some voluntary and private sector agencies, particularly in the provision of residential care, they are heavily dependent on state finance, and generally provide facilities under contract to local authorities or central government. Child care social work in Britain is therefore a manifestation of public policy and of family-related legislation.

But of course what social workers actually do, albeit constrained by a legislative framework, is influenced by ideas and values which reflect the climate of opinion in society (especially as reported in the media) and by the professional and personal standards they themselves bring into the job or absorb during and after training. These ideas, values and standards are in turn influenced by research findings, changing ideologies and, to some extent, fads and fashions.

Child care policy in the 1980s

Child care policy in the 1980s was based largely on laws passed in 1969 and 1975, and reflected the struggles of social workers throughout the decade to achieve a satisfactory balance between the interests of the vulnerable child and the problems faced by families in trouble.

Under the Children and Young Persons Act 1969, social workers were authorised to use place of safety orders to protect children in emergencies (Dyde 1987). Such orders meant that a child could be detained in a safe place for up to 28 days if a court could be persuaded there were reasonable grounds for concern about the child’s well-being. The magistrates could grant such an order without hearing from the parents in the case; indeed, the parents did not even have to be informed that an application was going to be made. It was assumed that the short-term interests and the safety of the child were paramount, and that the informed judgment of the social worker was sufficient basis upon which to make an order.

The Children Act 1975 restricted the rights of natural parents, and permitted under certain conditions the freeing of children for adoption against parental wishes. As a result, the Act strengthened the position of foster and adoptive parents compared to birth parents.

The Child Care Act 1980 imposed a duty on the local authority to diminish the need for children to come into care by offering ‘voluntary supervision’. It also enabled local authorities to receive children into care on a voluntary basis, but the parents of such children did not have the automatic right to remove their children from care on demand. Local authorities had the right to make a full care order if certain conditions were met and, if not rescinded, it would last until the child’s 18th birthday. Once such an order was made, parents lost all their rights and duties in respect of that child.

During t...

Inhaltsverzeichnis

• Cover
• Half Title
• Title Page
• Copyright Page
• Dedication
• Table of Contents
• Preface to the third edition
• Permissions
• Acknowledgements
• Part I A framework for the 1990s
• Part II The theory and practice of maintenance
• Part III Dimensions of practice
• Part IV In conclusion
• Bibliography
• Name index
• Subject index