Abstract
If ever social work were the focus of critical social policy, it has been in the past 4 years. During this time, the London Borough of Hackney has been rejuvenating its social work service delivery, in a scheme it brands as ‘Reclaiming Social Work’. Social Work Reclaimed narrates this evolution.
The authors – mainly practitioners from the local authority – set out a convincing manifesto for the ‘Hackney model’. This bespoke social work approach, is described by the editors as fundamentally ‘collaborative and respectful’ (p. 16), whereby workers foster enough confidence in families in order that the families can ‘rely on their own strengths and resiliencies’ (p. 17). The approach acknowledges the emotional and risky work undertaken by social workers, and tackles the bureaucratic and more abstract challenges to effective interventions.
Goodman and Trowler have essentially devised a template for the operational system, detailing the job descriptions, recruitment process and theoretical framework it entails. Briefly, the organization divides its social work service into ‘units’, comprising a consultant social worker, social worker, children’s practitioner, systemic therapist and the unit coordinator responsible for administrative tasks. In itself, this structure tallies with the Professional Capabilities Framework envisaged by the newly established College of Social Work. The approach is based firmly in systemic theory and much of the practice is informed by current research into attachment. As the units themselves are structured as an interdependent system, many of the writers testify to how this complements the theoretical foundation, which in turn harmonizes with the families they are working with. The writers explain that each professional within the unit has equal knowledge of each family’s current circumstance and live needs. As such, this provides containment to the family members, and the unit is conceived of as a ‘secure base’, consistent and fluid in its boundaries and actions.
Unusually for UK education and practice, Social Work Reclaimed mentions the discipline of social pedagogy, via one of the contributing practitioners, Timo Dobrowolski. Dobrowolski discusses the complementary approaches of systemic theory and social pedagogy, both of which are ‘more interested in the causation of problems within social networks, than in answering them with quick-fix interventions such as criminalising … or accommodating children’ (p. 80). This is the essential detail of Reclaiming Social Work, which espouses ‘working with curiosity’ as a way of maximizing the workers’ understanding of how families have functioned over time, arriving at the current difficulty, and identifying features that will instil optimism for the future – for both the family and the worker. This is reflected in the focus on linguistics in recordings, for example, using the word ‘vibrant’ to describe a young person, who could otherwise be depicted negatively – and for ever more on files – as ‘challenging’ or ‘troublesome’.
Notwithstanding the attraction of such small but far-reaching practice pointers, I confess that I finished this book with a list of logistical questions and clarifications. From little ones – such as, how, if all professionals are sharing the workload evenly, do the gripes about pay differentials manifest themselves; how much of the 36 hour week is spent updating other unit members on minutiae of developments; how, if all visits are done jointly, does all the work get done; who is writing the performance indicating assessments, as it’s surely laborious to do so in a truly ‘collaborative’ fashion – to larger, more conceptual ones, such as how, if the children’s practitioner is the professional building the relationship with the child, to avoid de-skilling social work practitioners in direct work with children, or worse, removing them from that direct experience of the child; and how is it ensured that the unit, with a collection of workers embroiled in the family, does not evolve to replicate the family’s malfunctioning system? My overall sense was that, like the preened picture provided to local government inspection teams, these nuts and bolts were omitted from the otherwise quite thorough description of process.
Notwithstanding this, reading Social Work Reclaimed gave me a restless desire for change in my own practice. It contains some ‘tips’ transferable to mainstream statutory social work, such as raising an awareness of the impact of discourse in records and assessments on future workers’ conception of ‘the family’. In reading the accounts, I felt ever so slightly radicalized, inducing an impression of other local authorities as hierarchical, risk averse and monolithic. By the editors’ own confession, Hackney was a service performing badly. Perhaps, when the stakes are performance related central government funding, such radicalism can only be risked by non-complacent bureaucracies. How frightening is it for a hierarchical system to morph into a ‘systemic system’, where the divisions of labour become less marked, and workers at all levels keep their toes in the front line? Or, more optimistically, maybe the more self-satisfied high-ranking local authorities are keeping an eye on Hackney’s stake in reclaiming social work, until they can be assured that it works – not only for families and front line workers – but also for performance monitors and auditors. Trowler and Goodman maintain that it does, so the next question is, when do the rest of us start?