Family Centres and their International Role in Social Action

Social Work as Informal Education

Chris Warren-Adamson

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2017
• Print ISBN:
  9781138702592
• eBook ISBN:
  9781351806930
• Topic: Social Sciences
• Subtopic: Social Work
• Index: Social Sciences

This title was first published in 2001: Family centre practice is one of the success stories of the past twenty years. As well as contributing creative ideas to centre practice this important edited collection highlights the role of practitioners as developmental or informal educationalists. International contributors challenge care management in child protection as the dominant discourse in child care social work and instead advance integrated practice in the internationally developing role of family centres as a more authentic and hopeful practice for children and families. The contributors outline ways of avoiding reductionism - social work reduced to a protective and assessment role - and show how socially inclusive practice can be sustained with very marginalized families. The book argues that there is a need for the social work training curriculum to emphasize social work's debt to social and informal education, and concludes with a call for an international forum of family centre practice.

1 Introduction: Family Centres, Integrating Practice, and Empowerment Journeys

CHRIS WARREN-ADAMSON

This book identifies a rich vein of (family) centred practice which it is hoped will provide inspiration and ideas for those who work and participate in centres, and for those who are responsible for them. A crisis in British social work with children and families is also recognised and such centres are offered as an authentic alternative to such practice. A conclusion of the book is that the practice shown in the centres – social work as education – best fits the ecological paradigm for an understanding of human behaviour. The book concludes with a call for an international forum of (family) centres.

In this introduction the crisis will be explained, then the theory and potential of family centred practice is discussed, followed by a brief summary of the practice to look out for in the chapters of the book.

Chapters vary in simplicity and complexity and in structure; as do centres. This text will use the words family centre despite the difficulties it imposes. Family centres are resource centres and our concern is centre-based practice (as opposed to fieldwork); it is about parents and children and families broadly defined; and there are cross-overs with settlements, social action centres, community education centres, community mental health centres, and so on.

A Crisis for Practice

In the UK, the sigh of relief by public sector workers, and teachers and social workers in particular, at the arrival of New Labour in 1997, is short-lived. Ministers appear to mirror the attitude of their predecessors. In the struggle between ministries over the terrain of child welfare, the Home Office and the Department for Education and Employment appear to have taken off with universalism, development and prevention. The Department of Health (the traditional guardian of social work) is left with a pre-occupation with targeting children who need protecting and looking after.

Social work with children and their families in many parts of Britain is greatly troubled, and there is much concern about its ability to balance intervention in protecting, supporting and promoting families (Parton, 1997, Parton & O’Byrne, 2001). What has happened is that social work in this context has become reduced to and equated with an administrative set of knowledge and skills concerned with policing abusive families. This has become the dominant discourse; practice appears to have become preoccupied with procedure and the achievement of assessment, not as a process, but as a short-term product. Moreover, many newly qualified social workers see qualification as escape from institutional practice and make case-management their first post-qualifying step.

Family Centres Endangered

In Britain, family centres – one of the major successful¹ developments in child care social work of the last twenty years – are endangered by a New Labour Government and its policy towards child protection and family support. The thrust of Government policy and its practical implications appear as follows. First, reduce the role of local authority social services departments in childcare to two main activities, a) policing families in matters of child protection and youth crime, b) looking after children under the Children Act, 1989. Second, transfer the exercise of the local authority’s wider duties to support families under part 3 and schedule 2 of the same legislation to the plethora of partnership arrangements initiated by New Labour.

Family centres in England and Wales are endangered because – in the light of the above changes – the majority of family centres are paid for, directly or indirectly, by local authority social services departments. Departments, reduced in focus, are squeezed financially as monies are transferred to other preventive programmes. As social service departments define their ‘core business’ in the narrow sense of protection and the ‘looked after child’, family centres are in increasing danger of being reduced themselves to a narrow assessment and policing role, or of being cut.

Managing the Paradox

There is a paradox here. Throughout the nineties, the Department of Health has expressed its concern about the reductionism of local authorities to a narrow protection role. It has urged concurrent thinking and practice in protection and support, culminating in a document published by the Department of Health, the Department for Education and Employment, and the Home Office, entitled ‘Framework for the Assessment of Children in Need and their Families’ (DH 2000). The document is underpinned by an ecological perspective of human behaviour and which implies a highly professional concurrent set of tasks for professional social work practitioners.

However, despite our ambitions for a positive local authority fieldwork practice, the conclusion is that such practice has been overcome by just too many difficulties: a) area team social workers are ham-strung by the case-management model, b) being beleaguered has become a key characteristic of the identity of the practitioner of the local state, c) ‘splitting’ is rife – good voluntary and private services, bad state services (on ‘splitting’, see Stewart, 1992: 258), d) there is a constant drain in capacity and experience, and staff take flight frequently, often to the temporary new Government initiatives, e) the practice world has little capacity to train its new practitioners; f) social work is tied to a dyadic, individulalised approach to practice.

Getting Beyond the Dyadic and Thinking Collectively

The individualised, private approach referred to above has had plenty of critics (Whittaker & Garbarino, 1983, Smale, 1995). How might a more collective approach take place? There are after all many examples:

• Patch – the organisation of services around a patch, locality, neighbourhood, retains an occasional profile in the UK national scene. (Hadley & McGrath, 1980; Smale, 1995), and in the US (Adams & Nelson, 1995; Zalenski & Bums, this text), and in France (Freynet, 1995; Cannan, 1997).

• Community Social Work – Holman (1983) inspired us with his accounts of skill and stories of resourcefulness in this approach to neighbourhood social work.

• Family Work/Therapy – an early perspective was represented by Manor, (1984), Hoffman (1981), and many others, seeking to achieve ‘first and second order change’ (Watzlawick et al., 1979). More recent perspectives draw on Faucoult (White & Epstein, 1990).

• However, in the idea of Network Therapy (Carpenter & Treacher 1983), Treacher rebuked his family therapy colleagues for not pursuing the implication of their own enthusiastic adoption of a systems approach by reducing their practice to what Imber-Black called ‘treating family therapy as an intra-family event’. Treacher recommended that, in the case of some families, there was a case to ‘treat the whole street’. Imber-Black (1988) applied systems thinking to the world between agencies. Her Families and Wider Systems amounts to a handbook for those who need to unravel the messes between systems, often where several agencies, mis-communicating at every level, often mirror the chaos in the ‘client system’.

• Connected to the above, Dimmock and Dungworth (1985) advocated the use of Network Meetings, using wider family therapy techniques in assessment and decision-making in ‘statutory child care cases’.

• Family Networking – as early as the early seventies, Speck and Attneave (1973) in the USA were reporting on an approach to problem solving where meetings were held with large family and social support networks. The approach reads as a precursor to;

• The Family Group Conference (FGC) – The New Zealanders developed the FGC; there is now global interest and experimentation. Sensitive to the extended family networks and collective problem solving of the indigenous population and the plethora of island communities under New Zealand sovereignty, the New Zealand government enshrined a duty to employ the group conference in protection procedures (Connelly, 1994; Whiffen & Morris, 1997). Subsequently the group conference has been used internationally in general problem solving (not just high tariff abuse contexts) and the New Zealanders themselves are now extending its use to youth offending.

• Neighbourhood Work – Community work claimed a multi-layered terrain for itself in planning, inter-agency work, and the neighbourhood. In identifying the ‘Skills of Neighbourhood Work’, Henderson & Thomas (1987) made a claim for the neighbourhood as a distinctive site for action, and saw it as enduringly relevant despite a more mobile society (repeated in France – see Bourget-Daitch & Warren, 1997). Attempts have been made to add the protective agenda of social work to neighbourhood development (Baldwin & Carruthers, 1998; Annie E. Casey Foundation, 2000; Fletcher, this text). The challenge is to connect the above with other powerful ideas on neighbourhood development, for example, welfare modernising perspectives (Atkinson 2000) and eco-neighbourhoods (Barton 2000).

• Social Group-Work – is taught variously in British training courses but it is not underpinning.² Students find the world of largely individual work in practice placements to be a barren landscape when it comes to practising their group work skills. An exception is the local resource centre (family centre) where certain strands of group process are practised, from support and therapy to, for example, the informal or adult education model (Jeffs & Smith, 1990), feminist group-work (Howe, 1987: 121–133), and self-directed groupwork (Mullender & Ward, 1991).

• Social Support Networks – Whittaker (1983), drawing on the correlation between poor support networks and abusive behaviour, poor health and crime, made a powerful case for the development of informal support networks as a key feature of social work practice. This is now a part of the discourse of practice and particularly assessment (DH op. cit.) but despite available materials (Lovell, Reid, & Richey, 1992; Rickard, 1998) workers are still more inclined to report on the lack of networks than on their own success in constructing them.

Centres as Sites for a Collective Future

Few of these approaches have become identified as mainstream practice – the exception being (intra) family therapy although it tends to be associated with medical or quasi-medical settings. For most of the above, it is hard to see appropriate sites for their sustained development. Until, that is, the emergence of the family centre. Perhaps the most promising initiative for a creative and true social work practice is sited in family centres, especially those which have been termed ‘integrated centres’. This is not a new concept (Gill, 1988; Stones, this text). In a six centre action research study (Warren-Adamson, 2000) the integrated centre was accounted for as follows: function, method, focus, and the empowerment journey.

Function and the Integrated Centre

The containment function – this explains the centre’s capacity over time to parent, to contain, weather, absorb, and accept, and help to change troubling and challenging behaviour. This is a distinctive feature of social welfare. It is what social work should do. The concept of containment is taken from Bion and the idea of the parent as container of the projective force of the infant (see Shuttleworth, 1991, also Winnicott, 1990, for a similar concept of ‘holding’). Connected to this is Howe and Hining’s (1995) criticism of contemporary child and family work and legislation where, they argue, an assumption only of rational action in users – partnership, partnership – means that when users behave irrationally we appear not to have the tools and often we act with hostility, unjustly, and reject. Not so centres, which seem better placed to look both ways (see also Irvine, 1956, Menzies Lyth, 1989).

The casework decision-making function – this explains the centre’s capacity to help families make decisions and participate in decision-making, and also it explains the centre’s capacity to contribute data about families to help others make decisions (particularly the judicial and protection process). This also is distinctively the domain of social work.

The resource centre function – explains partly the centre’s capacity to lay on a range of opportunities for families, accounting for diversity of need, and partly the capacity of centres to transform in the light of need. It is the development role of centres – spawning, nurturing, developing, moving on groups, moving from an emphasis on people’s expressive needs to their instrumental needs and goals. This is a broader domain of social groupwork, informal education and community development. And it connects to:

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Table of contents

• Cover
• Half Title
• Title Page
• Copyright Page
• Table of Contents
• Acknowledgements
• List of Contributors
• Foreword
• 1 Introduction: Family Centres, Integrating Practice, and Empowerment Journeys
• 2 The Family Centre and the Consolidation of Integrated Practice
• 3 What’s Happening in France? The Settlement and Social Action Centre: Exchange as Empowerment
• 4 Education and Empowerment in Family Centres
• 5 Francophone Centres in Québec, Canada – Two Case Studies
• 6 The Referral Only Centre – Managing Changing Attitudes to Parenting
• 7 The Office as Centre: A ‘Patch’ Approach, Supporting and Protecting in two Massachusetts Communities
• 8 Justice, Child Protection and Family Centres – Part 1 (Inside)
• 9 Justice, Child Protection and Family Centres – Part 2 (Outside)
• 10 Aotearoa/New Zealand – Family Centred Practice from a Mental Health Perspective
• 11 Aotearoa/New Zealand – Working Differently with Communities and Families
• 12 Contemporary Debates in Centre Practice in Youth Justice and Community Development
• 13 User Participation in Family Centres in Greece Vasso Gabrilidou, Elpida Ioannidou and
• 14 Make Your Experience Count: Social Work as Informal Education
• 15 The Neighbourhood Centre as a Base for Social Action and Life-Long Learning
• 16 Conclusion – Lessons from Family Centres: the Authentic Site for Ecological Practice