In hard times, hard-pressed social workers cannot be the only resource
Published by Professional Social Work magazine, 11 August, 2022
Social Work England’s recently launched consultation on student social workers’ readiness for professional practice once again raises the spectre of individual social workers being held responsible for structural and political failings. Proposed standard 2.16 is just one example of this but struck a particular chord:
Manage my time and prioritise my workload, demonstrating specific skills in relation to caseload management and use of limited resources to ensure that people’s needs are met.
Statutory social workers will attest to the failure of the market in adult social care, compounded by the pandemic, that has led to them being unable to secure sufficient care and support to meet assessed needs - and that is before we get to the important matter of a person’s wishes and feelings about who should provide that support, and how.
Families, friends and neighbours will attest to having to resort to doing what they can, often while juggling multiple other responsibilities and challenges, impacting their physical and mental health. Safeguarding issues arise from well-intentioned - often loving - but inconsistent and/or inexpert care. Need increases. Due to lack of community-based support, social workers have no option but to turn to residential care, which is more expensive and often not what people want.
I recently had a conversation with a manager in a local authority who said: “We need to think of social workers as a resource - what can social workers do, instead of relying on commissioned care packages.”
I have spent much of my career arguing for and, indeed, trying to model a version of statutory social work that moves away from it being viewed simply as a conduit to other services via ‘an assessment’. However, I worry greatly about this economically expedient co-option of the long-lamented, de-proceduralised, ‘proper’ social work we frequently invoke when decrying the intense over-bureaucratisation of the role.
This call to provide alternatives undermines the professionalism of social workers who have statutorily assessed people as needing commissioned (or direct paid) care and support. It also fails to acknowledge that while social workers would welcome being liberated from their desks to be more practically useful to people, the reality is that the performance management systems that dictate local authority social work practice do not allow for it.
What is being proposed by positing social workers as a resource in these resource-starved contexts? Social workers already build relationships and alliances, support people and communities to secure and marshal resources. We advocate, agitate and uphold human rights through socio-legal literacy and expertise.
This can take the form of securing benefits, housing, supporting people to make and give effect to their decisions. On more than one occasion, I have supported people to clear and clean their homes. But what of personal care, medication and other kinds of skilled support which require particular expertise and the ability to commit to multiple visits in a day?
The suggestion that social workers and informal carers plug gaps in care provision due to the failure of the market devalues the contribution of care workers and advances the narrative that their vital work is unskilled and therefore worthy only of the lowest pay and virtually no career development opportunities.
The solution is not for social workers to manage their time better or make better use of increasingly limited resources. It is more and better-used funding for social care, for the welfare safety net and for the universal social support that prevents need, alongside workloads that allow social workers the time and space to build meaningful, constructive working alliances with people and communities.
To achieve this, local authorities would have to reconceive ‘performance management’, currently based primarily on numbers of ‘cases’ and ‘assessments’ being ‘open’ or ‘closed’.
Instead, they should move to practice and management models that recognise the human and economic gains of allowing practitioners the time and space to practice in accordance with the rights, needs and wishes of the people and communities they support.
This would require systems that capture not only the quantitative data needed for strategic planning but also that vital qualitative data on what ‘good social work’ looks like. We can design these people-oriented systems.
Management and leadership structures that support and champion such work and, importantly, shoulder their proportionate share of responsibility, would no longer have to be the rare exception, but the norm.
From its early days, Social Work England has sought to position itself as a supporter, not just a regulator, of social workers. It now needs to ask itself whether, in the current contexts, proposed standard 2.16, alongside, notably, 1.28 - which emphasises workers’ self-care responsibilities in “periods of uncertainty, change and stress” - would hinder, rather than help, in achieving that aim.
Further, it needs to ask what it can do to ensure government and employers are meeting their responsibilities to foster conditions that liberate social workers to work toward a fairer and more just society which would itself see a reduction of social ills and the needs that arise from them.
Christian Kerr is chair of BASW’s north east branch