The Short Guide to Social Work

Adams, Robert, Robert Adams

• Publisher: Policy Press
• Year: 2010
• Print ISBN: 9781847422873
• eBook ISBN: 9781447308553
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Social Sciences
• Subtopic: Social Work
• Index: Social Sciences

This engaging and accessible text offers a concise overview of social work which will appeal to anyone needing a quick introduction to social work as a discipline. It contains essential information for all prospective and new social work students, the theories and policy and practice frameworks as well as current issues facing social work today. Illustrated with many examples from practice, it covers social work with many service user groups including children and families, adults, older people, disabled people and people with mental health problems as well as specialist areas of practice.

Part 1: Preparing for social work

Chapter 1: Introducing social work

Introduction

This chapter defines social work and puts it in its historical and social context. It then illustrates its key features, indicates how it meets people’s needs and concludes by identifying what social workers do in practice.

What is social work?

Social work is a modern profession which forms part of a broad span of social care activities carried out by a huge workforce in the health and social care services. The repeated use of the word ‘social’ in this sentence indicates the need to clarify the meanings of these different ‘socials’.

Wide array of social care services

Social security is the term often used to refer to the various monetary welfare benefits available for people, either universally as with retirement pensions, or means-tested as with ‘meals on wheels’ (meals brought to people’s homes). Social care is the generic term used to refer to the personal social services provided directly or indirectly by local authorities (in the sense that alongside services directly provided, many services are indirectly provided, that is, commissioned by local authorities from private, voluntary and independent providers). Social services include a huge array of child and adult social care services for the person and for the carer, provided in the person’s own home, through day services or in residential or nursing homes (see Table 1.1 for the main ones).

The precise size of the social care workforce is unknown but an authoritative estimate (Eborall, 2005, pp 1-2) gives the total as 922,000 people, 1.6 million if extra support staff in education and health services are included, 61% of whom are working with older people, 19% with disabled adults, 13% with children and 7% with people with mental ill health.

Table 1.1: Main adult social care services

Type of service	What it entails
Children and families	Social work services for families Family support Safeguarding children Under-fives services Childcare ‘Looked-after’ children, adoption, fostering Specialist services for children Disabled children Children with special educational needs (SEN) Youth services
Vulnerable adults	Services to protect adults at risk of, or experiencing, abuse
Hearing impairment and deafness	Services provided within the National Audiology Framework
Blindness and visual impairment	Services for partially sighted and blind people
Disability	Services for disabled people
Autism	Services for people with autistic spectrum disorder
Learning disabilities	Services for learning disabled people
Advocacy	A range of advocates for people and services to enable them to self-advocate
Mental health	Services for people with mental health problems
Mental capacity	Services under the 2005 Mental Capacity Act , to safeguard the rights of people who lack capacity
Housing	A range of housing provision to meet people’s needs

This total is less than 10% of the healthcare workforce, which increased from 1,071,562 (including 701,324 qualified clinical staff) in 1998 to 1,368,693 (including 529,731 qualified clinical staff) in 2008 (see NHS Staff 1998-2008 Master Table, www.ic.nhs.uk/statistics-and-data-collections/workforce/nhs-staff-numbers/nhs-staff-1998--2008-overview).

Nature of social work

Social work is a single profession, but under this general heading a great variety of practice exists. Cree (2003, p 3) acknowledges that it is not possible to make a simple statement about what social work means to all practitioners, clients and people who use services. Within the UK, there are different emphases between practitioners, within different geographical areas – urban and rural, well-off and less well-off, industrial and non-industrialised – and between the approaches favoured by different practitioners. Social workers with UK qualifications and registration by the professional bodies of the four different countries of the UK (General Social Care Council [GSCC] [England], Northern Ireland Social Care Council [NISCC], Scottish Social Services Council [SSSC] and Care Council for Wales [CCW]) are recognised increasingly in different countries.

Social work has different international identities in different continents and countries. Nevertheless, social work academics and practitioners recognise the advantages of developing a global presence for the range of practices under the general umbrella of ‘social work’. Accordingly, the International Federation of Social Workers (IFSW) and the International Association of Schools of Social Work (IASSW) jointly define social work as follows:

The social work profession promotes social change, problem solving in human relationships and the empowerment and liberation of people to enhance well-being. Utilising theories of human behaviour and social systems, social work intervenes at the points where people interact with their environments. Principles of human rights and social justice are fundamental to social work. (IFSW, 2000)

Social work is very much about bringing about change in people’s lives as individuals, in families and in communities. It has the capacity to bring about social change as well, through enabling policy makers and politicians to reframe personal and social problems. As governments in many countries recognise the complexity of problems encountered by people, individually, in families, in social groups and in the community, social work as a profession is developing in order to tackle these problems. It is important to understand that in the UK, as in many other parts of the world, social work originates in the growing understanding that much can be done to help vulnerable individuals and families to cope with the more demanding and complex problems of living, between one extreme of expecting them to help themselves (traditional self-help) and the other extreme of shutting them away in institutions (orphanages, children’s homes, institutions for people with physical impairments or learning disabilities, mental hospitals, old people’s homes and so on).

How did social work originate?

From the late 18th century, in the US and western European countries including the UK, there was a general move towards confining poor, disabled, mentally ill and criminal people in institutions, sometimes for many years, or even the rest of their natural lives. Between the late 18th and early 19th centuries, criminals were increasingly executed or transported to penal colonies in Australia.

Many of the activities associated with modern social work in the UK can be traced back to somewhat more philanthropic initiatives in the second half of the 19th century. The foundations of social work recognisable in the 20th century lie in the model of individual casework developed by the Society for Organising Charitable Relief and Repressing Mendicity (that is, begging), generally known as the Charity Organisation Society (COS), founded in London in 1869, whose members were usually women in the respectable middle classes (Stedman Jones, 1971, p 256), who aimed to encourage self-help and inculcate God-fearing respectability among families who had fallen on hard times. The COS caseworkers did not waste their efforts on those considered to have sunk so far into pauperism or depravity that they were incapable of helping themselves. Like the guardians of the 1834 Poor Law Amendment Act, they drew a sharp distinction between those considered ‘deserving’ and ‘undeserving’. They rewarded and reinforced the Victorian values of hard work, self-help, respectability and thrift.

More broadly, the different components of modern social work can be traced to a number of diverse and sometimes interconnecting historical movements and traditions. Entire books...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Title Page
• Copyright
• Contents
• List of tables and figures
• List of abbreviations
• A note on the terms used in this book
• Introduction
• Part 1: Preparing for social work
• Part 2: Practising social work
• Postscript
• References and further reading
• Appendix: Information about post-qualifying programme structures