Burnout has ‘always been there’: award-winning social worker speaks about the profession over the decades

Published by Professional Social Work magazine, 13 July, 2023

How have you seen the social work profession changing over the past 60 years?

I will start by saying what goes around comes around. In other words, in many ways the social work profession hasn’t changed. What has changed is the language that people use; the language has changed but the essence hasn’t changed. It’s about listening and empathy which are values I learned on my social work course and are values central to my social work.

We’ve added new techniques and ways of working – some of which are useful, some of which we’ve discarded along the way. All of the ones that we haven’t discarded fit with the basic knowledge, values and skills of social work.

Currently, the average career of a social worker lasts for seven and a half years. What has kept you in the profession?

My original training. I’m still in touch with six of the people who were on my small course all those years ago.

I moved around in social work. I was a team leader, I did family support, I did adoption work, and I moved into being an educator.

I’d also say that I’m very interested in social work across nations and national boundaries. I moved internationally, largely because of my husband. He moved to Canada but I didn’t join him for 18 months because I felt so committed to the families I was working with in Leicester. Relationships have always been really important and I’m one of these people who stay in touch with my clients.

I still use the word ‘client’, but the way, and have not found an alternative. I don’t like the term ‘service user’ because a lot of people are reluctant users of the social work service. I like the term client because it means I have a professional obligation to provide a service for which the state, as it happens for me, is paying.

If you ask me what my identity is, it is social work even though for the last 30-40 years I’ve been attached to the University of East Anglia.

Half of almost 1,000 social workers surveyed by SWU last year said they were thinking about leaving the profession. Was burnout as endemic in social work when you first began?

It’s always been there. When I was looking for a job when I left my training course, my tutor Olive Stevenson – who has made a huge contribution to social work - said be careful where you choose for your first job and think about yourself. Find somewhere where good social work is practiced. I think that is important.

Your first job must be where you’re comfortable with the job you want to do and how it’s being done in that place.

I’ve had my periods of burnout. I think you deal with burnout not by rejecting the families you’re working with, but by choosing the right way to move. You can move within your agency. I moved within Norfolk because I felt I needed more experience in a family centre because I wanted to work closer with teenagers.

I also think that agencies should be making good use of the expertise they’ve got with their 40 – 60 year olds as educators, as practise educators. There are so many ways that you can reduce the pressures and still value what that individual’s got to offer.

As a social work academic and Emeritus Professor, can you comment on the state of social work education and student bursaries?

I’m appalled by the state of the bursaries and also appalled by the inequality of the different routes into social work.

I like the idea of apprenticeships and I think it’s important to have different routes in.

I wrote a paper called “In defence of a university social work education” pointing out that, although there are trainee routes, the education route has the advantage that you’re not tied in with a particular agency. You are free to critique. You have different placements and can see what works, whether you really like to work with adults with mental health problems or with children or with people with hearing issues. As a student you’re freer to make mistakes. You’re trying things out. You learn quite a lot.

As a trainee – as an apprentice or on a fast-track course – you are expected to stay employed by that agency, so obviously it does rather limit your willingness to critique. I think social workers really need to critique what they see. That is a crucial part of examining: Why am I doing what I’m doing? Could I do it differently? Do I like the way this placement does things, or would I prefer the way that this other placement does things?

The bursary level for masters and undergraduate students on university courses is appallingly low, particularly when you compare that with the fact that on other fast-track courses they don’t even pay any fees. That makes the cruelty as well as the inequality of the funding of social work education just indefensible.

I think we do need a national review of social work education. I know there are national reviews, but we need one that looks at recruitment into the profession of people who want to go into it from a university degree straight from school. We must have ways into the profession and one of those ways is to go as a student and, therefore, needing a bursary.

I don’t know what the rates are but people leave their courses because they have to work, they have childcare responsibilities, or they might be looking after their elderly parents. Not to pay a decent bursary when students are, after all, working within agencies during their training is all part of the elbow of this particular campaign.

Learn more about the student-led bursary campaigns supported by the SWU Campaign Fund in Wales, Scotland, and England on the SWU website.

You have said that Olive Stevenson taught you that social workers are creative helpers – how has this influenced your practice?

Being a creative helper is absolutely central to my practice because I go back to knowledge, values, and skills throughout my career. I really like the BASW Professional Capabilities Framework (PCF) as a way of negotiating yourself as a social worker and, indeed, with your employers through your career.

Relationship helping is absolutely central. It means listening and trying to be in a position of trust. I’ve written about the importance of power – not failing to understand that you are the person in power and therefore relationships are tricky. When people talk about partnerships it can sound like a nice word, but you are the professional.

Creating trust is tricky. Bearing in mind that clients don’t always trust you and, frankly, you can’t always trust them. Because why would they not lie to you sometimes? Olive Stevenson wrote about the fact that people whose lives are on the line will not always tell you the truth. That doesn’t mean you don’t value and respect them, but relationships are tricky. And yet, relationships have to be central.

Relationships are also central to your work with your colleagues in the health service, teachers, support workers, community leaders, youth workers. Which is why I love the idea of being a patch social worker because my job was to work with those people as a team around the family. I prefer to say “mothers, fathers, and children” instead though, as sometimes “family” misses out fathers and we work with every member of the family.

The “helping” bit is about flexibility. What I don’t like is the move towards the term “intervention”. It seems to imply something very short term: there’s a problem, you intervene, you use a particular method from the many that are now available, and then you have an end. So, you’ve done your intervention and you have an outcome.

Look at children in care - a child can come into care at six weeks old and may still be receiving a social work service at age 22. That’s not an intervention; that’s a service. Therefore, I prefer the term ‘helping’ because helping means everything. It means I’m a poverty aware social worker. Welfare rights and advocacy are part of my practice.

This doesn’t happen now because the world doesn’t work that way, but I sat with my clients in social security offices saying that we will not leave this office until this person has some money for the weekend. That, to me, was all part of creative helping.

I don’t like manualised, prescriptive programmes. It goes back to the old adage: “I’d like to help you out. Which way did you come in?” In other words, if you don’t like my way of working then there’s nothing I can do for you. There are roles in social work for people who want to be, say, systemic family therapists or work in child and adolescent mental health specialist teams. However, the majority of social workers have to be flexible. You can’t say to somebody who has been referred to you because they may be neglecting their child: “Well, this is the way I work. Here are my scaling questions. Never mind the fact that you have no food.”

A prescriptive approach might work for some social workers in some jobs but it wasn’t my model. My model was flexible helping.

Which projects have resonated with you the most over the years?

I’ve researched on adoption and have placed children for adoption in my practice, but most of my work has been preventive work with families. My first book was Captive Clients which was about families going home from care, and I’m pleased to tell you it’s about to be reissued. I wrote it after the Maria Colwell case as I wanted to find out in what circumstances can children safely go home and what sort of services do they need.

The piece of work I’m proudest of is parents and child protection conferences, which followed on from that first book. I always felt that it was absolutely wrong that a group of people sat around and decided what was going to be done to this child while the family wasn’t there. It happened to coincide with the 1988 Cleveland Report in which Dame Elizabeth Butler-Sloss, now in the House of Lords, picked up on this and said surely it must be wrong that this key decision is made when the family isn’t there.

Butler-Sloss said: “Right, what do we know about parents in child protection conferences? Ah, we’ll fund some research.” We got the contract at UEA and the rest is history.

That did change practise and we were ahead, I think, of large parts of the world where professionals would sit around deciding what to do about children without the parents being there. It’s linked with family group conferences and I think that’s the way to go. The role of the social worker as the chair of the child protection conference, facilitating all these different perspectives, came in as a result of that.

I feel particularly proud of that piece of research which came from my commitment to families.

Cultural competence has been a theme running through your work over the past decade. Why has your research focused on this and how has the discourse around this topic changed in that time?

All those years ago it wasn’t called “cultural competence”, but I think it comes from empathy – how can you help people unless you can walk in their shoes?

In my early days this came from putting myself into the shoes of the families I worked with in Leicester. When I started my work in 1963, I had a caseload of 15 families and one of the families that I worked with was a rather sheltered, working class, rural family. I can see myself sitting in the very narrow, insalubrious house of a family with an open fire and the little kid was walking around with no nappy and pooping on the floor.

So, I said: “Have you ever thought of toilet training him?”

And the mother said: “Oh it’s alright me duck, he always wipes it up.” Whereupon the little kid picked up his poo and threw it in the open fire.

So cultural competence was something I learned very early on in understanding what it was like to live in poverty as this had been a homeless family.

Then I worked in Canada with First Nation and Métis families, and then I moved on to do adoption research. Some of the families were minority ethnic families and there was a lot of interest in why so many black children were in care and not being adopted. So, Steve Rashid, two colleagues, and I looked at permanent family placement for minority ethnic families and learned so much about foster care and adoption.

It was interesting to understand where the families were coming from, who chose either to foster or to adopt. The black families, who were mainly African Caribbean at this time, particularly didn’t want to adopt; they wanted to permanently foster because they didn’t want to take somebody’s child away.

So, the black children who were placed with black families, in my view, were privileged because they had permanent families but they never lost their birth families or their siblings. They were much more likely to be placed with siblings if they were placed with a black family. That really helped me understand that perspective.

We then wrote about child and family social work with ethnic minority families, again working with co-researchers from different cultures and advisory groups to try to understand the data. I still think that it’s really important to understand why ethnic minority families wait longer to adopt. It’s all about cultural competence.

I don’t like the term ‘intersectionality’ but it’s a convenient term to say that you have to look at every aspect of culture and that there is a world of difference between people’s experiences of discrimination. We have to understand that culture will be important to the experience of a white Polish Catholic person deciding what is going to happen to their child, as it is with South Asian families, and as it is with a Caribbean young person.

Have you come across anything surprising in your research?

That’s an interesting question. No, because I don’t think I started off expecting to find anything specific. As a researcher I have an open mind, basically.

I think I’ve learned a lot because my research has always been qualitative. I strongly think that as a researcher we have to have mixed methods. I don’t like the statement that empirically based randomised control trials are the gold standard – they’re not. Interviewing, focus groups, and intensive interviewing of a small group of families has to have its place. Particularly longitudinal studies – that’s my adoption work. You can’t have a notion of what works in adoption when you’re not going to see the outcome of a child you placed at six weeks until they’re 25. We should be really proud of our British mixed methods model of research.

I’ve not been surprised, but I’ve been delighted. A lot of my research has been about permanence and I firmly believe that permanence can be provided in foster care, in residential care, in adoption, and in going back home.

Thinking back to African Caribbean foster carers and learning from them – I asked an African Caribbean mother who was a long-term foster parent: “How do you give this child that sense of permanence?”

As a foster carer she wanted to keep the child in touch with her birth family and siblings. She said: “Well, I always talk to her about ten years ahead. When she was three I would say, ‘When do you go to school?’ and when she was 15 I’d say, ‘When are you having your driving lessons?’”

That’s not in any textbook. It’s listening to how someone deals with the issues, how you give your child a sense of permanence. Some people say that foster care is not permanent but that is absolute rubbish of course. For very many children it is permanent, and many foster carers will tell you that they’re foster grandparents.

Can you tell us about any projects that you are currently working on? Is there a topic that you are keen to further explore?

I’ve always had a socio-legal part of my career and when I retired I was on the local Family Justice Board and CAFCASS committee. I’ve got two publications that are coming out – one that’s called the Oxford Handbook of Child Protection Systems. It’s about child protection systems in the UK and this is highly topical because it explains why we do not have mandatory reporting of child abuse in Britain. I would like to convince the politicians that mandatory reporting is not the way to go.

If you ask people, “Do you think there should be mandatory reporting of sexual abuse?” Well, of course they will say yes. However, the research shows that all that happens in countries that do this is that you flood out the system because you can’t differentiate between types of abuse. So, in these countries that have mandatory reporting, you only get a service if you’re reported as having abused your child. Whereas in our system people seek help, and sometimes it’s child protection service.

I’m a researcher and someone who cares deeply for family support work and early help. We know from the countries that have this mandatory reporting system – including Canada, Australia, and America – all that happens is professionals, particularly teachers, are over-reporting. If in doubt, if you think you might be criminalised if you don’t report, you report something. The end result in these countries is that most of the people who are reported, because they may be harming the child, don’t get any services at all.

This might be different if it’s just regarding sexual abuse in institutions, but I’m not sure that it would ever stay at that. No country has ever had mandatory reporting just for sexual abuse. Perhaps that’s a topic to think about. The problem is that it’s dealt with by the Home Office, and the Home Office has different ideas from the Department for Education and they don’t seem to be talking to each other.

So, I don’t think we want to go down the mandatory reporting route. I explore this in a chapter of my new book that covers Japan and Columbia and it’s a major study that I’m really proud of.

 I’ve also written on continuing contact, continuing meaningful links for children coming into care. This includes reunification and returning home. I’ve just written a chapter for a handbook on international research on adoption, writing about adoption disruption and what should the CAFCASS report writer know about the long-term impact of adoption on children. When is it the right choice? And when would a different choice be appropriate, particularly for sibling groups?

Do you have any advice for social work students and newly qualified social workers?

Before you start on the course, be sure that this is the career that you want. It’s not something you just go into to see if you like it. We are desperately short of social workers and training course places are expensive – not just expensive for the university students paying huge amounts, but also the time of practice educators and academics.

Get all the advice you can before you take it on. I think that’s been tricky because of Covid. There’s been a move away from the probing interview process that you had to have.

Also, if your first job isn’t working for you, think about how you can change it. But be careful where you choose to take up the job. I do worry about the extent of use of agency workers, although I can understand why social workers feel they have to go down this other route when they are not paid enough and they want to get a mortgage.

The voluntary sector has opportunities and I’m a great believer in generic social work training. For example, if the local mental health team is not providing you with the sort of support you need, then there must be other opportunities perhaps in adult care, palliative care, or hospital social work.

If you leave a job, you must say goodbye properly. It’s just terrible when you hear people saying: “Well, I saw this social worker and then she never came again.” To me, this is unethical.

My last bit of advice is to join your local BASW group, talk to your colleagues, and join a union. I’ve always been a union member.

As a union member and member of a professional association you can say things that you would have otherwise not been able to say if something is going very wrong.

You can go to the press as a union member, and you have a duty to do that as far as I’m concerned. What you can’t do as in individual you can do as a SWU [Social Workers Union] member.

Professor June Thoburn qualified as a social worker in 1963 and worked in local authority child and family social work and generic practice in England and Canada before taking up a joint appointment with Norfolk County Council at the University of East Anglia (UEA) in 1979. She is founding Director of the Centre for Research on the Child and Family and the Making Research Count collaboration, and has an interest in child welfare, and helping social workers make appropriate use of knowledge. She has been an adviser to CAFCASS, was the Founding Chair of the Norfolk Family Justice Board, and in 2002 was awarded a CBE for services to social work.