"Beginning your career as a social worker in London" written September 09

"Social workers provide support, encouragement, counselling and advice for individuals facing a life crisis - such as unemployment, mental illness, abuse, homelessness or disability - and who have been excluded from society as a result. In both London and the greater UK area, social workers are highly-qualified individuals who are keenly aware of the social, physical and emotional needs of their patients. These professionals use their skills and knowledge to help uplift the lives of those in their care, and reintegrate them into their communities."

This is a direct quote from a site that wishes to recruit social workers. Does it not sound great? Would it not appeal to anyone with a heart? Of course it will attract people into training as a social worker. I'd be tempted myself...if I wasn't rolling around the floor laughing instead.

Beware, beware, beware. Once again this week I and my colleagues have battled our way through a week on the frontline in a referral and assessment team. Yesterday, my brain simply went into gridlock. All of the above worthy aims and intentions might be possible, if I had half the work that I have. But I doubt it. I and every colleague I spoke to, feels desperately under pressure. Sure, some of the time I cope, but that does not mean that work is getting done.

And what is this work, exactly? Well on Monday I spent at least 5 hours filling in forms, filing, printing out data, photocopying and sorting out meeting dates and times. Work that I did not need any social work training whatsoever to do. Administrative tasks, that a sensible, averagely intelligent 18 year old could do. And the fact is, about 3 hours almost every day would need to be spent on such tasks, to keep up with the demands laid down by legislation.

Later in the week, I went to see a family which had a 6 year old boy just left with them by his mother. Under the regulations, the time I spent with the family was controlled by the requirements to complete a core assessment and do checks, eg 1hour was spent filling in CRB forms...So out of the 4 hours I spent with that family this week, how much was to "provide support, encouragement, counselling and advice"?

I would say, about 20 minutes. That included 10 minutes with the abandoned child and 10 minutes with the brand new carer, on her doorstep, after a lengthy interview controlled by bureaucratic demands. The time I left her home was 6.30pm, so I was not rushing to meet some finish by 5pm deain meeting the demands of the bureaucracy. Worse still, other clients will lose out because I cannot spread myself thinly enough to treat all of them in that way. I am adjusting to this, to the built in failure and shoddy work, but I won't endure it for long, especially now that it is eating away at my own sense of integrity.

So most days I do the juggling act, keeping as many balls as possible in the air, hoping I am not dropping the one that could be the next Baby Peter or Victoria....but with absolutely no certainty of that of course!

So far I am hanging in there, but please don't annoy me with  ridiculous rhetoric about uplifting lives and add hypocritical insult to the inevitable injury of staying on this soulless treadmill.

 More clearly than ever this week I see myself acting as a functionary, a cog in a huge machine. If I am true to myself, and treat my clients as fully human, then I simply will not succeed in meeting the demands of the bureaucracy. Worse still, other clients will lose out because I cannot spread myself thinly enough to treat all of them in that way. I am adjusting to this, to the built in failure and shoddy work, but I won't endure it for long, especially now that it is eating away at my own sense of integrity.So most days I do the juggling act, keeping as many balls as possible in the air, hoping I am not dropping the one that could be the next Baby Peter or Victoria....but with absolutely no certainty of that of course!So far I am hanging in there, but please don't annoy me with  ridiculous rhetoric about uplifting lives and add hypocritical insult to the inevitable injury of staying on this soulless treadmill.

I'd like to end with another quote: it's a definition of slavery:

"A slave is:

• • forced to work -- through mental or physical threat;
  • owned or controlled by an 'employer', usually through mental or physical abuse or threatened abuse;
  • dehumanised, treated as a commodity or bought and sold as 'property';
  • physically constrained or has restrictions placed on his/her freedom of movement."
  
  
  
  I know which quotation in this article  rings more true for me as a social worker in Britain 2009.

I overslept today. Possibly to do with doing a visit late afternoon yesterday, driving through pelting rain, and then discovering at the client's home that I had arrived at an Eid party. The guest of honour (the carer of my client) had just returned from Haj. And all dressed in white, very striking he looked too!  I removed my shoes and sighed to myself as I entered, knowing I was the ultimate party pooper, that my timing could scarcely be worse, and that all I could do was keep the visit as short as possible....
I declined several offers of hospitality, in the interest of not prolonging matters. Ultimately I succumbed to a few dates brought back from the pilgrimage, which were tempting.... and I was worried that in refusing hospitality I would be seen as in some way offensively dismissive. Along the way I explained the official thinking on supporting the placement financially (we would not be doing so, of course.) I also remembered that I had to revisit the CRB form. I had written that prior to her current address, Mrs X had been living in Afghanistan. "But you must get her exact address, " our lovely, patient business support person had explained. "Otherwise they will send it back...." " I see," I said. And I did, all too well.
So I brought the subject up, right there in the brightly decorated room, with various relatives and friends all keen to welcome back the doughty pilgrim.
"Exactly what was Mrs X's address in Afghanistan by the way? I need it for the CRB check."
Mr Z looked at me in some astonishment. "Just....XYZ province. There have been a lot of (and he made a gesture of explosions.) There are no streets and numbers or postcodes as you have here. It is...why we are here, because we did not want to be killed...or to kill." 
But, ever wishing to be cooperative, Mr Z, who has become a British citizen and so understands the drill fairly well,  wrote down another word. "There," he said. "That's like...Well, a district in the province. That is as close as you will get to an address."
"I see," I said. This time I really did. I must just hope that the CRB agency will understand that there are parts of the world where addresses are not quite as they are in the UK.

Back Again..Still Here!

I have changed roles since the last time I wrote. Now I am a social worker in Private Fostering. This is a system which came about following the death of Victoria Climbie. It seems the Government does not think it is good that a family makes its own decisions about children, who for whatever reason cannot be with their  own parents or very close relatives as defined by legislation. It isn't enough to do an assessment and make a decision about whether monitoring is needed or not. Monitoring must be done, regardless.

So today I visited a 15 year old boy from Afghanistan. He is living with his married cousin who has serious financial difficulties and asked for help to provide for the boy. I explain that there is no provision to make payments to families. They should provide for the boy from the family's resources. Or else.....
Ah now, there is the rub. What if the family decide that they can't make ends meet and request that the Borough find accommodation for him?

Well, then we can place him with foster carers. They might be of the same religous background, if there are any Muslim foster carers available.They will be professional carers, assessed, vetted, checked, trained, monitored and paid....to do the job of providing care in their home for a young person.

But wait a minute....What about listening to the wishes of the young person? "I want to stay with my cousin, but I want pocket money and I need clothes. I would miss my little cousins..." And it is my professional view that apart from the financial problems, this young person is well cared for at his current abode.

So we would really accommodate him, pay an allowance of £xxx per week, make a clothing grant and set in motion a whole Leaving Care process which will result in him having support until he is 18 and in acquiring a Council tenancy. Total cost....including social work time..£thousands.

We would rather do this than make any financial contribution to help a family to manage. Because....???they are family. They might harm the boy. We prefer to have him accommodated. No wonder the Borough is overspent...and just how would I explain this to the boy?

How Social Work Would Kill the Soul.

I came home last night and lay on the sofa and wept. Not quite literally, but it was perhaps worse. I lay and felt just how it is to be doing social work in Britain today. And it was not even that bad a day.At least I wasn't rushing like a maniac! And a situation that could have been really difficult was resolved when the mum involved sobered up quickly and was able to collect her daughter, safely. I even got thanked by a teacher for my help! Now that is a first!

But my colleague was feeling so much pressure, I really worry for her. She is going through what I will call the AGony experience. A youngster was placed in a "Short Term Residential Unit" in an emergency. The girl is a teenager, angry, confused, feeling let down I imagine, in all sorts of ways. My colleague does not know her from Eve, but being allocated the case she is expected to get on with it.

What does that mean, though? Does it mean spending time with the young person, getting to know her and finding out what has gone wrong and what might be needed to put it right? You might hope so, wouldn't you?
Not exactly. It means coming to a meeting with Staff and the girl, within 48 hours of her placement, but not to have a real discussion with the girl. No, we must have a Placement Agreement meeting. At that meeting, my colleague is grilled by staff from the Unit, about where the required forms are, the Essential Information Record 1, The Placement Plan Part 1, The Care Plan....

My colleague, who has been busy with one or two other matters in the intervening 48 hours,  that's 2 working days. For example, preparing a report for a Child Protection Review and attending it, finding a new placement for 2 teenage boys whose father does not want them to come home, and one or two other little matters.  She does not have time to complete these forms.Shocking is it not?

Some time after 5pm on Friday,  someone from the Unit rings and jumps up and down on the phone about the illegality of the placement without the forms. The Unit has done an audit and these forms are required that very day. No, they cannot wait until Monday. The sky might fall, obviously.

My colleague, lets call her Blessing, has to run around, putting something on paper, finding a fax number and sending off those forms. She is experiencing modern social work, where anybody and everybody has the right to question your practice and tell you what to do. Because the system says in black and white exactly what is required from the social worker. It is a long list of forms, many pages long, to be done within certain timescales. So Johnny or Jack or Mabel or Maude, any worker, can ask the social worker for the required paperwork at any time.  There is a preferred order to do this of course, as follows: - in front of clients, after 5 pm on a Friday, via an email circulated to all your actual managers up to and including The Almighty Himself probably, "Where is Form A, Form B, Form C, Form D etc etc Form X, Form Y, Form Z?"

Meanwhile back to the AGony experience....what happened at this absolutely essential Placement Planning meeting, with the angry young lady having her first experience in the "care" of the Local Authority?
Well, so much time is spent filling in the form in order to have a record of the meeting, that the girl gets frustrated, because it seems to her that people are more interesting in filling in their forms than in listening to her and what is really on her mind. She walks out of the meeting. Blessing is grilled about the forms and also feels like walking out, but that would not be professional. Or would it?

I know how that Grilling feels, because it happened to me several times. I felt humiliated, put on the spot, undermined, and abused. And I am meant to be the person with the overview of the young person and their needs! The system has created an arrangement of strings, and so many other people can yank on those strings whenever they choose. Everything is urgent, must be done now, can't wait. The Forms take over, and creative, compassionate, constructive thinking disappears.

Everybody loses, the young client who more than anything needs to be treated like a human being, not another sausage to be processed. The social worker who ends up feeling abused and despairing that she or he can ever get on with the real work. The residential worker who thinks that harrassing the social worker is part of the job description....

So does Blessing go off for the weekend with any sense of achievement, or even relief? No, she is absolutely furious, resentful and stressed our a tidy sum. The foresees not getting home, again, until after did not come out of it well at all. Services for children were not satisfactory. Is there any chance of getting the money back from Price Waterhouse, and undoing the damage done by their recommendations? Probably not, because the political will to fund proper services is not there.

It is so much easier to carry on piling the pressure onto social workers and scapegoating them at every opportunity. This is a slavery which would kill the soul if such a thing was possible. It is time to end that slavery. One way or another, it will end. Meantime the soul shrinks into a tiny corner and waits for liberation.

Blew my Top..oh dear!

For the first time in my life, I lost it at work. Someone from my agency, (I am a locum) rang to badger me about getting a CRB check done for tomorrow. At least they want to have the form so that they can say it is in process when they are audited.


I blew my top, when she said that if I don't, I might not get paid etc etc. The thing is I don't have right on my side, I suppose, since as she said it is the Government's rules. Yes, the Government, that is all those MPs who have been making fraudulent and inflated expenses claims...No wonder they are so quick to jump on any sin of ommission or commission by anyone else!

The Government, which has in its wisdom created a society where box ticking, conveyor belt style social work has squeezed out the time to do anything other than strain your wrist writing reams of stuff which will most likely only be read if something goes horribly wrong. The Government, whose rules mean that social workers with families and children of their own have to neglect them, in order to write these turgid reports which serve very little useful purpose.

But when the Government says jump, we have to say, how high? So we have to fill in a CRB check for each agency we sign up with. It takes weeks to return, costs someone somewhere money and irritates Locum Social Workers who are barely coping anyway. Does the Government know that I spend possibly 20 minutes a week alone with children, that is about 5 minutes per child?

Of course there is a rationale for it. And just yesterday, the arrest of Vanessa George and the goings on at Little Ted's Nursery, bring that sharply into focus. Once again, rules and procedures will be tested, examined, tightened up, and mud, or blame, will be slung. Pressure will be brought to bear and the whole social care world will become that much grimmer and joyless for everybody, in the name of Child Protection.


I have always been a bit of a Quiet Maverick, never one to rock the boat but also very much my own person. I am so glad about that now, as the profession I have to work in for the time being would otherwise be such a soul destroying experience. But I don't think I can hide my Maverick tendencies for much longer, as there is too much that is just plain WRONG in social work and I feel that a passionate response is required.

But I know that getting angry with a young employee of a huge Agency is not the answer, and I will probably apologize, do the right thing, submit the form and wonder, when do I cross the line from quiet putting up with nonsense for the sake of a quiet life and a basic pittance, and when do I stand up and say, this is Anti life, oppressive, joyless slavery, which serves no useful purpose?

Perhaps when I know that I myself am guilty of bullying someone who is just doing her job, and who is younger, less well educated and possibly even less well paid....It is really time to think how much longer am I going to tolerate this system which sucks my life out of me, with little advantage to the clients. The Vanessa Greens of the world will occasionally slip through the net. Does that mean everybody else has to be treated as something of a criminal, because they want to work with children?

I have been meaning to do this for so long. Even if no one else ever reads it, I have to let off steam about this ridiculous situation. It is a Saturday and I am still fuming about work. It can't be good for my health. When I am with my colleagues sometimes it feels as if we are in a war zone and I am just fed up with it. I qualified as a social worker in the 1980s, I enjoyed it and did some great work for 13 years. I did an advanced qualification, trained as a counsellor, had a great job in that for 7 years. After a career break I thought I would try social work again. Surely, I thought, they will have realized that going down the route of more and more bureaucracy is madness.
No, actually, "they" haven't.
In fact 3 weeks after I got a locum post, after months of trying, The Baby P Tragedy hit the headlines. Ever since then, I feel as if I have slipped into a nightmare which is very hard to wake up from.
This blog is not so much about clients, but about the reality of the job that social work has become, in frontline childcare. It is about what I find outrageous, abusive and dangerous....for me, for colleagues and of course for clients too. I don't plan to stay in social work, as I am not willing to be a victim of the system and I am selfish enough to believe that I should be able to feel some satisfaction in my work, some sense of it helping people, and some freedom to be creative. So social work is one of the last places I would choose to spend my precious, God given life and talents.
And I know it is not just me. I hear colleagues express their frustration at trying to do the impossible, prevent chaos and juggle with difficult and demanding situations.
For example, yesterday a colleague was taking a child home after some time in accommodation. The signs were clear that Dad, the sole carer, did not want him back, but management were asking why my colleague had not returned the boy home. So she arranged to do this with an obviously reluctant Dad, who said he would be at home to receive his son. Under some pressure from my colleague, of course. We collect the boy from school, take him to Dad's and no one is in! Fantastic! So now the two lady social workers have a boy in their care, no Dad, a mobile phone with poor reception and a group of the boy's friends standing about curiously.
4 hours later, the boy and his brother are placed in a cab to go to a new foster family. My colleague has been grilled by managers, filled in forms, we have had to entertain and supervise 2 difficult boys. The day has been about 11 hours long, we could not get to the loo, and there was no money to buy the boys any food.
I get thanked for helping my colleague, but she leaves the office with a huge sense of anger about how she has been blamed, and management don't take responsibility for pressurizing her into creating this situation.
When I worked in social work before, there was not this horrendous blame culture to the extent that it exists today. How can we possibly do good work when we feel that every "i" must be dotted and every "t" must be crossed, or else...run the risk that it's your name that will be appearing in the newspaper headlines!
Social workers go into the job, or used to, to help people. I think there is now a breed of social worker who simply enjoys telling people what to do, and finding fault with people. It is a toxic system and I absolutely will not allow it to rob me of joy in living, self esteem and dignity in return for the comparative pittance that we are paid.