About three in every 10 people in Britain think social workers help with household chores like cooking and cleaning, with personal care like washing and dressing, and with childcare. Two in 10 reckon they will nip to the shops for you. Asked to choose from a given list of professionals they consider important providers of mental health support, 69% of people identify psychiatrists and 65% GPs – but only 41% pick social workers.
These findings come from a ComRes survey commissioned by Think Ahead, the fast-track training graduate scheme for mental health social workers, to mark this week’s World Social Work Day. As Lyn Romeo, England’s chief social worker for adults, comments with a certain understatement, “there is still more to do to communicate the crucial role of social workers”.
That was to have been the role of the short-lived College of Social Work, set up by ministers in 2010 with plans for it to grow to become a royal college on a par with those for the most esteemed professions, but shut down in chaos five years later. News that the College of Occupational Therapists is to become royal – richly deserved, by the way – has rubbed a good deal of salt into that wound.
There is a fresh plan, however. From 2018, part of the brief of a proposed new regulator for social workers in England will be “to promote and maintain public confidence” in the profession. The mandate for the organisation, provisionally titled Social Work England (SWE), is contained in the children and social work bill currently before parliament. After a rocky start, it enjoys broad support.
One reason SWE is being welcomed is that it will give social work its own regulator again after six years under the generic Health and Care Professions Council. A second is that ministers accept it cannot be self-financing, at least in the short term, and are underwriting it by £16m in its first two years. And the most significant reason is that an initial idea for it to be run direct by Whitehall has been ditched.
Just how independent it will be remains moot: a quango accountable to government, not parliament, it will need ministerial approval of the professional standards it polices. But the social work world sees the lifting of the spectre of regulation by a government department as a clear win.
Another success being celebrated is the withdrawal of clauses from the bill that would have allowed councils to seek exemptions from children’s social care law to test innovative ways of working. Critics saw the idea as erosion of vital safeguards and mounted a strong, successful campaign against it – but the issue was almost certainly settled when Eileen Munro, the leading social work academic often cited by ministers in support of professional reform, opposed it.
However, real tensions remain between the government’s social work reform vanguard led by Isabelle Trowler, chief social worker for children, and the bulk of the sector establishment, with plans for accreditation tests for children’s social workers looming as a new flashpoint. But there is a sense of a thawing in relations.
Herbert Laming, sector elder statesman and crossbench peer who led both the seminal inquiry into the death of Victoria Climbié, which published its report in 2003, and a review of child protection six years later following the Baby P affair, hopes the thaw continues. He tells me: “What social work needs above all at this time is a bit of tender loving care.”
In a lecture on Wednesday at the University of Suffolk, Lord Laming will spell out the enormously high expectations that society has of frontline workers’ skills and judgment when dealing with vulnerable children and adults. The task, he will say, has been made infinitely more difficult by austerity, which is why he joined the call for withdrawal of the exemption clauses at this point even though he understood and backed the case for innovation.
Social workers are crying out for support and encouragement, Laming says. He is surely right. There has been too much stick and not enough carrot in the mix of late.
Good social workers are invaluable. So let’s give them proper support | David Brindle
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