Year: 2011

On Friday 15th April I attended my first Social Work Action Network (SWAN) 6th National Conference in collaboration with In Defence of Youth Work. Although an annual conference took place in summer 2010 in Glasgow, the above was arranged in Birmingham in response to the level of cuts proposed by the Coalition Government.

SWAN is comprised of social work practitioners, academics, students and service users, united in their concern that social work activity is being undermined by managerialism and marketisation, by the stigmatisation of service users and by welfare cuts and restrictions.

There were a variety of speakers, ranging from those working in the profession, to UNISON activists, to service users relating their experiences, to disabled activists at the forefront in fighting the austerity measures, to international practitioners, researchers and activists. I attended the workshop entitled: ‘Educate, Agitate, Organise: UNISON responses to the Big Society’. The presenters were Helga Pile – UNISON National officer for Social Care, Helen Davies – Branch Chair Barnet UNISON & adult’s social worker, Simon Cardy – UNISON Steward Wolverhampton Branch & children’s social worker, Sharon Campion – Sandwell UNISON, Social Work Convenor and Independent reviewing officer.

I expressed my deep concerns at the meeting with regard to the level of resistance taken by UNISON in response to the fiercest levels of cuts on an unprecedented scale since the Second World War. I described the recent UNISON member’s meeting I attended in Coventry, where UNISON’s magnificent alternative budget was launched. I was in awe to see that finally my union was beginning to rise from its knees. Unfortunately, short lived, and my disappointment soon returned, as the branch officers then immediately invited discussion on compulsory redundancies.

Numerous attendees at the SWAN workshop demanded that UNISON direct and lead a viable and constructive fight back. Numerous attendees insisted UNISON call a general strike in unity with all other unions. Once again, a UNISON official managed to incite nothing but disappointment with a non-committal and passive response for the audience.

There were three vibrant international perspectives presented at Conference from South Africa, Greece and following the Arab revolutions. They discussed social work in their international context and the resistance against the cuts and privatisation methods attempted.

John McArdle, from Black Triangle Campaign, (disability rights campaigner) introduced a session on ‘Building Alliances to Defend Services’. He informed conference of the recent suicide of a service user. He stated the service user had left just two letters behind him to explain his actions. The first letter was from the Benefits Agency informing him his Disability Benefit would now cease. The second letter was from his local Housing Department informing him his Housing Benefit would now cease.

I fear if these cuts go unopposed, many more of us will have first-hand knowledge and experience of such horrors. The most vulnerable sections in society have already begun to see no other alternative than to take their own lives as a direct consequence of these atrocious cuts. Cuts to people’s benefits and care packages result in further intensified poverty and despair to an already marginalised section of society.

A divided house is easier to destroy. Therefore collective strike action from all public and private sector unions in the form of a general strike can be the only recourse left. There are tens of millions of people in this country who work in the public sector and/ or use our services. Solidarity across all professions and service users as exemplified by our contemporaries in Greece, Egypt, and South Africa are the examples we should be now be looking to. Please UNISON lead a fight-back, before more people die.

July 2011

The latest newsletter includes articles on strikes by social workers in Southampton and Birmingham against austerity cuts to pay and pensions; a critical overview of the Munro Review of child protection; an analysis of social enterprises and social work practices and their implications for practice; a discussion of the link between privatisation of social care and the abuse of learning disabled residents at the private Winterbourne View Hospital; and a member of the Case Con radical social work collective in the 1970s considers lessons from that period for today’s struggles. There is also a round up of SWAN activities and events from around the regions.

 

Please forward this newsletter as widely as possible to your colleagues and networks.

Dispatches encourages SWAN members and supporters to write about activities, actions, meetings, and debates in your group/region for the next newsletter so please send in your articles, news, comment and photos to Dispatches by clicking here.

SWAN  London has joined forces with other campaigns and events over the summer. SWAN London representatives spoke at the protest over Elaine McDonald’s treatment by the Royal Borough of Kensington and Chelsea (a woman whose night time care was cut, which left her wearing pads overnight, despite being fully continent). You can see more here: http://tinyurl.com/645rluq

SWAN London also lent its name to a joint letter to put pressure on BMJ/RCN recruitment fairs to ban Atos Origin, the private company responsible for discriminatory assessments of benefit claimants on Employment and Support Allowance: http://tinyurl.com/5w32x4p

A SWAN London representative also spoke on social work and campaigning at a national student conference organised by BASW in June and addressed the new student cohort at London South Bank University. The group has also launched a blog at: http://swanlondon.wordpress.com/

Report by Dan Morton

SWAN members supported a small but lively lobby on 4th August 2011 at St Pancras Hospital in London against mental health cuts at the Camden & Islington Foundation Trust. The lobby was called by the Defend Whittington NHS campaign .  The Trust proposes to implement massive cutbacks – 60 staff will lose their jobs, as well as pay cuts for many remaining staff, the closure of 100 beds, and the replacement of trained staff with unqualified workers. The lobby was attended by social workers, service users, nurses and local campaigners. Plans are being made for petitioning, a public meeting and further protests. For more info: dwhc.org.uk

Report by Rich Moth

The Rochdale Equitable Pioneers, who in 1844 founded the early Coop movement, would be the first to argue that David Cameron’s ‘big society’ has no right to claim heritage from early forms of nineteenth century mutualism and working class cooperative societies.  Those Social Enterprises (SEs) that have been developed in the last 10 years to run NHS contracts and more recently the Social Work Practices (SWPs) pilots have developed not from any twenty first century people’s movement but instead as smokescreens behind which lies a cuts agenda. They are also designed to break up public services, place them into financial insecurity with short-term contracts, and then throw them into the hands of private equity companies.
SEs and SWPs have their origins in the last New Labour government.  In 2001 the then Department for Trade and Industry set up the Social Enterprise Unit to promote their use across the economy. They have been steadily pushed, having seen several employee owned SEs established, usually in the form of management buy-outs, to run primary health services.  The current Con-Dem government has embraced them with enthusiasm and wants SEs to compete for council contracts to weaken the influence and erode the ability of councils to provide direct services in Adults and Children’s social care.

SEs are hard to define but are essentially a diverse fusion of voluntary – third sector – charitable organisations run firmly on a ‘business’ model.  There exists an elaborate ‘social enterprise’ discourse which combines the language and discipline of capitalist commerce with altruistic aims to ‘do good’, meet social need and have what proponents call social impact.  They talk about social entrepreneurism and social capital.  Examples include companies who run a service for a ‘good cause’ or to meet social needs (e.g. a rural bus service or a children’s centre) that will re-invest ‘profit’ back into the business rather than distribute to owners and shareholders.  At present there are no SEs in social care but Birmingham City Council, Swindon, and Blackburn and Darwin are considering establishing them for their entire Adult social work services.  
SWPs emerged from the 2008 Children and Young Persons Act.  Proponents argue that allowing social workers to set up private practices will reduce bureaucracy and increase professional autonomy. For social workers and service users alike this might seem  attractive but a close reading of the small print reveals much of the financial risk being transferred onto social workers, contracts being limited to annual cycles, new layers of bureaucracy with up to 37 different performance outcomes for each child, and the replacement of control by management hierarchies with control by contract.  Currently there are 4 SWP pilot schemes in Kent, Hillingdon, Staffordshire and Liverpool and a further 10 planned (4 in children’s services and 6 in Adult services) including Birmingham and Shropshire.

The difficulty councils face is that there is little enthusiasm in local authorities and much resistance from social workers.  In Norfolk the council thought social workers would want to become mini entrepreneurs but their sales pitch failed to generate interest and the proposal was abandoned.  In Sandwell social workers were quick to see that the proposal was effectively a form of privatisation and foster carers were furious children had not been told about the scheme which was eventually also abandoned.  Of the 6 additional schemes announced since the start of 2011, Coventry, Warwickshire, South Tyneside and Lincolnshire have all pulled out having been given tight timescales to develop schemes by government and having looked at the considerable financial risks involved.

You can download the SWAN briefing on Social Work Practices below.

The Background

With the election of the coalition government in 2008, the recent economic crises and radical welfare reforms which have been proposed in recent years, social work and social policy in England have been undergoing profound changes. Following the tragic death of Baby Peter Connelly and enquiries into the systemic failure of professionals within Haringey Council, the Social Work Task Force, and consequently the Social Work Reform Board were created to propose progressive changes to social work education, training and practice.

Within this backdrop, the status of child protection emerged as an area of increasing public policy concern. Following Lord Laming’s report on child protection in 2009, the challenges faced by front-line social work practitioners in managing huge caseloads, while manoeuvring lengthy bureaucratic procedures  highlighted the difficulties in maintaining professional judgement, while engaging in ‘tick box’ assessment systems. In June 2009, Professor Eileen Munro, from the London School of Economics, was invited by the Secretary of State to conduct an independent review of child protection in the UK. We briefly summarize the findings of the three reports published under the Munro review and provide a critical commentary about its relevance, impact and implications for social work practitioners.

The First Report
The Munro review of child protection was published in three parts between autumn and spring 2010 -11. Part One: A Systems Analysis was published on 10 October 2010, receiving considerable media attention. In this report, Munro engaged in a consultative process of speaking to service users, children, young people, families and social workers in an attempt to understand “why previous well-intentioned reforms, have not resulted in the expected level of improvements” (Munro, 2010:3). Thus, this could be viewed as base-line report, engaging in policy analysis of recent reforms to child protection, with some discussion of implications for social work practitioners. The report is structured in three parts: section one detailing a systems approach to child protection, section two focuses on early prevention and intervention and section three sets out the next steps for the second report.

In the first report, Munro criticises the atomistic nature of current child protection systems which focus on isolated problems, technocratic regulations driven by compliance culture. While she attempts to broaden this scope by adopting a ‘holistic approach to child protection’, this is limited in scope and intent. Some useful points emerge including the need to strengthen professionalism and adopting a socio-technical approach. However, this ‘systems approach’ is still limited to thinking within bureaucratic structures, rather than engaging in broader conceptualizations of the problems of child protection as a social issue (see Parton, 2010). Thus, while the first report had some positive aspects, especially in listening to the voices of service users themselves, the problematics of bureaucratic and managerial social work practice remain unchallenged, and the real challenges facing children and families social work, especially the resource limitations faced by local authorities, remain invisible.

The Second Report
The second report, Part Two: A Child’s Journey was published on 10 February 2011. This report structured in four chapters is a descriptive account of child protection systems as experienced by a young person from seeking help to receiving it, from initial needs assessment to final evaluation of interventions. While Munro insists that the report “will not seek a series of superficial quick fixes” (Munro, 2011a:8), the interim report in many ways does suffer from a superficial treatment of a complex issue. In the second report, Munro expands on her systems approach and details the need for good practice including early intervention and prevention, the role of multi-agency working and effective ‘management’ of front-line social workers in safeguarding children. This report is weakened by its narrow focus on vulnerable children only when they enter the system, rather than a much needed broader discussion of the lack of supports and combined systemic failures within schools, families and communities which can lead to a child becoming at risk. By doing so, the focus of this report is not so much on child-centredness as the goal of a ‘good society’, but rather on facilitating and creating a smooth transition for children engaging within the system. Wider discussions around the lack of power, governmentality and trust in the social work profession (see Houston, 2011; Pollack, 2011 for discussion) are not considered. Instead, it is a revival of the street-level bureaucracy dialogues, placing the burden of efficient service delivery once again on front-line social workers, without reducing any of the crushing difficulties of coping with high risk cases with finite staff, time, support and resources.

The Final Report
The final report A Child Centred System was published on 10 May 2011 and is organised in eight chapters. With much signposting to the previous two reports, the final review presents a guide for an effective child protection system, embedded within professional values and shared accountability and transparency in practice. By attacking the compliance culture, and promoting learning cultures within organizations, the report presents as a departure from previous policy reforms which laid the blame of child death as a failure of professional judgement, rather than looking deeply into its causes.

The recommendations put forth mirror much of Lord Laming’s (2009) report, including the removal of over-bureaucratized lengthy assessment procedures. In addition, suggestions are made to overhaul the assessment process by removing distinctions between initial and core assessments, creating greater leeway for professional judgement, removing constraints to local innovation and creating new and more effective inspection procedures for good practice to support children in their journey through the child protection system. Thus, by sharing accountability for child protection across agencies, the child centred system proposed by Munro, attempts to create a more efficient, less bureaucratized system of procedures.

Key weaknesses of the Inquiry
A critical observation of all three reports, especially the final Munro review reveals four major weaknesses. While this was an independent review, the lack of explicit political and ideological positioning within these reports is itself quite worrying. Academics with practitioner experience, or who are closely aligned with practice, are generally clearly rooted within specific (and often left-wing) ideologies, with a clear focus on protecting vulnerable groups and families. The selection of Eileen Munro to head this review, adds legitimacy and institutional power to her reports, but simultaneously makes one wonder why a academic-practitioner was not charged with this important task.

While Munro does propose a useful critique of past reforms in child protection, her analysis of their failures as being ‘unanticipated’ is almost naïve. It was recognition of the problematic nature of these reforms that was the stated starting point of the Social Work Task Force. Broader neo-liberal contexts, the marketization of welfare and the new managerialist models, have all but made it impossible for front-line workers to be more than administrative clerks and they have lost power, voice and agency in the work they do. Thus, the marketized system of welfare would favour ‘efficiency’ over quality of service user encounter, reducing the young person in need to being a ‘case’ which needs immediate resolution, rather than as a child with specific needs. Munro confuses child-centredness, with child engagement with the child protection system. Remaining child-centred requires at the very least an acceptance that any examination of the child’s needs must involve a deeper examination of the family and community as well. Finally, what we have is a manager’s guide to good practice, rather than a critical reflection on the social basis of child protection, as a concern for everyone living in a ‘good society’. Social work practitioners can gain a useful summary of child protection systems and procedures in these reports, but from a practitioner’s perspective, these reports provide little new knowledge and direction in extending current debates.

References

Houston, S. (2010). Further reflections on Habermas’s contribution to discourse on child protection: An examination of power in social life. BJSW. 40:1736-1753.

Munro, E. (2010). The Munro review on child protection: Part 1 A Systems Analysis. London: Department of Education.

Munro, E. (2011a). The Munro review of child protection: Interim report- A child’s journey. London: Department of Education.

Munro, E (2011b). The Munro review of child protection: Final report- A child centred system. London: Department of Education.

Parton, N. (2010). Child protection and safeguarding in England: Changing and competing conceptions of risk and their implications for social work, British Journal of Social Work, 1-22.

Pollack, S. (2010). Labelling clients ‘risky’: Social work and the neo-liberal welfare state. BJSW. 40:1263-1278.

Social Work Task Force. (2009). Building A Safe, Confident Future: The final report of the social work task force. London: Department for Children Schools and Families.

The news is bouncing right now with the prospect of strikes by civil servants, teachers and lecturers in the autumn following their June 30th day of action and recent strikes by social workers in Doncaster , Birmingham and Southampton, while commentators are practicing the Paxman raised eyebrows and sneer at this ‘return to the ‘70s’. Of course history never repeats itself, we need to value and learn from that decade of protest, and to remember that radical social workers were part of that. This was most obviously through CASE CON, a magazine ‘for revolutionary social work’ whose activists met in local groups and nationally and campaigned in the community and unions. What follows is the briefest of discussions, for more see the chapter in ‘Radical Social Work Today’, edited by Lavalette (follow this link for info).

Starting with the name, ‘CASE CON’ was a deliberate attack on the term ‘case conference’, the ‘con’ of all those earnest professionals sitting around and seeing only an endless stream of individual ‘cases‘. This was simply victim blaming when the problem was poverty, unemployment and bad housing. And we took heart from the wider political struggles of the period: ship yards occupied, successful miners strikes, the freeing of the Pentonville Dockers, Claimants Unions, Tenants Associations, anti-psychiatry groups and the burgeoning women’s movement. We were, then, part of an explicitly anti-capitalist movement that rejected traditional authority and struggled to find instead new ways of living and relating, both personally and professionally.
For some, action focussed on community issues, especially housing with apostolic stories of social workers manning barricades to stop squatters being evicted and families bedding down in social work offices to prevent children coming into care. Heady stuff but more usually radicals acted through the unions: protesting against cuts, frozen posts, low pay, poor office accommodation. We argued that we were ‘workers not martyrs’ and that our sense of vocation should not be exploited by employers.   

We should not over romanticise CASE CON. Many/most bought the magazine for the ‘Private Eye’ style cartoons and exposés, not because they were revolutionary socialists. And with CASE CON dissolving itself in 1977 it played no part in the 1978/79 strikes by field social workers or the 1983 residential workers strikes. But we did have successes. CASE CON was part of the campaign that stopped children coming into care because of homelessness and the union action against emergency standby duty led to permanent out of office hour’s teams. Some echo of the radical critique is also now part of every day practice, such as the statements about anti-discriminatory/anti-oppressive practice, recognising the socio-political content of a client’s life, working with service user groups.  

But the fact that much of this is rhetoric rather than reality reminds us of the continuing need for radical challenge, and this tradition is heard clearly in SWAN’s emphasis on social justice as the heart of social work and our exploring the ‘link between a structural analysis of clients’ problems to an ethical imperative to act’.  SWAN also provides, as CASE CON once did, a forum where we can learn from each other and feel less isolated in difficult times.

A longer essay about the Case Con collective by Jeremy appears in the new  book: ‘Radical Social Work Today’, edited by SWAN Convenor Michael Lavalette (details at this link). A review of the book will appear on this website soon.