Social Work and Social Policy

An Introduction

Jonathan Dickens

• Publisher: Taylor & Francis
• Year: 2016
• Print ISBN: 9781138017566
• eBook ISBN: 9781317702399
• Edition: 2
• Topic: Medizin
• Subtopic: Sozialarbeit

An understanding of social policy is vital for engaging practically with social work values, and dealing with political and ethical questions about responsibility, rights and our understanding of 'the good society'. This textbook provides a comprehensive introduction to social policy, tailored to the needs of a social work audience.

The new edition of this popular and accessible text analyses current policies and policy themes relevant to social work, and locates them in the context of fundamental social policy principles and debates. It discusses the nature of social policy and its relationship to social work, and covers essential themes such as:

• service user participation and involvement
• the balance between individual, societal and state responsibility for people's wellbeing
• the interactions of the state, the private sector, voluntary organisations and the family
• the relationships between needs, rights and choices
• the purposes and challenges of professional social work
• the meanings of 'equality', 'prevention' and 'personalisation'

Each chapter ends with activities for reflection and analysis, and suggestions for further reading. Social Work and Social Policy is invaluable for students undertaking social work qualifying courses, all of whom are required to demonstrate an understanding of the social policy contexts of practice.

Part 1 Core models

Overview

The chapters in this part of the book introduce three core models for making sense of social work in its broader context of social policies, other social services and social values.

Chapter 1 raises crucial questions about social work what is it for, who is it for, what is its role in society? It explores these questions by giving an account of four periods when others have tried to answer them – 1920, 1968, 1982 and the first decade of the twenty-first century. The history shows that social work’s role and tasks are complex, ambiguous and demanding, and the chapter goes on to describe how ‘models’ can be useful in such circumstances. They pull out the key features of a situation, bringing a sense of perspective and order to the uncertainties and contradictions. It then outlines the first model, the social work diamond, which locates social work in the middle of competing responsibilities to the state, service users, professional values and organisational imperatives.

Chapter 2 takes a look at the broader social policy context. It introduces the second model, the social policy triangle, to illustrate the three interweaving objectives of social policy in western countries – to secure people’s well-being, to promote individual responsibility and to facilitate the smooth working of the market economy. It also gives an overview of the range of social services that social policy covers, highlighting their links with social work.

Chapter 3 gives the third model, four perspectives on the role of the state in ensuring people’s well-being in capitalist societies. The chapter describes the main features of the minimalist, integrationist, social democratic and radical approaches, and draws out their implications for social work. It discusses the contribution of radical social work. The chapter emphasises that there are complex mixtures of all four approaches in welfare policies and individuals’ beliefs. It illustrates this ambiguity with reference to two important policies for social work – community care and personalisation.

1 What is social work for?

DOI: 10.4324/9781315780405-2

What is social work for, and who is social work for? Different people will give different answers to these questions, but it is impossible to answer them fully without referring to social work’s broader context of social values, social policies and other welfare services. Discussions about the role, or roles, of social work are not new, of course, and are reflected in government policy documents, professional literature, the views of service user groups and in the policies of organisations that employ social workers – to mention just four major sources of ideas. They are also reflected in media coverage about social work, and in debates with other professionals about who should be doing what and how. The differences of opinion are often at the root of disagreements with people who receive social work services, perhaps without wanting to, or those who wish to receive them but do not.

The aim of this book is to highlight some of the fundamental debates about social work and social policy, exploring the links between them and the implications that they have for one another. The focus is on social work in the UK, and more specifically England. There are differences in legislation, policies and organisational structures between the four countries of the UK, increasingly so as devolution progresses. However, the underlying issues and dilemmas are similar, as for all western countries with democratic political systems and developed economies. Even where the detail is specifically English, it should still spark ideas about parallels, or contrasts, in readers’ own countries.

Social workers are often called upon to deal with the most complex and demanding situations: what sort of people are fit to look after children? What duties do adult children owe to their aged parents? If they can’t, or won’t, fulfil them, what responsibility does the state have? Who should pay? What rights do individuals have to live their lives as they see fit, if that jeopardises the health or well-being of others? What about their own health and well-being? These are questions that philosophers and politicians have debated for centuries, and social workers make decisions about them every day (Reamer, 1993; Dingwall et al., 1995). These decisions are often extremely difficult, and the difficulty reflects the tensions between important social values – tensions between choice and safety; liberty and equality; individual responsibility and society’s responsibilities; state help and state control.

Social workers make these difficult decisions in a context shaped by legislation, government guidelines, organisational priorities and resource availability. In their daily practice, social workers are more likely to be mindful of meeting legal requirements, following procedures, hitting deadlines, returning telephone calls and e-mails, and balancing budgets, rather than overarching principles like ‘liberty’ or ‘equality’. Yet behind the tasks of practice, and behind policy initiatives such as personalisation or greater integration of services, at the centre of social work, lie those fundamental social principles, with all the tensions, ambiguities and dilemmas that they generate. That is why this book emphasises the importance of understanding social work practice and decision-making in terms of long-standing social values as well as current social policy trends.

Who is social work for?

One of the debates about ‘who is social work for?’ is whether it should focus on the most vulnerable people in society, the ‘at risk’ cases with the highest levels of need, or whether it should play a greater role with a wider group of people, where need is less urgent, and earlier intervention might prevent later problems. This may mean preventive work with individuals and families, or with groups and communities. But there is a further dimension to it, which is that social work also serves a wider function for society as a whole – for the many, not just the few who receive (or might receive) services. There are two angles to this further dimension: one that sees it as beneficent (everyone benefits from an orderly society in which social problems are minimised and dealt with early on), and the other that sees it as controlling (social work as a subtle – or sometimes not so subtle – way of monitoring people who might cause problems, keeping them in order, so that the rest of society can have a trouble-free life).

These questions and debates apply as much to social policy generally as to social work in particular, and we shall return to them throughout the book: whether the focus should be on the very needy or the not-quite-so-needy, and the wider impact on society as a whole. The issues come up especially when we look more closely at social policy (Chapter 2), the role of the state (Chapter 3), models of need (Chapter 4) and prevention (Chapter 9). For now, we explore the significance of these questions by looking at debates about the roles and tasks of social work in the past. This shows us how the same questions come round again and again.

To illustrate this, we look at four key stages for social work in England: 1920, the era before the welfare state, when Clement Attlee wrote his book The Social Worker; the Seebohm report of 1968, that saw an important role for social work as part of the post-World War II welfare state; the Barclay report of 1982, holding on to that vision even as the post-war welfare consensus was unravelling; and recent debates across the UK about the roles and tasks of social work in our modern era. Even if some of the language has changed, the older reports are shaped by the same issues of how to make services effective, relevant and responsive, how to encourage participation by the people who use them, and how to balance rights and responsibilities, risks and resources.

1920: Clement Attlee and ‘the social service idea’

Clement Attlee is most famous for leading the Labour Party to an overwhelming election victory in July 1945, and being prime minister of the 1945–51 Labour government that created the welfare state (see Box 2.4). The notable achievements were the creation of the National Health Service in 1948, and the passing of the National Assistance Act, also in 1948, which made it a responsibility of national government, rather than local authorities, to ensure that everyone had enough money to live on, finally bringing the Poor Law to an end (see Box 2.3). But Attlee had a long and successful career in national and local politics before then – he had been deputy prime minister throughout the war, leader of the Labour Party since 1935, and an MP since 1922. And before all that, he had been a social worker and social work lecturer, and had even written a book about social work.

Clement Attlee was born in 1883, into a prosperous family in Putney, London (there are numerous biographies, including Howell, 2006, and Beckett, 1997; and Attlee’s autobiography, 1954). It was a large, traditional Victorian family, with an ethic of doing good and strong Christian beliefs, although Attlee himself later gave up Christianity. Attlee was educated at Haileybury College, a leading public school (note: ‘public’ here means fee-paying and exclusive) and then at Oxford University. After graduating he trained as a lawyer, but his heart was not in that work, and one evening in 1905 he and his brother visited Haileybury House, a boys’ club in Stepney, set up and paid for by donations from former pupils of his old school. This was to be one of the decisive events of his life. He started volunteering at the club, and although he was a quiet person, he began to enjoy the company of the boys and young men and took on more and more responsibilities in running the club. Within two years he had become the manager, and moved to live in a small house beside it. Nowadays in England we might call him a youth worker, but with a wider conceptualisation of social work, Attlee was a social worker.

During those two years, his old attitudes about poverty and society changed completely. When he first went to the Haileybury club, he shared the traditional beliefs of his social class, that individuals were responsible for their own poverty and misfortune, and needed to work harder and lead more responsible lives to overcome them. But now, in the East End of London, as he got to know the boys and their families, his understanding of their lives deepened and his attitudes began to change. He began to realise that in order to understand why people behave the way they do, and how best to help them, one has to look behind individual behaviour, to see the social context. He gives some personal and moving examples of this in his book; for example, the young men might turn up late to play football, but rather than blame them he came to see that this was because of the long distance from their homes to the playing fields, the poor public transport, and the pressures they were under to work long into the evenings. By late 1907 he was describing himself as a socialist, and joined the Independent Labour Party.

The work at the club was in the evenings, and in 1912 Attlee got a day job as a tutor and lecturer in social service at the London School of Economics. He left the job when he joined the army in 1914, but returned to it after the war. In 1920 he wrote The Social Worker.

It is an intriguing and inspiring book to read because it gives a picture of social work in its early days, and at an important transitional time for social policy. Many services were provided by charities, but government was beginning to take a more active role in people’s welfare (for example, the first state old age pensions were introduced in 1909). Attlee’s vision of what social work should be like and how it should be done, reflects the struggles of this relatively new profession to decide its purposes and skills, in the context of the debates of the time about the proper roles of the state, the individual and the family, and the charity sector. Attlee argued passionately that social work should be driven by the ideas of citizenship and social justice, not charity.

Atlee had started as a volunteer himself, so he was not opposed to all forms of charity or voluntary activity, but he was very mistrustful of the way that charity could all too easily become patronising and self-serving:

Charity is always apt to be accompanied by a certain complacence and condescension on the part of the benefactor, and by an expectation of gratitude from the recipient which cuts at the root of all true friendliness … The evil of charity is that it tends to make the charitable think that he has done his duty by giving away some trifling sum, his conscience is put to sleep, and he takes no trouble to consider the social problem any further … Very many do not realise that you must be just before you are generous.

(Attlee, 1920: 9, 58)

Instead, Attlee proposed ‘the social service idea’, in which all men and women are treated as citizens, and the aim is not benevolence but social justice. Attlee writes ‘The rise of democracy has changed the outlook of the social worker: formerly social work was done for now with the working classes’ (1920: 19, italics original). He considers that social workers should be reformers, researchers and agitators, but above all they must have the right attitude – no superiority, but sympathy and patience based on understanding the lives of the people with whom they are working.

1968: the Seebohm report

The 1960s were a period of rapid social change, and in many ways an optimistic time for social work and social policy. The Report of the Committee on Local Authority and Allied Personal Social Services in 1968 is a high point of this era. It is known as the Seebohm report, after Frederic Seebohm who chaired the committee. At the time, local authority social work was split across three main departments, for children, health and welfare.

Seebohm argued that each department tended to focus on its own responsibilities, failing to recognise the full needs of the people using them – an analysis that is still echoed today in calls for organisational reforms to ensure better inter-agency and inter-disciplinary working (Dickens, 2011). The report called for social work services to be brought together into unified ‘social service departments’, in which social workers would be the lead profession. (Scotland was ahead of the game with the Kilbrandon report (1964) which led eventually to the creation of social work departments under the Social Work (Scotland) Act 1968.)

The Seebohm report led to the Local Authority Social Services Act 1970, and the creation of social services departments in England and Wales in 1971. It is notable, though, that the report itself did not use the term ‘social services’. It used Attlee’s old term, ‘social service’, to emphasise that the new departments were not just to be about providing services to the neediest, but a way for all citizens to give and receive help. Its vision of the new departments is expressed in inspiring, universalist terms, looking to the wider benefits for society as a whole, not just the most needy:

We recommend a new local authority de...

Table of contents

• Cover Page
• Half Title Page
• Other Title
• Title Page
• Copyright Page
• Table of Contents
• List of figures, tables and boxes
• Acknowledgements
• Introduction
• Part 1: Core models
• Part 2: Key issues
• Part 3: Current topics
• Conclusion: between the middle and the margins
• References
• Index