Points to Ponder: The impact of decisions about children’s and justice social work on the future of the profession

Read the latest reflections from SASW National Director, Alison Bavidge, in our new "Points to Ponder" blog series, exploring what a future National Care Service could mean for Scotland - and for social work...

Just before the Christmas break, the Education, Children and Young People Committee published its Stage 1 Report on the National Care Service Bill. The Committee felt unable to comment on where children’s social services should be positioned.  News articles drew attention to the fact that, although there is research commissioned by Government to consider the most appropriate place for children’s services, this decision does not have to go back through Committees or any Parliamentary process.  The research will advise the Ministerial decision, the NCS Bill (if it goes through) having given Ministers the power to make that decision.   

In recent months, you’ll have seen various events and articles about community social work, evidencing the profession’s desire to work holistically, make meaningful relationships with individuals and communities and to move away from care management roles to more therapeutic support models that understand the dynamics and social systems around people. 

A parallel discussion is happening about the level of genericism social work could or should aspire to.  We’ve known for a long time that some families experience multiple professionals (children’s, mental health, substance use, disability and/or justice) and that this can become a full-time management task for people who in the greatest need of support. Not only is this sometimes confusing and burdensome for families, it also costs resource. 

“Social workers as the GPs of social services” (used recently in Committees by Gillian Mackay and Sandesh Gulhane, MSPs) is shorthand for a potentially really important idea.  If social workers were attached to universal services like education and primary healthcare, we could work differently.  We could work in a more generic way and more closely with communities in neighbourhoods.  We could support the aims of The Promise to support families to stay together if possible whilst ensuring the needs of the child are prioritised.  We could smooth transitions from children’s to adults’ services more effectively by keeping our lead practitioners involved and handing cases over less frequently.  We could link people in the justice system to a wider range of social care supports.  Like GPs, we could take on some specialisms (such as Mental Health Officer work, interventionist child protection, investigative interviewing, young people and justice) that our team-mates could call on to supplement their own skills.  We could all travel a shared path of professional learning about trauma, human development and assessment skills to continually deepen and improve the generic base we start our social work careers with. 

This might bring benefits to people who need support and services.  We could claim that social eco-system ground recognising trauma and disadvantage and work with/alongside the person, of course, but not the person in isolation.  We could support people in their worlds, with the dynamics and wider needs of their families, their relationships and the complexity that competing needs and human rights bring.  In local, multi-disciplinary teams we would be known, we could build trust. We could be better social workers. 

Points to ponder: 

  1. What has been the impact on holistic, relationship-based support of being more “specialist” over the last few decades? Does it drive interventions focussed on individuals without real regard to their social eco-system? 

  1. Will social work be able to choose to work more generically at any point in the future if adults’, justice and children’s services are not together and come from different organisations with separate budgets and processes?  

  1. If social work separates, how likely are we to be able to deliver a more simple experience for all of us when we need support? 

  1. If social work separates, will there be fewer or additional points of transition across services as people move through the life-span? 

  1. Can the ideal of a single door to community health and social care be a reality if social work is split?