It's my 30th ICCL this week, so it's finally time to tackle a subject that's been on my 'to do' list for a while now: Social Workers.

Now I don't really know if you have these people in other countries, and if you do, I don't know what you call them, so it seemed to me wise to kick off with an explanation of who they are and what they do. But it turns out that's not the easiest thing in the world. I mean, how exactly do you (and I'm talking to my own people, here) pithily explain social work to foreigners? I suppose the simplest way to put it is that the welfare state in this country is there to look after the populace. Not medically, that's what the NHS is for, but….sort of… in every other way. I know this opens up a whole world of political jibing about how it's been stripped away, sold off, underfunded and generally taken apart, but let's not get bogged down. That is what the social services are there for- to look after us. Hence they can be helping people with drug or alcohol abuse, mental health problems, getting back in to work, living with a long term health condition and caring.

Actually I haven't found that massively on their agenda, but that was just a preamble to my main point. In the UK social workers are almost certainly less well respected that any other comparable profession. They do, or are supposed to do, jobs arguably as demanding and important as teachers, doctors, the fire service or the police, and yet they are accorded nothing like the level of esteem by the public. They get terrible publicity from cases where their mistakes have caused harm to others. Admittedly these mistakes result in terrible tragedies, such as when the abuse and neglect of a small child when so totally unnoticed that the child died. But in the first place it was not them who did the abusing (despite it being them who got all the flak) and in the second place the fact that this is what happens when they get it wrong just goes to show what a vital job they are doing

From my personal experience, I would equate social workers as a body with teachers and nurses. They are underpaid, underappreciated and asked to do a difficult job in a poorly funded and badly organised environment. Then they are expected to fill out forms. It is true that I know of people who have had bad experiences with social workers and that when they fail it is a tremendous let down. I spent a couple of years as a teaching assistant in a school and it never escape me that every mistake I made had the potential to be detrimental to a child's education and, hence, future. Such professions carry high stakes and, if you want people of compassion, commitment and calibre to do the jobs, you must not let the consequences of individual failures, which will always be high, affect the esteem in which the profession as a whole is held. I know of two social workers who have, for the last twenty years, run an abuse survivors support group in their own time once a month for two hours simply because they knew people who needed the service and nobody who provided it.

In short, then, social work is an important job and when done properly it makes a massive positive impact. When its ability to impact is compromised then all factors, including systemic failures and lack of proper funding, organisation and leadership. When the job is done properly and the results are positive (which general means they have smoothed things over and therefore nobody notices) they must be given the recognition and praise they deserve. We'd be much worse off without them.

Articles by benjaminpmoore Archive

benjaminpmoore

25.02.13 Front Page

Back Issue Page