In Charge for a Day

We challenged four social work professionals to outline how they would overhaul the social care sector, if they found themselves...In Charge for a Day.

Final year student social worker at the University of Birmingham, & Activist

"If I was in charge for the day, I would aim to disrupt the corrupted systems to rebuild them in a anti-oppressive way.

"There are many areas I think could be improved in the world of social care services. However, I would want to specifically tackle discrimination against people with lived experiences and professionals based on their protected characteristics - for example, their race, gender, sexuality or disability. The harm of discrimination isn’t just seen or felt personally, but can also create systemic difficulties, so my plan would tackle each level.

"Why is tackling discrimination important? Not only does it affect all aspects of an individual’s life, sometimes it can be the deciding factor of whether you “deserve” certain treatments. Your voice might not be heard or valued as much as others because of your race, religion or sex etc. If that is our reality, how can we possibly turn a blind eye to the serious dangers of discrimination and oppression? No one should be above being criticised. It should be used as a stepping stone to improve, as no one knows everything.

"But I would also evaluate the quality of services being provided. Are service users being listened to? What happens after reporting discrimination? Are we creating a safe environment? Within the organisation, I would be asking more critical questions around personal and professional identity. Are we safeguarding our professionals? Is career progress accessible to all or only a few?

"I wouldn’t be able to achieve this all in one day, but I would structure a detailed plan and process so that we can start disrupting the system. From there, we would make the necessary changes! Time and money would go into how to improve our practice and services. There isn’t an end date to this because we should constantly be challenging and improving. We can’t become complacent.

"If I was in charge for only one day, I would take that opportunity to amplify the voices of those who go unheard. We must challenge and make changes as awareness can only go so far."

Consultant social worker

"Social workers caseloads would be reduced by at least a third. Social workers would have the time to provide families the support and help they need (and deserve!). As a result, retention would improve. Children and their parents would be more likely to have the same social worker which would help relationships.

"More administration support would be provided. If I have ever made a positive difference in the life of a child, it has always been because I was supported by brilliant business support.

"Every social worker would have an assistant social worker who could deliver interventions and provide intense practical support for families.

"Work with families would be underpinned by practical ideas, skills and tools that would be made available to all social workers, such as motivational interviewing, systemic practice, and signs of safety. Time and space would be allowed to support ongoing skills-based training.

"A different hierarchal structure would be developed - experienced practitioners wouldn’t be forced into choosing between front line social work or management. Instead, experienced social workers could acquire specialist roles. They would develop an expertise, continue to work directly with families, and support less experienced social workers.

"When parents have significant and enduring problems, we would have access to a range of intensive, evidenced-based interventions. For example:

• A therapeutic rehabilitation centre for a parent with a longstanding drug and/or alcohol problem.

• A long term, practically and emotionally helpful relationship for a lonely, depressed parent, completely overwhelmed by the challenge of parenting. One way to achieve this would be foster carers fostering the family.

• Psychotherapeutic treatment would be available for a parent experiencing severe mental health problems, causing him/her to actimpulsively and violently.

"Parents would be asked to address only one problem. The main problem. We would not send them to several different short-term programmes, but instead think carefully about the critical cause of concern.

I"nstead of parenting programmes that last 6-12 weeks, social workers and parent advocates would codeliver localised support groups that run indefinitely. This would provide parents the content of many parenting programmes, but also enable ongoing social support, and a place to receive/ give advice.

"If children need to come into care, we would have access to high quality, local, in-house foster care provision. Adoption would be an option, but adoption without direct contact (family time) would be extremely rare. If a parent makes changes, even a few years after their child is removed, shared care or reunification would readily be considered.

"Ongoing family time between parents would be supported by specialist family support workers in well equipped, nicely furnished centres. Parents who have children in care, fostered or adopted, would be entitled to therapy for their loss, plus all the support that parents who are at risk of losing their children can access."

Independent social worker

"When reflecting on changes if I oversaw the child safeguarding system, I think about two fundamental issues. Firstly, we have a system based on hierarchical, corporate style structures. Secondly, there is a lack of transparency, where confidentiality for families is often used to avoid openness.

"Therefore, the centrepiece of my plan is the implementation of community panels – known as Comps - which will be a substitute for the role of local authority senior managers, replace the current OFSTED inspection regime, and limit input from private companies and large third sector actors in providing services, favouring a local ecosystem of services and innovation.

"Comps will take the lead in liaising with local politicians with respect to funding and planning of services and will be based on a localised “patch” structure, rather than a centralised hub. Comps will ensure a shift from office-based to outreach support so that safeguarding systems are less dependent on referrals and more able to address community issues, such as child sexual and criminal exploitation. Imagine the difference if this had been in place during the pandemic.

"Instead of using locums, Comps will establish “banks” of social workers, kept directly on retainer, to cover gaps in relation to leave, sickness, and fulltime vacancies.

"Eventually, social work teams will become non-hierarchical, promote a culture where frontline workers undertaking research is the norm, and provide support so that practitioners can speak to the media about what they do. This will support a move away from a compliance-based service where “monitoring” or “statutory timescales” will become profanities.

"To evaluate services, Comps will coordinate a new inspection regime with on-going evaluation based on feedback of experiences from families, testimony from workers, and outcomes for children - not adherence to data points.

"Finally, Comps will work with the legal profession to ensure the family courts are more transparent, accessible to families, and less adversarial in approach. This will reflect the shift to a more open social care system, led by a confident, but compassionate workforce no longer held back by the comfort blanket of hierarchy."

General Secretary, Social Work Union

"If the Social Workers Union (SWU) was at the helm of social care services for a day we would set in place a service wide plan to embrace a community led approach. This would be an expansion of the SWU and British Association of Social Workers (BASW) Professional Working Conditions Campaign that was launched in 2018 to improve the working conditions of Social Workers and has continued thereafter.

"To start, SWU would run a far-reaching public education drive about the nature and current state of social work in the UK. This would grow media interest and build public awareness of SWU’s research which shows that Social Workers are strongly engaged in their work and want the very best outcomes for people that use services, but they are hampered by poor working conditions and a lack of resources. Some changes we would make:

- Workload – social workers have too many cases – meaning they don’t have the time to get through them all.

- Too much paperwork – social workers have too much paperwork, as well as paperwork which is too repetitive.

- Managerial Support – a large number of non-social workers are in management positions. Because of this, they place unrealistic timescales and expectations on employees. Managers would be trained appropriately.

- Supervisory Support – more frequent supervision would have positive impacts on stress as well as cases that individuals are expected to deal with.

"SWU would also ringfence current social care service funding and impress upon the government the importance of restoring previous funding, making whole a sector that has been cut to the bone by austerity-based policies.

"We need to move away from the neoliberal commodification of care – particularly in adult social care – that assumes the individual is best placed to buy services, and instead move the focus to a community-led approach that values the many rather than the individual. The vulnerable in our society are not customers; they are people.

"There aren’t any magic wands available in this scenario so this isn’t a change that could take place over the span of one day. However, our aim would be to set into motion a significant shift in social work culture that has empathy, awareness of social policy, and personal values at its core."