Abstract
Reviewed by : Nigel Parton, University of Huddersfield, England DOI: 10.1177/1468017317715577
Steve Rogowski has been one of the most thoughtful and productive local authority social work writers of his generation. His articles and books go back to the late 1970s, and since his sabbatical and recent retirement he has written numerous articles and been a regular contributor to Professional Social Work, the membership journal of the British Journal of Social Work and this is his third single-authored book. Social work with children and families very much draws on and builds on these earlier publications, particularly the two books (Rogowski, 2010, 2013). As the subtitle suggests, the book aims to provide critical reflections on the way that the policy and practice of social work with children and families has changed over the past 40 plus years. While this is done via the personal professional experiences and reflections of the author these are very much located in a wide-ranging and analytical approach which draws on law, politics and theory. The book draws on a number of case examples, particularly towards the end, from the author’s direct experience to inform the general argument.
The book is very clear and accessible. It is divided into four parts with the first part focusing on the social and political contexts informing the aims and rationale for the reorganisation of local authority social services in the early 1970s and the moves from social democracy at the beginning of the decade to a much more explicit new right influence with the election of Margaret Thatcher in 1979. The next part of the book is entitled ‘the high points of social work’ during the 1980s which witnessed the reform of the approach to youth crime in most parts of the UK and the emergence, on a much more limited basis, of community social work. These were the primary contexts in which Steve Rogowski worked in the middle of his career. The third part of the book is called ‘the low points of social work’ and provides a critical appraisal of the increasing focus on a narrow focus on child protection and the growth of managerialism, the growth of targets and procedures – what he calls – the ‘social work business’ and the increasing influence of neoliberalism. The final part looks at ‘ways forward’ both in terms of the critical and radical possibilities and how these might directly inform day-to-day practice. In doing so, he explicitly tries to take an optimistic view of the future for social work with children and families and thereby inject a degree of hope into what might be achieved.
It is not surprising, in the light of the headings for parts two and three of the book, that he wants to frame the future in terms of an emphasis of trying to re-connect practice directly and relationally with children and families in an explicitly community social work way. In this he is clearly very sympathetic to the ideas of Brid Featherstone et al. (2014) in terms of ‘re-imagining’ and ‘humanising’ child protection social work. This is an important message but one that has become even more difficult even since this book was completed. Unfortunately, the possibilities of doing this from a traditional local authority base in England, I feel, are becoming very slim indeed.
For the vast majority of his professional career, Steve Rogowski worked as a front line practitioner in one of the most deprived and challenging local authorities in the north of England – Oldham. A major strength of the book is that this informs and adds huge value to what he writes. A disadvantage is that, perhaps, this quite specific local authority practice base means the argument stops short of pursuing more radical thoughts regarding ways forward. For, while social work has a key role to play in the day-to-day task of protecting children, it is important that this is not confused with the much bigger challenge of trying to address the social problem of child maltreatment (Parton, 2014, chapter 11).