I have been fortunate to work on occasions with SACCS, the ground-breaking organisation that has helped us to take forward our thinking about how abuse can have the effect of traumatising children. As part of this work I discovered that their approach was compatible with my own perspective on trauma which is rooted in existentialist thinking. One result of this has been a co-authored article on existentialism and trauma. Mary Walsh, chief executive of SACCS (www.saccs.co.uk) and I worked together to produce a paper that has now been published in the Journal of Social Work Practice:  http://www.informaworld.com/smpp/content~db=all~content=a919432665~frm=titlelink?words=existential,trauma It is to be hoped that it will stimulate further discussion and research on this important topic.

The latest issue of this journal is available - free of charge - at http://www.socialworker.com/jswve/content/view/142/72/

I provide training on a wide range of topics and enjoy the variety, but sometimes patterns emerge as a particular topic becomes falvour of the month. Recently 'record keeping and report writing' has been a popular request from training commissioners. I am pleased about this, as my experience as an expert witness over the past 13 or so years has left me feeling concerned at how problematic much of the record keeping can be. A point I emphasise in my training is that we need to see report writing and record keeping as important aspects of our work, as forms of professional communication and not as a bureaucratic chore that can wait and then perhaps be done skimpily. A recurring theme across those situations where social work has been seen to be falling below an acceptable standard is that of poor or non-existent professional communication, so the skills needed for effective report writing and record keeping should be high on our agenda.

The General Social Care Council recently published details of a survey about supervision in social work. It was not encouraging reading. We are fortunate in social work to have a strong tradition of supervision, unlike many other professional groups. It is very sad if we are not able to make the most of that supervision. Over my career I have seen many, many examples of how good supervision has made an extremely positive contribution to practice and almost as many examples of how poor or non-existent supervision can be so detrimental.

Tony Morrison, highly respected trainer and author who sadly died earlier this year, always argued that practitioners who are not receiving good supervision (or not receiving supervision at all) should do something about it, rather than just accept the risks of undertaking demanding work without the proper level of support. Supervision is too important for us to allow it to be neglected.  

Communitycare.co.uk recently reported a survey which showed that four out of ten social workers regard their caseload as 'unmanageable'. This is, of course, an unacceptable situation, as unmanageable caseloads add up to stress, poor-quality practice, a higher level of mistakes, increased sickness absence, a failure to learn and very poor morale. Some people would see this as a management challenge: what are managers going to do to address these problems? This is a legitimate question, but I would want to present the situation in broader terms as a professional challenge: what are we, as professionals - whether practitioners, managers, educators or whatever - going to do about it? Of course, there aren't any magic answers to this complex problem, but all the more reason, then, for people to support one another in finding ways forward, rather than just staying quiet and hoping that 'they' will sort it out eventually. Bureaucrats say 'they'; professionals say 'we'.

In an earlier posting (http://www.socialworkfocus.com/myblog-admin/trying-to-do-the-impossible.html) I warned of the dangers of trying to do the impossible. This survey shows that this is an issue we need to take very seriously.

Russell House have recently published a book on children's services that is very critical of managerialism and its insidious effect on quality of practice and morale of staff (see the Book News section on the home page of this site). This adds to the critique of managerialism in my Practising Social Work: Meeting the Professional Challenge book (http://astore.amazon.co.uk/neilthomp-21/). Managerialism has clearly had a devastating effect not just on social work, but also on public services more broadly. There are signs that the new UK Government is moving away from managerialism (albeit with small, slow steps) and moving towards a 'big society' model of less regualtion. What impact this will have on standards of practice, professional morale and so on remains to be seen. We can but hope for a more positive approach to professionalism.

In recent years I have noticed that many social work colleagues seem to be narrowing their horizons. Their focus seems to be increasingly on their own area of practice without seeeing it as part of the broader picture of social work as a diverse profession. From my experience of running training courses with social work staff from various specialisms I get the impression that there is far less interest in our prfession as a whole. So many people want to look at, and talk about, their particular branch of the social work tree and seem to have relatively little interest in looking at the tree as a whole (let alone the social policy wood it forms part of). Thankfully, there are also many people who do want to see the big picture and maintain an identity for social work across the various specialisms. I just hope that we are not seeing a trend towards 'silo thinking' - that is, people seeing the significance of only their part of the social work world and losing sight of how it fits into the broader whole. 

I was running a training course on leadership recently and it reminded me how important leadership is for social work. For me leadership isn't just about management. I would like to think that managers see leaderhsip skills as part of their repertoire, but I think that practitioners have a leaderhip role too - indivdiually and collectively. Leadership involves having a clear idea of where we want to get to and how we are going to get there, and I would like to think that practitioners are not waiting for managers to decide that for our profession. I would like to think that we can all play a part in deciding our direction and pursuing it. For me that is one of the things that makes social work a profession - the fact that the direction we move in will owe much to our values and our own sense of why what we do is important and valuable.

I began my career in residential child care a long time ago. I had the official title of 'residential child care officer' (RCCO), but was also often referred to as a 'residential social worker'. These days in the UK we have protection of title, so only people who are registered with the appropriate care council can legally refer to themselves as such. This has been a very positive move as previously anyone who did anything vaguely charitable could call themselves a social worker: 'I'm a social worker; I do fundraising for my church group'. However, it raises the question of whether residential child care is part of social work, when the vast majority of such workers are not registered (except in Wales where the picture is significantly different from the rest of the UK).

I have always thought of residential child care as not only part of social work, but also a very important part of social work. However, I am aware that there are many people, both within the sector and outside it, who would disagree with me. How do we judge what is social work and what is not?

In my Practising Social Work book I  talk about the importance  of 'setting out our stall'. By this I mean that we are likely to have difficulties over role definition if we do not make it clear to the people we are working with (clients and other professionals) what we can and cannot do, what we should and should not do. Unfortunately there is a tendency for many people to assume that the social worker is responsible for anything that does not fit neatly into the duties of other professionals. Clearly such an assumption simply sets us upto fail as we could not realistically succeed with such a broad and nebulous set of duties. Consequently we need to be clear about what our role is in each case (as defined within the parameters of law, policy  and professional values) and communicate this to those concerned - rather than allowing a situation to develop that is characterised by vagueness and a lack of focus.

Reference

Thompson, N. (2009) Practising Social Work: Meeting the Professional Challenge, Basingstoke, Palgrave Macmillan. http://astore.amazon.co.uk/neilthomp-21/