Steve Rogowski - Social Work with Children and Families

Steve Rogowski has almost forty years experience of social work. On qualifying he worked as a generic social worker for Derbyshire County Council. Since then he has been a social worker with children and families for Oldham Council until March 2014. He has published widely about his experiences in a variety of social work/policy journals and magazines, recently including the odd blog. His books Social Work: The Rise and Fall of a Profession? and Critical Social Work with Children and Families: Theory, Context and Practice were published in 2010 and 2013 respectively.

Steve Rogowski

by David Smith

Part One
Setting the scene

Part Two
The high points of social work

Part Three
The low points of social work

Part Four
Ways forward

There are numerous people to acknowledge in a social work career spanning five decades. These include academics such as Peter Beresford, David Smith and David Thorpe from my time at Lancaster University in the 1970s through to Beth Humphries at Manchester Metropolitan University in the late 1990s. Others include, in no particular order, Audrey Mullender, Bill Jordan, Ray Jones, Iain Ferguson and Paul Michael Garrett. It goes without saying that I am especially grateful to David Smith for writing the foreword.

Then there are the many and varied colleagues in social work and allied professions, as well as some important volunteers, with whom I have worked (and sometimes worked against!) over the years. There are far too many to mention, but they will know who they are.

Finally, and certainly not least, there are the countless children and families who have allowed me into their lives, sometimes for brief spells and, at other times, for much longer periods. I am grateful to them for putting up with my occasional intrusiveness but hope they always knew that ultimately I was there to help and support even if, at times, there was an element of control.

Steve Rogowski

Oldham

February 2016

As far as I know, there is no one like Steve Rogowski. By this I mean that I can think of nobody else who over almost forty years has practised as a social worker largely in a single area Oldham in Rogowskis case while continuing to reflect critically in published work on that practice and its changing political and policy context. In this, (his latest last?) book, he draws on his unique experience as practitioner and academic writer of both short personal or polemical pieces and of extended works of scholarship to offer a powerful historical and analytical critique of developments in social work during his professional lifetime, with a particular focus on his own specialism of work with children and families.

Organised into four parts and nine chapters, the book is helpfully structured and signposted as he guides the reader through the shifting social, political and economic landscape in which he has maintained his efforts to work as a critical practitioner. He describes and analyses social works highs and lows, concluding with a consideration of possible futures for social work in which, taking the phrase from Raymond Williams, he tries to identify resources of hope in difficult times. His scholarship is evident in the sources he cites, with approval or dismay, which range widely over times and topics, and from high-level social theory to close-up studies of practice. In reflecting on what has changed for social work practitioners and why it has changed, he draws on work in several disciplines from political philosophy and politics through to sociology and social policy and on his own impressive bibliography. Crucially for the books arguments, he consistently illustrates the practical meaning of these changes by detailed and convincing case studies and examples from practice.