The Task-Centred Book

Peter Marsh, Mark Doel

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2005
• eBook ISBN: 9781134313426
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Medicine
• Subtopic: Health Care Delivery

Task centred social work is one of the best known and most strongly supported approaches to social work practice. This text is a radical departure from traditional literature on social work methods. The main reference point is the voice of practitioners, service users and carers, as researched and developed by the authors over twenty years. Case studies are used throughout the book to build on the experiences of practitioners and the people with whom they have worked, demonstrating practical skills for:

• study and analysis
• teaching and learning
• practicing task-centred social work
• review and continuing development.

The Task-Centred Book is a core text for both undergraduate social work courses and continuing professional development training, as well as being a practical book for the active professional which will support the development and implementation of task-centred practice.

CHAPTER 1
DEVELOPMENT

OBJECTIVES

By the end of this chapter you should:

Recognise the complex translation of ideas into action in social work practice

Be able to outline underpinning elements of task-centred practice

Know about the early development and general outline of task-centred practice

Understand why task-centred practice is an ‘innovation’ in practice

See the challenges and opportunities for the development of task-centred work.

DEVELOPMENT: THE ORIGINS AND BACKGROUND OF TASK-CENTRED PRACTICE

Developing social work practice is a complex and challenging activity. That will be a consistent theme of this book, and this first chapter not only lays much of the groundwork as to why it is complex and challenging, but also describes some key elements that need to be present for the sound development of practice. The importance of service users’ and carers’ views, the role of science and evidence, and the need to take full account of the diversity of people’s lives are all covered here. The origins and basic outline of task-centred practice are presented, together with the ways that this model may be developed, with the challenges and opportunities that are offered to such a development.

WHY STUDY PRACTICE?

Under the general heading ‘social work is work with people: it’s that simple and that complicated’, the UK government explains what social work is, for those thinking of it as a career, as follows:

Social work is all about people. Social workers form relationships with people. As adviser, advocate, counsellor or listener, a social worker helps people to live more successfully within their local communities by helping them find solutions to their problems. Social work also involves engaging with not only clients themselves but their families and friends as well, as well as working closely with other organisations including the police, NHS, schools and probation service.

(Department of Health 2004)

This range of activities clearly needs some underpinning knowledge, for example the law, policies and regulations, psychology and sociology. But the ‘application’ of these areas of knowledge, and the ‘practical’ activity of working with the people involved, and planning and helping with their care and protection, may be thought of, by many, as strongly related to common sense. No doubt in discussions and in arguments, within a family or between friends in a pub, there are views being put forward about the right way to advise people or to ‘live more successfully’. Sometimes these discussions might acknowledge the need for some particular information, for example about the law, but they are not likely to stress the need for a study of ‘application’ or ‘practice’ for these sorts of activities. The suggestion that learning easily converts into doing may be right in some areas, but definitely not in social work. The conversion process is complex. It’s about the law, it’s about the people, and it’s about the ‘stuck’ situations that are often brought to social workers.

First, the legal issues are far from straightforward in ‘application’. There are issues of power and control, for example, where social workers have to present to service users the legal case for requiring them to do or not do certain things. How do you put this in the way that is likely to be most effective? How can you do it and still allow people choice in areas that are not part of the requirements? How can you do it and still work with people to encourage them to do other things, for example to write to their child in care even if they cannot see their child? These may appear to have common-sense answers, but there are as many common-sense answers as there are people discussing them.

Second, social workers need to see the service user’s point of view, and they often need to see many service users’ points of view. These views are central: they should drive the actions that are not legally required. For many decades social work has been developing a ‘partnership’ approach to practice which bases work, as far as possible, on views, wishes and experiences of service users (Marsh and Fisher 1992), and this is now clearly outlined in the statement of ethics or professional code for registered social workers in the UK (General Social Care Council 2002: see Box 2.1). However, working to this principle is not easy. Individual views about care and protection are often strongly held. Within families or groups it is all too common for blame to be allocated and entrenched patterns of misunderstanding to set in. In short there is very likely to be some element of conflict in these views. This conflict will be expressed in the context of the individual’s language, religion, ‘race’ and culture (as the law concerning children in England and Wales puts it (Children Act 1989 s.24). Conflict and multifaceted personal culture make the understanding of views notably complex.

Third, the situations that social workers often work in are usually complex. The situations have usually reached some sort of crisis, or some form of impasse. People are ‘stuck’, without knowledge of the right actions to take, or without the ability or willingness to act on the knowledge they do have. People do not generally come to social workers with simple problems; they solve those elsewhere. So the issues already mentioned of power and understanding are likely to be taking place in situations that are far from ordinary. Practice in social work is rarely located in ordinary circumstances; these circumstances are nearly always unusual and difficult, probably best described as extra-ordinary. Applying knowledge and listening to service users is substantially more challenging in such circumstances.

Applying the knowledge of child or adult psychology, or the law, or a policy, is not easy. ‘Practice’ is an important area of study in social work. A social worker is not just a ‘lawyer-lite’ or a ‘psychologist-lite’ professional. Social workers need professional practice knowledge and skills of their own, not least to apply the underpinning subject knowledge, some of which will be shared with other professions.

The history of social work has reflected this need, and numerous approaches to practice have been put forward. This book is concerned with one of those approaches: task-centred practice. It will be our argument in these pages that this approach has many reasons to commend it, not least that it directly addresses the three issues outlined above: it is directly concerned with power and compulsion, the need for understanding others, and the need to reduce the complexity of social problems to manageable proportions.

THE BUILDING BLOCKS OF TASK-CENTRED PRACTICE

How then has task-centred practice been built? It has rested on three main pillars: research, service user views and wishes, and practitioner experience.

Practice-based research into effective ways of carrying out the activities needed in social work (with all of the complexities outlined above) has underpinned its development. Studies have researched analysis, planning, doing, and reviewing, and built one on another into a substantial body of work.

The second pillar is the accumulated experience of practitioners, sometimes expressed through research, but often based on practice wisdom because of the possibilities that task-centred work offers for a continuing development of practice through practice, a point we will return to later.

The third pillar is that provided by the views and wishes of service users and carers, sometimes expressed via organised processes, such as advocacy groups, sometimes again expressed within research, but more often directly embodied in the practice itself. The view of the service user and carer is at the centre of task-centred practice.

Knowledge-based practice

This tripartite formulation of knowledge has been well expressed by Janet Lewis (2001), who was for many years the research director of the Joseph Rowntree Trust research foundation, which sought to combine research, service user and carer views, and practitioner experience in generating applied knowledge for practice. She entered the complex debates about evidence-based practice (Trinder 2000), where this tripartite base has been expressed in a number of different ways, and suggested a pair of memorable equations. Her formulation was that research could be used as evidence once there had been satisfactory interpretation of the findings. This process of translation needed to be undertaken to convert the raw outcomes of a study into recommendations for action, and it formed the first equation. This evidence then joined the experience of practitioners and the views and wishes of service users and carers in forming the knowledge for practice, and the second equation. These two equations are in Box 1.1, and we will return to the second one in particular a number of times throughout the book.

BOX 1.1: KNOWLEDGE FOR PRACTICE

Evidence=Research ‘findings’+interpretation of the findings Knowledge=Evidence+practice wisdom+service user and carer experience and wishes

Lewis’s neat formulation is a good basis for a profession based on putting the views and wishes of service users and carers at its centre, while coupling this with research and with practice experience. It suggests that ideally practitioners could outline the contribution of each of the three elements within the particular knowledge they were using. An entertaining article has noted that not adhering to this ideal may result in some unfortunate alternative models of practice that have remarkably little content…see Box 1.2 as a cautionary tale!

BOX 1.2: ALTERNATIVES TO EVIDENCE-BASED PRACTICE?

Noting that there are many circumstances when there is little evidence to guide medical practice, a light-hearted article in the British Medical Journal proposed a series of other models which could sometimes be seen in action.

These included

• eminence-based practice—where status counts
• vehemence-based practice—where stridency counts
• eloquence-based practice—where smoothness of tongue counts.
  And, suggested as being available to surgeons only, there was also
• confidence-based practice—based purely on bravado.

(Isaacs and Fitzgerald 1999)

While we argue that task-centred practice is especially well placed to put together these three elements of knowledge in the practice context of social work outlined above, nonetheless we appreciate the problems faced in generating such knowledge.

Research into practice has been far too limited in social work. There needs to be a focus directly on the practice activities of social workers, and how they can best respond to the kind of difficulties outlined above. Task-centred literature provides an impressive body of work on this area, but given the centrality of the issue there is remarkably little else (Smale 1983). In part this is due to an under-investment, in the UK at least, in social work and social care research (Fisher and Marsh 2003). Within this under-investment the lack of practice research is also due to the lack of connection between practitioners and researchers (McCartt Hess and Mullen 1995). The limited amount of social care research has generally concentrated on policy, rather than on practice.

Equally the basis in service user and carer wishes and experiences has been, in part, a rocky road. Social work can be proud that there are numerous examples of the voices of service users and carers within research studies, but other aspects of involvement have been a long and hard struggle (Barnes and Bowl 2001). While task-centred work has these views and wishes at its heart there are often likely to be struggles in getting these voices centre stage in all aspects of service.

The voice of practice, directly from practitioners, has also not been heard as much as it might. Practice-based discussions are not that common in social work, despite the evidence of developmental models such as communities of practice which we cover in Chapter 8. Practitioners have not found it easy to talk about practice, and with the Blackwell Encyclopaedia of Social Work (Davies 2000) listing 106 ‘methods’ (including ‘nothing works’) and 42 ‘theories’, it is not surprising that this has proved difficult.

As we argued in the early 1990s, social workers need a language of practice so that they can

begin to compare notes about what works, when and with whom. They can begin to research their own practice and to involve the users of the social services in this process. Together they can speak with authority about the value of social work.

(Doel and Marsh 1992:x)

It is the strong combination of the voices of service users and carers, practitioners and researchers that makes task-centred work so powerful.

Cultural competence

We noted earlier the complexity of understanding people’s views and wishes when they are mediated through the complexities of language, religion, ‘race’ and culture. Social work has, quite rightly, often paid special attention to these areas, although it has, in common with all other services, also be...

Table of contents

• COVER PAGE
• THE TASK-CENTRED BOOK
• THE SOCIAL WORK SKILLS SERIES
• TITLE PAGE
• COPYRIGHT PAGE
• ACTIVITIES
• BOXES
• ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS
• INTRODUCTION
• CHAPTER 1: DEVELOPMENT
• CHAPTER 2: STUDY
• CHAPTER 3: ANALYSE
• CHAPTER 4: TEACH
• CHAPTER 5: LEARN
• CHAPTER 6: DO
• CHAPTER 7: REVIEW
• CHAPTER 8: SUPPORT
• CHAPTER 9: REDEVELOP
• APPENDIX EXAMPLE ANSWERS TO SELECTED ACTIVITIES IN THE BOOK
• REFERENCES