THE BITE-SIZED LECTURE

Step into our Bite-Sized Lecture hall for the first time, as Dr Prospera Tedam, Associate Professor at United Arab Emirates University, condenses and explains her new research.

One of the many key highlights of this research was that discrimination in terms of race was clearly perpetuated during the pandemic, and the majority of this study’s participants experienced racialised responses during this time.

“For practitioners, it was such a vulnerable time that many felt unable to do anything about, and in the absence of firm government guidelines, decisions were being made at a local level that weren’t in favour of everybody. Shielding was one example.

“When shielding was introduced, the idea was, if you’ve got vulnerable family members, you need to work from home to keep them safe. That gave managers this power, if you like, to decide who was entitled to be shielded. So one participant was told, flat out, you’re from *Ghana, your family’s in *Ghana, you have no grounds for shielding. Then a colleague who was white British, with family two hours away, was told your family’s close, so you can work from home. “My debate in this paper is, why does that become a necessary part of the exclusion or inclusion criteria, where your family lives? That isn’t what the government said. In the absence of guideline definition, we really leave this serious decision making to people who then interpret, or misinterpret as the case may be, in favour of some and to the disadvantage of others.

“We need a management process that is more culturally informed. I borrow this term culturally responsive leadership, which I think is a really important leadership method, when working with a diverse population - considering what we’re saying, how it’s coming across, who we’re speaking to, and who it includes and excludes.

So the Black practitioners felt they ended up doing more work during Covid, when more of the people who looked like them were dying and becoming disproportionately infected. There seemed to be either a lack of understanding, or complete disregard to what was going on.

“This was, of course, exacerbated by the murder of George Floyd. Black practitioners were saying: nobody ever mentioned the name George Floyd in our team meetings. Nobody mentioned Black Lives Matter. Black people are dying of Covid, we’re in the office, we’ve not being given PPE, and on one occasion, another practitioner said you had to be mates with the administrator who gave out the PPE to get any, but the administrator was white and all her friends were white, so they just went out and bought their own.

“This kind of thing is important to highlight for social work because we often find ourselves thinking that, because our profession is built upon this whole notion of respect for equality and diversity, empowering everyone, wanting the world to be a place where everyone is given an equal share of the cake, practitioners - and indeed researchers - can forget there are differential experiences for different groups of people. We are not immune as a profession, and the silence of some managers and leaders around Black Lives Matter - when you’ve got a significant number of Black students practitioners - is actually quite disgraceful, and needs to be picked up.

“I’d like to finish by mentioning the fact there’s little to no research on why we seem to have high numbers of Black social workers doing agency work, rather than permanent roles. One practitioner I spoke with made it absolutely clear that the reason for this, in his view, is that when you experience racism, it’s easier to leave a locum or agency role.

“That was quite disheartening to hear in 2020 or 2021.

“If this carries on, we will continue in the profession to see more ethnic minority people becoming locum social workers, which doesn’t help any local authority, because there’s a kind of fluidity of staffing, and no real core staff.

“Covid uncovered a need for culturally responsive leadership, recognising the diversity of people you lead and manage, and ensuring that everyone has a fair proportion of the goodwill and the good things that exist in our profession.”