Chapter 1 traced the development of social work in the post-war period in the wider context of the changing welfare state, from the fragmented post-war local authorities through to Seebohm’s 1970 unified local authority social services departments, staffed by professionally qualified generic social workers. From the 1980s onwards there was a return to more specialist social work, albeit in a very different policy context. There have been major changes to where social workers are located institutionally, the role of the market in service delivery, the relationship between central and local government in determining social work services, and to social work’s professional identity and relationship to other professions. These developments have important implications for what social work is and how social workers are trained. This chapter examines current structures for delivering social work services and for co-ordinating them with other relevant services, alongside the systems developed for ensuring quality and accountability, including both professional governance and social work training.
A major benefit of the establishment of a single local authority social services department following the Seebohm Report was that these departments had the capacity to work holistically with families. However, the removal of one set of divisions, for example between adults’ and children’s personal social services, was inevitably replaced by new divisions between social services, health and education, which produced new problems of communication and co-ordination. There were significant difficulties in bringing together the different occupational groups involved in delivering personal social services, with their different areas and levels of expertise, to form a single department offering a generic service, and there was confusion and debate about whether ‘generic’ meant generic departments, generic teams or generic social workers (Stevenson 1999: 86). Considerable time and effort was devoted to trying to work out the best way of organizing the delivery of the new personal social services: ‘The creation of Social Service Departments did not resolve the problems of communication and cooperation as had sometimes (unrealistically) been suggested. Inside and outside the local authority were agencies or other professionals critical to the well-being of children and families and others needing service’ (Stevenson 1999: 88).
As this chapter will show, the attempt to find structural solutions to the problem of how best to co-ordinate the work of different professions and agencies in order to provide adequate support and protection for children, adults and families has preoccupied successive governments. These issues became an increasing concern as local authority power was gradually eroded from the 1980s onward, in favour of greater control of policy and resources by central government. The work of social services departments was overseen by the Department of Health and Social Security, and from 1988, when this department was re-organized, the Department of Health.
Whilst the formal institutional arrangements for personal social services remained unchanged during the 1980s, social work fragmented again into more specialized work under a single social services organizational umbrella. There were several reasons for this. First, a series of high-profile inquiries into child protection scandals in the 1970s and 1980s consistently uncovered failures of communication between social workers and other agencies involved with the families, and also identified inadequately trained and supervised front-line workers as a contributory factor. The complexity of child protection work and the need for good communication with other agencies led to greater specialization by social workers, with child and family social work increasingly narrowly focused on child protection.
Second, two major pieces of legislation, the 1989 Children Act and the 1990 NHS and Community Care Act (discussed further later in this chapter and in chapter 6), signalled a new role for social workers as enablers and managers of services working in partnership with other agencies. Both pieces of legislation involved a move away from state social work’s centrality in providing services, to a much expanded role for the private and voluntary sectors as service providers (albeit with state funding), with social workers assessing situations and facilitating appropriate service delivery. The main exception was in child protection where local authority social workers retained central responsibility for assessing whether children were at risk of significant harm, and making arrangements for their protection (Langan 1993; Langan and Clarke 1994: 76). The legislation reinforced divisions which had already emerged for pragmatic reasons between social workers working with older and disabled adults, those focusing on children and families, and mental health social workers.
This return to more specialist roles for social workers led in the 2000s to institutional changes which continued the reversal of the Seebohm reforms and created new local institutional structures for social work with different client groups. These changes were driven by longstanding concerns about the rising cost of adult social care and New Labour’s focus on ‘joined-up government’ to achieve better co-ordination between different services and agencies as a means to deliver more effective and efficient services through the synergy they hoped this joint working would produce. Some changes also involved ‘de-professionalizing’ social work to some extent, as many new roles were no longer restricted to qualified social workers. So, for example, care managers, working with elderly people or adults with disabilities, may have qualified as occupational therapists, and those working with adults with mental health problems may be health professionals (Harlow et al. 2013: 240).
From the 1990s, social work also began to be referred to under the broader canvas of social care and from 2000 the organizations regulating social work adopted the term ‘social care’ to include both social work and the wider social care workforce (the General Social Care Council and the Health and Care Professions Council), as opposed to the original Central Council for Education and Training in Social Work. These changes also risked undermining social work’s professional status because ‘social care’ was traditionally a Cinderella service, subordinate to medicine and healthcare, associated with the more ‘tending’ and ‘hands-on’ practical aspects of looking after vulnerable people, and carried out by people with few or no qualifications. Furthermore, some authors have argued that the incorporation of social work into the broader social care agenda has distracted attention from the more controlling and political aspects of the social work role, led to lay confusion about the difference between social work and social care, and has often resulted in social work, configured as part of social care, being viewed as inferior to healthcare or as an adjunct to it (Barnes et al. 2007). Higham (2006: 8), however, claimed that ‘the emergence of social care in its own right has set social work free to become a profession which can now focus on higher level practice, skills and values’.
The institutional structures for social work with children and families were radically re-organized after the Laming Inquiry (2003) identified poor communication between health, education, social services and the police as the underlying cause of the failure to protect Victoria Climbié from the abuse she suffered, which eventually led to her death. The government’s response, Every Child Matters (Chief Secretary to the Treasury 2003), led to the Children Act 2004 which introduced a duty on many organizations to work collaboratively to safeguard children and promote their well-being. Section 10(2) of the Act defined well-being as involving five aspects: physical and mental health and emotional well-being; protection from harm and neglect; education, training and recreation; the contribution made by children to society; social and economic well-being. These were abbreviated in subsequent policy documents to five outcomes: being healthy; staying safe; enjoying and achieving; making a positive contribution; and achieving economic well-being (see, for example, DfES 2004: 4). The Act required local authorities to appoint a Director of Children’s Services, with responsibility for both education and children’s social services. This led to the creation of children’s services departments, answerable to a councillor holding lead responsibility for children’s services within the local authority.
Changes at local government level were matched by changes in central government. From 2004, responsibility for social work was divided between different central government departments. The Department of Health retained responsibility for adult social services and mental health social work. Children’s education and social care were brought together under a new Minister for Children, based in the Department for Education and Skills (DfES, subsequently the Department for Children, School and Families, DCSF). In 2010, under the Coalition government, the department name reverted to Department for Education, with responsibility for children and families resting with an Under Secretary rather than a Minister. This had the effect of significantly reducing the profile of social work with children.
Directors of Children’s Services did not have to have a specific professional background and the majority of the initial appointments to these posts came from education, with only about 25 per cent coming from a social work or social care background (O’Brien et al. 2006). Furthermore, only a small proportion of the total budget was allocated to social workers, who were limited to working with the most vulnerable children – ‘children in need’ – including children in need of protection, disabled children and looked-after children (Parton 2009). Broader community-based family support roles were given to the education sector in the form of extended schools, and to the recently established Children’s Centres staffed by workers from a range of professional backgrounds.
The 2004 Act therefore removed social work from its more generic aspirations by replacing Directors of Social Services with Directors of Children’s Services and separate Directors of Adult Social Services (Jones 2014). Seebohm’s vision of social work providing a universal preventative family service was also replaced by a focus on high-risk families and child protection, while more universal family support services became the responsibility of other professionals. Children’s social work was effectively subsumed within education from 2004 onwards, whilst adult social work became further colonized by health under New Labour and the Coalition and submerged under the banner of ‘health and social care’. New Labour also created new multi-agency bodies such as Youth Offending Teams, where social work’s influence and distinctiveness waned (Rogowski 2010). This fragmentation of services meant that social work lost its rather fragile identity as a generic but distinctive profession.
As chapter 1 showed, since the late 1980s the organization and delivery of welfare services has been shaped by neoliberal ideology, with a central role given to the operation of the market and to methods of management drawn from the private sector. This organizational change in the public sector is referred to as ‘new public management’ (NPM). It is characterized by:
Although NPM was developed in slightly different ways by the New Labour governments (1997–2010) and the 2010–15 Coalition government, the underpinning philosophy has remained fundamentally unchanged. While the post-war welfare state has always involved a mixed economy of welfare, with services provided by the state, the market, the voluntary sector and the family, the balance shifted under the influence of neoliberalism to give a much greater role to the market (and to some extent the family). The state continued to be responsible for funding the majority of welfare services, but service delivery shifted away from the state to the private and voluntary sectors. This introduced a whole new layer of bureaucracy into public services, associated with the process of tendering and contracting for services. In some areas of welfare provision, such as the NHS, where it was not politically feasible to introduce private contractors, a system of quasi-markets was introduced where one section of the service contracted with another for particular services. Most notably, GPs were given funds to purchase hospital services for their patients, with hospitals competing with each other to be awarded a contract. Such competition was supposed to ensure that hospital services were delivered as cheaply as possible.
In social work, marketization involved the state paying for services co-ordinated by social workers but purchased from outside the local authority. Until the early 1990s, the majority of services social workers drew on were ‘in house’, i.e., local authorityrun resources, such as day centres, residential homes, and community provision, such as home help services, with a few highly specialist services being bought in. Clients were rarely charged for services or means-tested to determine their eligibility for them. Residential care was free for many older adults and paid for from central government’s social security budget.
In an attempt to contain costs, the 1990 NHS and Community Care Act shifted responsibility for meeting the cost of residential care to local authorities, as well as placing the onus on families and neighbours to provide as much unpaid ‘community care’ as possible. Local authorities only retained the money transferred to them from the social security budget for residential care if 90 per cent was spent on contracted-out services, and, again in an attempt to control costs, means-testing for these services was extended.
By 2005, 90 per cent of all residential care homes were in the private sector, many owned by large multinational conglomerates that effectively monopolized the market (Jordan and Drakeford 2012). Social workers, with the exception of those working in child protection, were correspondingly recast from a traditional social administration role into an NPM incarnation (Farrell 2010): social worker as care manager rather than caseworker. Furthermore, because one of the key reasons for the introduction of community care policies was to restrict expenditure (Lewis and Glennerster 1996), the social work role was transformed into one of gate-keeping and rationing (Lymbery and Postle 2010), which, many argued, de-professionalized social workers. It is important to note, however, that other motives for the changes introduced into adult social care – at least rhetorically – included de-institutionalization of older people and those who were mentally ill or disabled, in order to give them a better quality of life.
A similar process of marketization has occurred in children’s services in relation to the provision of foster care and residential care for children (Sellick 2011). This was further extended in 2009 when the New Labour government piloted independent Social Work Practices (SWP), analogous to GP practices, as a model for delivering services for looked-after children. The pilot SWPs took a variety of forms: voluntary or community organizations, social enterprises and private businesses. The aim was for social workers to be freed from the restrictions of local authority procedures and high caseloads to enable them to focus their efforts and energies on looked-after children (Stanley et al. 2012). Controversially, the pilot involved outsourcing some aspects of children’s social workers’ statutory roles and tasks, although the local authority remained the ‘corporate parent’ with ultimate responsibility for the child. The findings from the pilot were mixed and it was difficult to determine how far positive outcomes for children, parents and carers were attributable to the model or to other factors (Stanley et al. 2012). A proposal in 2014 to extend the contracting out of statutory responsibilities further by allowing local authorities to contract out child protection services was modified to exclude for-profit organizations bidding for the work after widespread objections from social workers, academics and the wider public (Munn 2014).
Wrennall (2013: 172) documents three potentially corrupting processes linked with NPM that may eclipse service user needs: (i) economic conflicts of interest; (ii) perverse financial incentives; and (iii) NOMBism (NOMB being an acronym for ‘not on my budget’). Economic conflicts of interest occur when the boundaries between public and private services become blurred (Penna 2003). This might involve public officials, such as social workers or doctors, also acting as directors of private companies (for example, residential care homes), leading to a lack of clarity as to whether local authorities are purchasers, providers or both, with the two being governed by different rules. Take-overs and mergers of different private companies can also result in a monopoly or cartel in particular areas of service provision, such as adult or children’s residential care.
Perverse financial incentives occur when local authorities are financially penalized for investing in ‘worthy’ outcomes or rewarded for less worthy ones. For example, in 2006 looked-after children who entered higher education became the financial responsibility of their local authority, meaning that there was a financial disincentive for local authorities to encourage these young people to go to university. By contrast, the cost of maintaining looked-after children in young offender institutions was met from the Home Office budget, ‘rewarding’ authorities when young people in care were sent to these institutions (Wrennall 2013).
NOMBism can mean that cost-cutting on one budget increases demands on others. A reduced budget for social care may result in additional costs to other welfare services such as the NHS. This was illustrated by the crisis in the NHS early in 2015 when a number of hospitals declared a ‘major incident’ and were forced to cancel all nonemergency operations and direct patients elsewhere because of intense pressure on A & E departments for a combination of reasons, including ‘bed-blocking’ by elderly patients who could not be discharged because there was no appropriate community care package in place (Guardian, 6 January 2015). Wrennall’s analysis illustrates how the apparent efficiencies of the market may be compromised by other countervailing interests.
Marketization of welfare services resulted in a new kind of fragmentation of provision, with different agencies responsible for different services. The pressures to meet performance targets, created by NPM, also undermined cooperation because of the different targets that different agencies had to meet. Responsibility for older people was frequently passed between health and social care, with mutual recriminations between health and social services over avoidable hospital admissions and delays to hospital discharges because of a lack of clarity about what constitutes ‘healthcare’ and what constitutes ‘social care’.
New Labour aimed to ‘modernize’ public services by promoting greater cooperation and communication between agencies whose joint working was necessary to address a wide variety of ‘wicked issues’. Wicked issues are multi-faceted problems with complex underlying causes and no clear solution, such as the poor educational outcomes of children in care, teenage pregnancy, neighbourhood deprivation and re-offending by ex-prisoners. Units and task forces were created, working across different government departments, to develop integrated policies to address these entrenched social problems. The Social Exclusion Unit (SEU), for example, established in 1997 and later transformed into a ‘taskforce’, had the remit of providing ‘joined-up solutions to joined-up problems’ (SEU 2004). Early SEU reports focused on rough sleeping, school exclusion and teenage pregnancy, making recommendations affecting central and local government departments responsible for health, education, housing and social security.
The Labour governments from 1997 saw ‘joined-up government’ – bringing different government departments together to develop more coherent policies – as key to its project of modernization of the welfare state, demolishing the ’silo’ mentality which separated policy making in health from social care, or separated policies to promote children’s health from those aiming to reduce poverty and poor educational outcomes. Joined-up government aimed to: (i) increase effectiveness by removing contradictions and tensions between different policies; (ii) make better use of resources by avoiding duplication or contradiction; (iii) promote synergy between different agencies addressing a particular problem; and (iv) forge closer cooperation between services for service users’ benefit (Pollitt 2003). At the level of local service delivery, this is exemplified in the creation of ‘one-stop shops’, such as children’s centres, where parents can access child health services, play facilities and advice on welfare benefits, training or employment opportunities or childcare in one place, and where different service providers can hypothetically more easily exchange information and develop a more holistic understanding of their clients/users.
The problem of poor service co-ordination was addressed through the promotion of ‘partnership working’. This sought to identify a ‘Third Way’ between the old bureaucratic hierarchical methods in which different government departments functioned relatively autonomously, each subjecting ‘their’ services to central government ‘command and control’, and the chaotic competition of the previous Conservative government’s markets and quasi-markets where the principal instruments co-ordinating services were local authority-issued contracts. A number of measures were introduced to bring this about. The 1999 Health Act, for example, introduced a number of ‘flexibilities’ to remove legal and structural obstacles to joint working: (i) pooled budgets, allowing local health and social care budgets to be combined; (ii) lead commissioning, allowing the local authority or health body to commission services on behalf of both bodies; and (iii) joint provision, enabling staff, resources and management structures to be combined to integrate service provision from management to the front line (Birrell 2006). These measures were intended to promote greater collaboration between health and social care for older people’s services and for learning-disabled and mentally ill adults. This legislation also provided for the creation of a new local organization, in the form of a Trust merging health and social care, to enable more effective organization of services. Trusts for mental health and learning-disabled services were successfully established in a number of areas; the proposal to establish Care Trusts for older and disabled adults in every local authority was eventually abandoned in favour of continuing with a variety of arrangements for joint funding of services. The model adopted has been one in which health has tended to be very much the dominant partner, with social workers generally brought into health settings, rather than the reverse (Penna and O’Brien 2006; Barnes et al. 2007).
Children’s services departments, established under the 2004 Children Act, aimed to improve ‘joined-up’ working by bringing together education and children’s social services; introducing an electronic database holding records on every child in England and accessible to all agencies; and establishing a statutory inter-agency body for child protection, a Local Children’s Safeguarding Board (LCSB), in each local authority, made up of senior managers from different agencies in contact with children and families.
To promote local partnership working, government funding for various initiatives was conditional on many different ‘stakeholders’ from public, private and voluntary sectors all being involved in planning and delivering services. The term ’partnership’ covers a variety of institutional arrangements from cooperation between two or more agencies which retain their own distinct financial and administrative arrangements, to highly integrated structures with a single budget and a unified management structure for different professionals working within it. At an abstract level, partnership between agencies concerned with different aspects of a social problem seems logical but there are various obstacles to implementing effective partnerships in practice:
Most research on partnership working has focused on identifying the factors contributing to good working relations between partners, with less clarity about whether partnership working actually produces better outcomes for users, and what particular aspects produce good outcomes for which groups of service users (Dowling et al. 2004). A study of health and social care partnerships for three different groups of service users – older adults, adults with mental health problems, and learning-disabled adults – identified three broad types of outcome significant to service users: (i) quality of life (including issues like feeling safe, having things to do and seeing people, living where and in the way you want and staying as well as possible); (ii) process (feeling listened to, having choices, being treated as an individual, reliable and responsive services); and (iii) change (greater confidence and skills, greater mobility, reduced symptoms) (Petch et al. 2013). Service users identified four features of partnership that contributed to these positive outcomes. Services based in the same building (co-location) enabled easier contact between different relevant staff, and improved inter-professional communication, enhancing services’ reliability and responsiveness. Services that met health and social needs simultaneously (multi-disciplinary teams) contributed to change outcomes – helping users recover confidence and skills after a fall, or providing environmental modifications that made mobility easier – and at the same time contributed to quality of life by helping them to feel safe or live where and how they wanted. Specialist partnerships, mainly created to serve the needs of specific groups of users, led to users feeling they were understood in a non-discriminatory way, which contrasted with acute services. Extended partnership, including housing, benefits advice and the voluntary sector, provided more comprehensive user access to relevant services.
Partnership working has benefits for agencies and the professionals who work in them. Dowling et al. (2004) found a common outcome of partnership working was increased understanding of the roles of the other agencies and professionals in the partnership. This is likely to assist inter-professional working, which we examine next.
Policy emphasis on partnership working between different agencies has resulted in professions which historically had relatively distant relationships now working much more closely together. This may occur within the same organization or across different agencies and may involve co-working a case or trying to meet common strategic goals, but it does not guarantee better working relationships, even with co-location (White and Featherstone 2005). A variety of factors may contribute to difficulties in inter-professional relationships, ranging from different statuses, language and conceptual understandings of problems to different expectations about each profession’s role and ways of working with service users. A study by Rose (2011) illustrates some of the issues that arise. She interviewed members of eight inter-professional teams in children’s services (Child and Adolescent Mental Health Services (CAMHS), Special Educational Needs and Social Care) including clinical psychologists, speech and language therapists, primary mental health workers, social workers, nurses, teachers and police officers. They all concurred that shared goals and agendas were important, but felt agreeing and achieving them was problematic. Some respondents felt their specialist professional perspective and expertise were threatened both because of overlapping skills and because they were encouraged to work generically to meet common goals. It was sometimes difficult to define the appropriate activities and role boundaries for different professionals. These were partly determined by their employing agency and also by professionals’ different levels of power and status, which affected parity in team decision making. Overcoming these difficulties required negotiation and compromise: ‘professionals may have to adjust to a conceptualisation of themselves as non-specialists; or accept that achieving the team’s goals may not always entail use of their specialist knowledge; or … [carry] out roles that would traditionally fall to someone else; or cope with someone else being given disproportionate decision making power due to the setting of the joint work’ (Rose 2011: 161).
In most multi-disciplinary teams, particularly those involving health, social workers are in the minority and may not be accorded the same esteem as other professionals (All Party Parliamentary Group (APPG) 2013: 20). Research on multi-professional health and social care teams dealing with people with mental health difficulties, learning and physical disabilities and older people supports this (Jones et al. 2013). Mental health social workers in multi-disciplinary teams reported they felt that medical-model psychiatric diagnostic labels were all-pervasive and that their colleagues were perceived in their professional identity, such as nurse or psychologist, first, and care co-ordinator second, whereas social workers’ own specialist contribution was unacknowledged. They therefore began to see themselves, and were viewed by other professionals, only or primarily as care co-ordinators (Bailey and Liyanage 2012). This suggests that partnership and multi-professional working are most effective when there is clarity about each agency’s or service’s contribution, and respect for each other’s specific expertise, rather than an attempt to erase difference and blur professional boundaries (Statham et al. 2006; Boddy and Statham 2009: 4).
One aim of the ‘joined-up working’ agenda is greater information sharing between agencies and professionals. This may, however, be adversely affected by new organizational working patterns, often linked to budget reductions, such as home working, ‘hot-desking’ and agile working, where workers have no permanent fixed location (Jeyasingham 2014), all of which sap morale and reduce opportunities for sharing information and direct communication. Continuity and stability are also impeded by adult service users being passed through different teams which deal with different types of information and advice, assessments and reviews (Jones 2014: 497), with generic call centres further depersonalizing the service user experience. This suggests that the aspirations for inter-professional and inter-agency ‘joined-up’ working are not matched by reality and some current arrangements benefit neither workers nor service users.
Inquiries into child deaths have repeatedly identified the failure to share information as the cause of the breakdown in child protection. The report into the death of a two-year-old child, Keanu Williams, in 2013, echoed the conclusions of many previous enquiries when it stated: ‘Professionals in the various agencies involved had collectively failed to prevent Keanu’s death … They did not meet the standards of basic good practice when they should have reported their concerns, shared and analysed information and followed established procedures for … child protection investigations and a range of assessments including medical assessments and child protection conferences’ (Birmingham Safeguarding Children Board 2013: 6, emphasis added).
Poor information sharing, different professional agendas, language and levels of power also contributed to the failure to prevent the death of Peter Connelly in August 2007. It is clear inter-professional and inter-agency communication in this case were poor, but it was social work which bore the brunt of the subsequent blame, with the public sacking of the Director of Children’s Services by the then Minister for Children, Schools and Families, Ed Balls, despite the fact that other agencies, such as the health service and the police, had an equally significant role in failing to protect the child.
The New Labour government placed great faith in technical solutions to some of these problems, deploying information technology to address longstanding difficulties in achieving effective inter-agency and inter-professional communication and cooperation (Garrett 2005), a faith also shown by the Coalition government. The 2004 Children Act’s ‘electronic turn’ led in 2007 to the rolling out of the Integrated Children’s System (ICS), an electronic system intended to hold records of professional involvement with children from initial contact to case closure, with local authorities that failed to adopt the centrally devised electronic forms losing funding (White et al. 2010). Another proposed initiative was ContactPoint, a database containing details of all children in England, accessible to all relevant professionals, on which they could enter concerns about children, triggering further action once a certain threshold was reached. There was considerable opposition to the proposal on the grounds of the unacceptable degree of state surveillance of families and the threats to confidentiality of information given to professionals that the database would entail, and ContactPoint was eventually abandoned in 2010. The government also created a standard assessment tool for identifying and assessing children with additional needs – the Common Assessment Framework (CAF). This single electronic form, intended to be used by different professionals, aimed to promote a common language among them, encourage early intervention and reduce referral rates to local authority children’s services (White et al. 2009). CAF’s implementation showed considerable variation across local authorities, with some using it for referrals as well as assessments. It also produced a fragmented rather than a chronological and narrative account of the child and his/her family, and precluded specialist professional knowledge being entered because of its standardized questions and ‘tick boxes’ (White et al. 2009). Furthermore, social workers’ anxiety about being held responsible for failing to note something which later turned out to be significant in the death of a child sometimes led to indiscriminate recording at the expense of deeper analysis (Horwath 2011). Social workers consequently became preoccupied with targets and procedures, deferring professional judgements and taking dangerous short cuts in order to meet timescales (Broadhurst et al. 2010a and b).
Peter Connelly’s death in 2007, occurring so soon after the reforms precipitated by the Climbié case and in the same London borough, publicly challenged the government’s faith in electronic systems. A further inquiry by Lord Laming (2009) indicated that social workers were spending too much time at their computers completing inordinately long and complex forms, with insufficient time to undertake specialist work with children and families. This finding was also reiterated in a number of other reports. The first report of the Social Work Task Force, established to advise the government about comprehensive reform to child and adult social work, found social workers stressed and hindered by unfit IT systems and electronic performance monitoring (Dickens 2011). A 2010 literature review on safeguarding found that social workers responsible for dealing with an increase in safeguarding referrals, in the absence of any limit on their caseload and in the context of limited resources, were additionally hindered by multiple performance indicators and rigid ICT systems (Martin et al. 2010). The Munro Report (2011), commissioned by the Coalition government to investigate child protection, also identified excessive centralized prescription, implemented in part through national IT systems for case recording, as hampering the effectiveness of social workers. In 2013 the BASW All Party Parliamentary Group Inquiry into the State of Social Work (APPG 2013) still cited poor IT systems, compounded by unrealistic timescales and rigid procedures, as significant problems.
In the post-war welfare state (1945–79), social work operated as a bureau-profession (Parry and Parry 1979). Local authority bureaucracy provided rules and procedures for implementing government policy within a legal framework, but complex individual cases and trust in professionals’ discretion meant variable responses were acceptable, with appropriate practice monitored by face-to-face supervision and local review. The managerialist approach to public services that emerged in the 1980s was founded on a lack of trust in professional standards and motives, and expanded central government systems for monitoring performance, imposing uniformity across practitioners and geographical areas. Subsequent governments have shown equal enthusiasm for centralized performance management although with modifications in how this has been administered.
Centralized inspection of local authority social services departments was introduced in the 1980s. From the 1990s onwards, standardized, centrally determined quantitative performance indicators were introduced, which increased central government’s power to specify and monitor service outcomes. New Labour used league tables, star ratings and ‘naming and shaming’ of poor performers to drive improvement in local services (Harris and Unwin 2009).
The return to specialization in social work has led to the establishment of separate inspectorates for adult and children’s social work. The CQC is responsible for adult services including nursing and residential care homes, home care agencies and other community provisions, such as supported living accommodation. The Office for Standards in Education, Children’s Services and Skills (Ofsted) inspects local authority children’s services as well as independent fostering and adoption agencies, residential children’s homes and special schools (increasingly provided by the private and voluntary sectors) and other specialist children’s services outside the local authority.
Concerns have been expressed about the under-resourcing, statutory duties, auditing techniques, autonomy and expertise of these two audit bodies. For example, Roger Singleton was appointed in 2009 as independent chair of a cross-departmental National Safeguarding Delivery Unit. He resigned in 2010 after the Unit was closed and all safeguarding and ‘looked-after’ children inspections were transferred to Ofsted, arguing Ofsted had insufficient knowledge to undertake the task successfully. The CQC came under serious criticism in 2011 after its failure to respond to reports by a whistleblower of serious abuse at Winterbourne View, a private hospital for people with learning disabilities and challenging behaviour. Action to close the hospital was only taken after the BBC’s Panorama showed film of patients being abused by staff. The hospital had been inspected by the CQC on several occasions in the previous two years and been assessed as ‘compliant with essential standards of quality and safety’, calling into question the adequacy of its inspection regime (Guardian, 27 June 2013).
In the CQC’s inspection of adult social care, only one out of the eight outcomes for ‘social care related quality of life’ is about how people are treated. This is derived from a questionnaire completed by service users which, for valid reasons (such as capacity, fear or harassment), may not be completed candidly or even at all (Lewis and West 2014). The Coalition government abolished the minimum care home standards established by New Labour, and in June 2010 the CQC was instructed to adopt a riskbased approach (House of Commons 2011), with the government justifying this with the claim that most carers were well motivated, adequately trained and ‘naturally’ caring (Department of Health 2011). Even with this ‘soft touch’ minimalist approach, after inspecting 13,000 homes in 2011–12 the CQC still, contra the government’s claims, expressed significant concern, particularly in relation to nursing homes, about inadequate staffing levels, poor nutrition, little dignity and providers’ failure to monitor the quality of their care reliably (CQC 2012, 2013a and b). The CQC, however, paradoxically stressed it was the public’s responsibility to tell the government about ‘inadequate staffing’ (House of Commons 2011), thereby placing responsibility for quality control with providers and then service users and their families. The ‘Delivering Dignity’ (2012) report stressed the importance of carers respecting people’s dignity but rejected instituting compulsory staffing ratios in care homes (Lewis and West 2014). A report in 2014 on home care services, which are provided predominantly by private companies, found some elderly people were receiving care from up to fifty different members of staff per year (Koehler 2014). Another inquiry by the EHRC (2011) documented numerous instances of neglect and deprivation of dignity and of basic human rights. Both reports indicate the inadequacies of the current inspection bodies.
Electronic systems for recording data and performance management have many purposes, of which facilitating inter-professional working is only one. An equally important function is to increase managerial control and monitoring of social workers and other front-line professionals. More explicit procedures may be helpful for some social workers and may also promote greater equity between service users within and across local authorities. Such systems also focus on outcomes, encouraging strategic thinking and accountability for resource usage (Banks 2007). However, the methods of performance management introduced rely exclusively on quantitative measures, with a consequent focus on those aspects which can be measured, such as waiting times, calls logged, or the number and type of qualifications ‘looked-after’ children acquire, rather than the potentially more meaningful qualitative aspects of an individual’s situation. Procedure therefore has been emphasized to the exclusion of professional judgement and has undermined trust (Banks 2007). Banks concludes: ‘We are left with practitioners more akin to technicians rather than reflexive, creative and committed professionals … [I]n working for social justice … the care, passion and commitment of social professionals … is needed to moderate and enliven the policy-led technical-procedural drive for equity that is currently dominating much practice in Britain’ (2007: 21). The Munro Report echoed this criticism of audit procedures relying on a relatively automated and impersonal approach to the task: ‘The original form of audit was face-to-face; the auditor listened to an account of how work had been done. But pressures of cost and time have led to audit now being primarily an indirect check, focusing on scrutinising organizations’ internal systems of control rather than making a direct examination of practice itself’ (Munro 2011: 1.19).
One paradoxical consequence of the intensification of performance management for inter-agency working is that social workers working outside the local authority setting, for example in a hospital, may have two incompatible lines of managerial accountability. Social workers may come under pressure from a health manager to secure the discharge of an elderly patient from hospital to meet a target, but with adverse consequences for the patient’s longer-term recovery and rehabilitation. The social worker, as a member of the hospital team, may be expected to meet hospital performance targets which conflict with ensuring the appropriate diagnosis and care of the patient, and which disregard their values and skills. Targets may also lead to ‘gaming’ – for example, medical staff in an A&E department at risk of breaching the 4–hour maximum wait passing an elderly patient with a ‘social need’ on to the hospital social worker, despite a medical assessment not having been completed (Harris and Unwin 2009).
Munro recommended that inspection should move away from assessing compliance with procedures to focusing on whether services do actually provide effective help for children’s and families’ needs, but the diversification of service providers for both adults and children, through the increased role of the private and voluntary sectors, has made this increasingly difficult for inspection bodies (and local authorities) (Ofsted 2013: 6). She also recommended that inspections should simultaneously examine all services relevant to children’s well-being, including health, education, police and the justice system. After consultation and piloting of integrated multi-agency inspection, Ofsted concluded that this was impractical and burdensome. As an alternative, in 2015–16 it will pilot joint inspections targeted on specific areas of concern, such as the sexual exploitation of children and young people (Ofsted 2015).
The shift in the focus of social work from casework to care management, alongside increased external auditing and inspection, based on various measures of performance, has had an important impact on the nature of supervision. Professional supervision has a number of different functions. It offers support with difficult and traumatizing issues, provides an opportunity for discussion and guidance on how to work with specific cases, and contributes to an individual’s ongoing professional development. In recent years, such professional supervision has increasingly been displaced by supervision as a means to manage individual performance, by focusing on issues such as ‘case closure, adhering to timescales and completion of written records’ (Munro 2011: 115). Munro proposed a reduction in the degree of central prescription of social work practice to promote a ‘learning culture’ amongst child and family social workers. She also recommended that the career structure for social workers should not involve leaving practice, so that experienced social workers were not diverted into management but could provide expert professional supervision and guidance to develop less experienced workers’ competence and expertise.
The financial crisis of 2008, and the election in 2010 of a Coalition government, committed to eliminating the public expenditure deficit over a single parliamentary term by drastically cutting public expenditure, had significant implications for social work. Local authorities lost 26% of their budget between 2010 and 2015. Although some areas invested in front-line social work posts, children’s social care posts across the UK fell by 4% between 2010 and 2013. Inspection evidence from local authorities and children’s homes showed the disruptive impact of using short-term staffing solutions, particularly when the annual staff turnover rate of care staff could be as high as 16% (Ofsted 2013: 6–8). The annual ADASS survey showed that, between 2010 and 2014, spending on social care fell by 12% while the population of those looking for support increased by 14% (ADASS 2014), with further cuts to public expenditure planned until at least 2020.
A number of factors continue to contribute to increasing demands on social services at the same time as there is a reduction in available resources:
As part of the Coalition government’s commitment to greater ‘localism’, the ring-fencing of some local authority funding ended, giving local authorities greater freedom to determine how their reduced budget was allocated, but this meant severe cuts to some services, such as Children’s Centres, whose funding was previously ringfenced, in some local authorities. A survey by the children’s charity 4Children found that, while use of Children’s Centres had increased and they were supporting an estimated two-thirds of the 500,000 most vulnerable families, spending on Children’s Centres and Early Years services had been cut by 20 per cent between 2012/13 and 2014/15. In children’s services, reduced local authority budgets meant a heightened focus on child protection, with fewer preventative and universal services for children and families. The focus on high-risk child protection cases has also led to sexually abused children, teenagers at risk of sexual exploitation, children with mentally ill parents and disabled children being overlooked (Martin et al. 2010). A reduction in the number of posts for qualified social workers in adult social care (Lymbery 2010) suggests much complex work is being allocated to unqualified workers.
Cuts to Early Years’ provision were at odds with the Coalition government’s commitment to an early intervention and prevention agenda, which was supported by reports that demonstrated that this minimizes long-term costs (Field 2010; Allen 2011). The combined effect of budget cuts in different areas of local authority funding can have particularly damaging effects for certain groups. Lowndes and McCaughie argue that curtailing services for families affected by DV has led to poor inter-agency co-ordination resulting in a ‘seriously negative compound impact’ (2013: 536), at a time when DV is increasing, in part because of the increased economic pressures on vulnerable families.
However, there is evidence (Hastings et al. 2012; Guardian, 16 October 2013; Lowndes and McCaughie 2013) that some local authorities have transformed services, taking a more strategic approach to budget reductions and devising new kinds of solutions. This has involved improved information sharing and better service integration, attempting to meet needs through working holistically and in an outcome-focused and needs-led, rather than service-led, way. Whilst economizing on senior salaries, almost half of all English local authorities have combined the roles of director of adults’ and children’s services, with some benefits for greater integration of services, such as mental health services, across age groups (Guardian, 16 October 2013). Some local authorities have also taken a client- or community-targeted approach, and focused resources on those geographical areas or neighbourhoods in greatest need. At the same time, Hastings et al., in their study of the early responses of local authorities in England to budget cuts, cited senior local government executives’ concerns that the cumulative effect would ‘“tip” particular groups or places over vulnerability thresholds, leading to additional more intense problems or needs’ (2012: 9).
There is a longstanding debate about what constitutes a profession, but social work has struggled to be accorded full professional recognition whatever criteria are used. The trait approach to professions, the most influential early sociological typology, claimed full professions such as medicine and law are characterized by a code of ethics, a regulatory body, high entry qualifications and approved university education/training, alongside control over their working practices and a dedicated body of knowledge (Johnson 1972). Social work has never possessed the status, extended education and high entry requirements, material rewards and discretion over its work that full professions have traditionally had. It has also continually struggled with its aims and purpose, boundaries, appropriate practice and academic location, knowledge base and methods/techniques (Parton 1996; Green 2006). Social work, therefore, was initially viewed as a bureau-profession and then later a semi- or mediated profession (Hugman 1991; Harris 1998; Harlow et al. 2013). Semi-professions are often funded by the state, which largely controls whom they work with and what they do, and social work’s activities have been continually reshaped by changing and divergent political and welfare ideologies. Both these factors have restricted its autonomy and contributed to its continued low status.
While, originally, professions such as medicine and law were entirely self-regulating, professional regulation has increasingly involved professional bodies acting under some kind of state control. Many of the initiatives introduced in social work in recent years have been a response to the crisis for the profession precipitated by the deaths of children, most recently Victoria Climbié in 2000 and Peter Connelly in 2007. These cases prompted state reviews of social work’s structures and systems, as the earlier part of this chapter has shown. They also influenced the systems for training and supervising social workers, for supporting and developing the profession, and for maintaining professional standards and accountability.
The Central Council for Education and Training in Social Work (CCETSW) was set up in 1971 to fund and manage social work education in the UK. CCETSW oversaw the first unified generic qualification, the Certificate of Qualification in Social Work (CQSW). This was replaced over the next three decades by a number of other professional social work qualifications and a new organization, the General Social Care Council (GSCC), responsible for the development of the whole social care sector, including the education and training of social workers. In 2003 the minimum social work qualification became a Bachelor’s or Master’s degree, and ‘social worker’ became a ‘protected title’, requiring registration with the GSCC, which could discipline, suspend or strike off social workers for unprofessional conduct. The Social Care Institute for Excellence (SCIE) was set up in 2002 to improve standards in social care, counteract regional variations and synthesize current knowledge ‘about what works in social care’.
Although these developments seemed to enhance social work’s professional status, the government’s primary focus was on producing a technically competent workforce, compliant with managerial demands, rather than a theoretically informed and critical profession (Rogowski 2010). Government ministers frequently reiterated social work was a practical ‘common sense’ profession not a theoretical one (Green 2006; Ferguson and Woodward 2009) and SCIE was more concerned with evidence-based practice (see chapter 6) than theory and wider understanding of complex issues.
Soon after the first cohort of social work undergraduates qualified in 2006, the death of Peter Connelly led to a number of major reviews of social work practice and training. The government’s Social Work Task Force (SWTF) found social workers stressed by many different aspects of their employment: insufficient preparation for practice from their training; high staff vacancies and caseloads; unfit IT systems; inadequate supervision; problematic performance management; disproportionate bureaucracy; and lack of a strong national voice guiding the profession. The Task Force recommended high-quality initial training and ongoing post-qualifying training, and emphasized partnership, clearer career structures and professional roles, and workforce strategies that considered supply and demand. It also emphasized the importance of sufficient front-line practice resources, strong professional and government leadership and more positive media representations of social work (SWTF 2009: 50). The recommendations are summarized in table 5.1.
The first report of the Munro Review (2010a), like the Task Force, uncovered heavy caseloads and a disproportionate amount of time spent complying with centrally prescribed procedures, timescales and targets. In her final report (2011), Munro stressed there should be greatly reduced central prescription and less emphasis on recording and compliance, and urged social work to re-engage with risk, relationship and professional judgement, re-focusing on ‘doing the right thing’ rather than ‘doing things right [procedurally]’. Munro was, however, criticized for failing to situate social work within a broader framework which acknowledged how neoliberalism and managerialism reduce children’s lives to a narrowly defined case requiring resolution (Rajan-Rankin and Beresford 2011).
In 2012 the GSCC’s responsibilities were transferred to the Health Professions Council (HPC), re-named the Health and Care Professionals Council (HCPC). The HCPC assumed overall responsibility for codes of conduct, standards of proficiency and the registration and regulation of social workers, including post-registration training, but once again social work was subsumed in a predominantly healthfocused organization.
The College of Social Work (TCSW) was set up in 2012 to promote the professional development of social work and act as a voice for the profession. It brought in qualification thresholds and a written test for entry and introduced a Professional Capabilities Framework (PCF) which set out expectations of social workers at each stage of their career, from initial education and training to later career development. Simultaneously, the HCPC published its own Standards of Proficiency (SOP) identifying its ‘threshold standards, of what a social worker in England must know, understand and be able to do following [qualification]’ (Narey 2014: 5). A new curriculum was introduced, and between 2013 and 2015 all social work programmes had to be rewritten and successfully accredited by the HCPC, and ideally also inspected and approved by TCSW. Although the HCPC’s Standards and TCSW’s Capabilities have been mapped onto one another, two sets of standards are indicative of a continuing lack of coherence in defining the profession.
Table 5.1 Recommendations of the Social Work Task Force (2009)
| Recommendation | |
| 1 Calibre of entrants | Strengthen calibre of entrants to social work training |
| 2 Curriculum and delivery | Overhaul content and delivery of social work degree courses |
| 3 Practice placements | Better arrangements for quality, supervision and assessment of practice placements |
| 4 Assessed year in employment (ASYE) | Introduction of ASYE as final stage in qualifying as social worker |
| 5 Regulation of social work education | Better and more transparent regulation of social work education |
| 6 Standard for employers | Clear national standard for support that social workers can expect from employers in order to do their job effectively |
| 7 Supervision | Clear national requirements for supervision of social workers |
| 8 Front-line management | Training and support for front-line managers |
| 9 Continuing professional development (CPD) | More coherent and effective national framework for CPD and raised expectations of entitlement to ongoing learning and development |
| 10 National career structure | A single nationally recognized career structure |
| 11 National College of Social Work | An independent national College of Social Work, developed and led by social workers |
| 12 Public understanding | Programme to increase public understanding of social work |
| 13 Licence to practise | Introduction of a licence to practise system for social workers |
| 14 Social worker supply | System for forecasting levels of supply and demand for social workers |
| 15 National reform programme | National reform programme for social work |
Source: adapted from the Social Work Task Force (2009:12).
Two ‘independent’ reviews of social work education and training commissioned by different government departments (Education and Health) were published in 2014 within a month of one another (Narey 2014; Croisdale-Appleby 2014). Their findings and recommendations were rather different, although both were concerned with raising standards. Narey stressed the importance of teaching students more about ‘practicalities’, and less about ‘irrelevant’ political theory, accusing some social work educators of indoctrinating impressionable young students with ‘idealistic left-wing’ dogma which prevents appropriate intervention in child protection cases because they inaccurately perceive parents as ‘victims of social injustice’. He also suggested social work should become a two tier profession with a new category of social work assistants complementing graduate social workers. Given that unqualified social work assistants have always supported social workers and have sometimes been disproportionately used to the detriment of service users’ needs (Lymbery 2010) as they lack the expertise and values required, this suggestion, if adopted, threatens to weaken social work further. Croisdale-Appleby, by contrast, was more attuned to the complexities of social work and the importance of nuanced and multi-disciplinary theory to guide understanding and action.
There was a continuing lack of clarity about which body represented the social work profession. The British Association of Social Workers (BASW) was established in 1971 as a professional association for social workers. Its relationship with TCSW, whose role was ‘to uphold the agreed professional standards and promote the profession and the benefits it brings to the general public, media and policy makers’ (TCSW website), was a difficult one. Attempts to merge the two organizations failed in 2012 when TCSW walked out of talks on the grounds that it would not take on representation of members in disputes with employers or disciplinary hearings because this role could potentially conflict with upholding professional standards (Community Care 28 September 2012). In June 2015 the newly elected Conservative government cut the funding for the College, after it had failed to recruit the target of 31,000 feepaying members by 2015 and after Ministers rejected the College’s proposal that it take on additional revenue-generating functions, such as post-qualifying training, forcing it to close after less than four years (Community Care 18 June 2015). A number of TCSW’s key functions and resources, including the PCF, CPD endorsement and several publications, were transferred to the British Association of Social Workers (BASW) as part of the closure process.
In a further institutional development, Munro’s recommendation that a Chief Social Worker should be appointed to ‘advis[e] Government on social work practice’ was accepted in 2013. The role was divided between two Chief Social Workers, Isabelle Trowler (Children and Families) and Lyn Romeo (Adults). The role has five key elements: (i) to support and challenge the profession to ensure that service users receive the best possible help from social workers; (ii) to provide independent expert advice to ministers on social work reform and general policy implementation; (iii) to provide leadership and work with key people in social work to drive forward reform; (iv) to challenge weak practice to improve the quality of social work; and (v) to provide leadership to principal social workers to improve practice and influence national policy making and delivery (DfE 2013b). At the time of writing, it is unclear what effects these Chief Social Workers may have on the profession.
Two new routes to qualification, in addition to the two-year MA or three-year undergraduate programme, have been introduced since 2010. Step Up to Social Work, a 14-month intensive employer-based training course, is offered in partnership with a university, which provides the academic input. Students receive substantial bursaries. The aim of the course is to ‘enable high-achieving graduates or career changers who have worked with children to train to become qualified social workers’ (DfE 2013c). Four cohorts of around 300 students had been admitted by May 2015. The second route, Frontline, modelled on the ‘high flier’ route into teaching, Teach First, is a training programme for child and family social work, which offers qualification as a social worker in 13 months and, after a second year, a Master’s degree. Frontline trainees are given a 5-week intensive summer training course and then start as employees in a local authority, supervised by an experienced social worker. Two pilots ran in 2014 and 2015, each with 100 students who will work in local authorities in Greater Manchester and Greater London. The programme has been extremely popular, with almost 6,000 people applying for 100 places in 2014 (Narey 2014).
In 2015 the Coalition government invited bids for a further initiative in social work training, ‘teaching partnerships’, in which initial social work training would be strongly embedded in statutory settings and would involve practitioners in teaching and research in collaboration with a partner university. The process of bidding and selection took place within a few weeks in February/March 2015, with successful partnerships expected to admit students to start training in September 2015 (DfE 2015). While the proposal to make such partnerships the principal means of providing social work training was welcomed by BASW, it expressed doubts about the feasibility of successful implementation in the context of financial cuts both in local authorities providing statutory services and in universities (BASW 2015b). Serious concerns were also expressed by the body representing universities involved in social work education about the short timescale, the introduction of yet another model of provision into social work education, the lack of attention to the relevance of international experience, a shift towards service-based specialization, and the exclusion of the private, voluntary and independent sectors from the proposal, despite their increasingly important role in employing social workers (Joint University Council Social Work Education Committee / Association of Professors of Social Work (JUCSWEC/APSW) 2015). At the time of writing it was unclear how the proposed teaching partnerships would evolve.
An assessed and supported first year in practice was instituted (ASYE), although social workers are allowed to register with HCPC before completing it, raising questions about how seriously it is taken, and dedicated funding for CPD remains uncertain.
A number of criticisms have been made of these recent developments. There is concern these new programmes are divisive for the profession, with Step Up and Frontline presented as ‘elite’ specialist child protection programmes, not providing students/trainees with a generic social work foundation, alongside anxiety that money will be diverted from traditional social work degree programmes into these schemes. The accelerated training inevitably reduces the academic input and risks trainees having an inadequate foundation for developing a critical understanding of the issues they are dealing with, and becoming part of ‘a profession built on “know how” rather than “know why”’ (Croisdale-Appleby 2014: 29). Some academics also claim that these new programmes are not being evaluated in a fair and impartial way vis-à-vis traditional university programmes (Schraer 2014).
There is also disquiet in the profession that little attention has been paid to earlier recommendations suggesting there should be less reliance on problematic ICT systems, rigid timescales and centralized performance indicators, and urging a return to professional judgement and more reflexive supervision. Clearly a reformed career structure, retaining experienced professionals in practice to support and supervise new practitioners, is a positive move but might be jeopardized by a continuing insistence on centralized control and prescription. Furthermore, there is little indication that social workers are being supported nationally to do their jobs effectively or that public opinion has become any more positive. No caps have been placed on caseload numbers and a survey of 1,000 social workers by BASW found 77 per cent reported unmanageable and ever-increasing caseloads and major problems with retention (2012b).
The establishment of social work as a single profession in the 1970s stemmed from the Seebohm Committee’s identification of the need for a service which could work preventatively with families to address the underlying causes of their problems. However, within a short time there was a return to specialization within social work. This was partly in response to a series of inquiries into child protection failures in the 1970s and 1980s, which demonstrated the complexity of child protection work and the importance of cooperation with other agencies and deflected attention from Seebohm’s vision of a holistic preventative approach to family problems.
Specialization was not reflected in major institutional reforms until 2004 when the inquiry into the death of Victoria Climbié pointed yet again to the problem of poor communication between the different agencies responsible for child protection. Child and family social work was combined with education to create new local authority Children’s Services Departments, which made the final separation from adult social work.
By the end of the 1990s, the focus of policy was on promoting cooperation between agencies and professions working with a particular client group, rather than on bringing together those working to provide personal social services into a single professional and institutional setting. Inter-professional and inter-agency working raises new problems about maintaining professional identity while working in effective collaboration with others, and social work has struggled to assert its professional identity and status, particularly in relation to health and health professionals.
The 1980s saw a fundamental change in the role of social workers brought about by the marketization of welfare, under the influence of Thatcher’s neoliberalism. With marketization, social workers became the enablers and managers of services that were increasingly provided by private or non-profit organizations. This change had major implications for the ethos of social work and the criteria against which performance was judged. Personal social services, like all other public services, have increasingly been held accountable for their performance against centrally specified targets and are subject to increasingly elaborate systems of audit and inspection by central government. Combined with the extended use of information technologies for record keeping and information sharing, this has resulted in social workers’ time becoming more and more taken up with inputting data into electronic systems.
Scandals surrounding child deaths and an unrealistic assumption that they are all preventable have shaped the organization and development of social work to a disproportionate extent. Scandals about the abuse of elderly, disabled or mentally ill service users have never provoked the intensity of inquiry and subsequent reform to social work practice that child deaths have done. There is some indication in recent developments in social work training, such as the introduction of Frontline, that social work is becoming a specialized profession focused on child protection and policing vulnerable families. More generic and preventative forms of social work with both children and families and other service user groups have been eroded, particularly in the climate of financial austerity following the global financial crisis in 2008, leaving minimally qualified social care and health staff to struggle with the complex issues raised by poor disadvantaged families and a rapidly ageing population.
The major reviews of social work practice and training prompted by Peter Connelly’s death in 2007 have recommended a return to valuing professional judgement, with less central prescription and much greater local autonomy, stressing the need to strengthen the profession, increase the calibre of recruits and improve public understanding of social work. However, there remain significant unresolved divisions and contradictions between some of the new bodies and training systems that have been set up. Social work has therefore not yet emerged from the crises of the first decade of the twenty-first century. It faces considerable challenges in delivering support to the most vulnerable and needy in the context of unprecedented cuts in public expenditure and the continual reviews of, and changes to, social work education and organizational functioning and structures.
In 1998 some powers which previously rested with the UK government in Westminster were devolved to newly established legislatures in Wales and Scotland. This chapter has focused on changes in the organization and governance of social work in England in the period after devolution. Policy and legislation in Scotland and Wales have diverged, to some extent, from the situation in England. Northern Ireland has had its own legislature for much longer, although its powers were taken back to Westminster during the Troubles (1974–98). We have not attempted to cover the details of the institutional arrangements for social work in Scotland, Wales and Northern Ireland, but the economic and ideological context for social policy and social work in all four constituent nations of the UK has been similar, as has the direction of policy change in relation to governance. This means that the general points made in this chapter and in the following one apply across the UK despite these differences in detail.
Students wishing to look in more detail at arrangements in Wales, Scotland and Northern Ireland should consult the following:
Wales
Scotland
Northern Ireland