A CONTEMPORARY HISTORY OF SOCIAL WORK
Learning from the past
Terry Bamford
First published in Great Britain in 2015 by
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Contents
Acknowledgements
Social work has provided me with a rich variety of experiences. Being deloused after a visit from a man of the road in my early days in probation, sharing a boat with social works doyenne Dame Eileen Younghusband in Puerto Rico, being electrified by an address entitled Clients are fellow citizens by a man in a white suit, academic Bill Jordan, at a British Association of Social Workers (BASW) conference, spending 12 hours talking shop with academic and former social worker Professor Ray Jones in Moscow airport, and countless other memories flood in when looking back.
I could not begin to list the many people who have helped to shape my thinking often without them knowing it. I am grateful to all my colleagues in probation, in BASW, in social services departments in the London Borough of Harrow and the Royal Borough of Kensington and Chelsea, and in the Southern Health and Social Services Board in Northern Ireland.They all contributed to what has been a rich experience of social work.
In writing this book, there are some people to whom I owe particular thanks. The staff at the British Library, where much of the book was written, have been unfailingly helpful in tracking down references. Fortunately, the Librarys Newsroom, which offers access to newspapers from the past hundred years, opened too late to distract me from the task, but it is a wonderful resource nonetheless.
Isobel Bainton has been a helpful and supportive editor, responding swiftly to any queries. Jo Morton and her colleagues at Policy Press have helped to produce the book as speedily and efficiently as I could have hoped.
My thinking has been helped by discussions usually over a glass of wine with Marianne Griffiths, John Dixon, Ray Jones and June Thoburn. Richard Hugman, Rhiann Huws Williams, David Jones, Ruth Stark and Anne James have also given me helpful guidance.
SallyTrench has helped me greatly with proofreading and has been an invaluable adviser on style, although I suspect there may be a deficit of commas for her liking. Her interest in the book has been a real help in keeping me to the discipline of writing.
My special thanks go to my family. Andrew has helped with the cover design. Sarah and Rupert have been subjected to testing out my ideas. My wife Margaret has been a patient source of encouragement, gentle criticism and constant support in writing the book. I thank her for that and for so many other things.
Preface
The past is never dead. Its not even past.William Faulkner, Requiem for a Nun, 1951
Writing contemporary history is a risky business. Hindsight may be a great teacher, but, looking back, what seems obvious now was rarely so clear at the time. Anybody purporting to write a history of the past 50 years has immediately to acknowledge that what follows can only be a partial and imperfect summary of the influences that have affected social work.
The reasons for attempting a contemporary history are part personal and part professional. It is personal because the story of the past 50 years is the story of my life in social work. I qualified in 1965 and worked in probation before the Seebohm Committee had been appointed and at a time when social work was fragmented between different occupational settings. It is professional because many of the issues facing social work today are those that have been around for many years.While learning lessons has become a clich of serious case reviews, I believe that we can learn from the mistakes of the past and put into practice some of those lessons. Social work should be playing a leading role in delivering high-quality care and in helping to drive social policy change.Yet the story of the past 50 years is one of its declining influence.
My credentials for writing this book are not those of an academic. Despite having done many things in a social work career, I have never taught social work from an academic base. I did run a student unit and from that came to appreciate the risk of too wide a gap between theory and practice.The challenge of integrating theory and practice makes demands on practice educators whose role is undervalued and underfunded.
Some of the topics discussed in the book the failure of BASW, the growth of managerialism, the regulation of the profession, the challenge of integrating health and social care, and the development of the College of Social Work are those in which I have had some personal involvement. So let me declare my prejudices at the outset so that readers can bear those in mind.
Prejudices
BASW is to borrow from the Conservative politician Rab Butlers famous remark about Harold Macmillan being the best prime minister we have the best professional association weve got. It has faltered along the way, it has taken some wrong directions and at times its leadership has been erratic. But it is the only substantial democratic association in the field of social work and will only be strengthened if social workers join and work to make it better.
Management is necessary in large-scale organisations. Social workers should be naturally good managers with their skills in relationship building and understanding human behaviour. Management tilts into managerialism when it becomes enmeshed in bureaucratic procedures, checklists and processes, and strips out the creativity of good social work.The way in which the employer voice and management voice have become dominant in discussions with government has been to the detriment of social work as a profession.
The demise of the General Social Care Council (GSCC) in 2012 was politically driven.The council gave an identity to social work now lost in its successor, the Health and Care Professions Council.The dismissal of the GSCC chief executive was a tawdry process. The reforms of social work education may provide an opportunity to reinvent a social work-driven regulatory body, which will be even more important if social workers are to become more engaged in social enterprises and small-scale practices.
