Children and Families

Garrett, Paul Michael

• Publisher: Policy Press
• Year: 2013
• ISBN:
  9781447316053
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Social Sciences
• Subtopic: Social Work
• Index: Social Sciences

Recent years have witnessed a number of 'child protection' scandals where children, often from the poorest and most marginalised communities, have been on the receiving end of violence, abuse and social harm. In this short form book, part of the Critical and Radical Debates in Social Work series, Paul Michael Garrett looks at the impact of marketisation of social work services in both Ireland and England. He argues that marketisation has had a negative impact on policy regimes, working conditions, social work practices and on the services for vulnerable children and young people. Leading researchers from across the globe contribute to the debate and provide additional evidence from a range of policy regimes that catalogue the negative impact neoliberalism has had on children's services.

PART ONE

Lead essay

Radical and critical perspectives on social work with children and families: England and the Republic of Ireland

Paul Michael Garrett

England and the Republic of Ireland are bound together historically and in a contemporary sense. Both are currently governed by coalition administrations intent on pursing broadly neoliberal policies. In terms of social work practice, in the Republic, the main legislation relating to social work with children was, until the enactment of the Children Act 2001, the Children Act 1908 placed on the statute book by the former British colonial administration. Today, social work in both England and Ireland is mostly work undertaken by women workers. In the latter jurisdiction, 83.2% of social work posts are filled by women (NSWQB, 2006, p 23). Nevertheless, not surprisingly, there are certain national defining characteristics. That is to say, the difficulties and dilemmas confronting practitioners, social work academics and the users of services are not the same in England and the Republic of Ireland.

This relatively short contribution to the ‘Radical and Critical Perspectives’ series can only begin to identify some of the main emerging issues and themes relating to social work with children and families.1 In this context, readers need to be alert to the fact that it is, I feel, misguided to simply view social work – with children and families or any other group – as an entirely benign and emancipatory activity. Social work should not be sentimentalised and its function and purpose misunderstood. When discussing social work, we need to keep the state in vision: by and large, social workers are employed by the state and this is a social formation that does not simply act as a ‘good-enough parent’, seeking to intervene in the lives of children because of the need to ensure that their welfare is ‘paramount’. The state, in both England and the Republic of Ireland, is not socially or economically neutral and its fundamental role is to maintain the present ordering of economic relations. As Bourdieu (2001, p 34) has elaborated, the state is:

an ambiguous reality. It is not adequate to say that it is an instrument in the hands of the ruling class. The state is certainly not completely neutral, completely independent of the dominant forces in society, but the older it is and the greater the social advances it has incorporated the more autonomous it is. It is a battlefield.

Related to this perspective, as Parton (2000, p 457) observed a number of years ago:

[one of] social work’s enduring characteristics seems to be its essentially contested and ambiguous nature…. Most crucially, this ambiguity arises from a commitment to individuals and families and their needs on the one hand and its allegiances to and legitimation by the state in the guise of the courts and its ‘statutory’ responsibilities on the other.

Presently, we are enduring a ‘conservative revolution’ (Bourdieu, 2001) and this is also determining the shape and core objectives of the state. More expansively, we are living in a period in which processes of neoliberalisation continue to impact on, and to remake, all areas of life.

Importantly, how the agenda of neoliberalisation is assembled and amplified is connected to the roles of strategically placed individuals. In this sense, the diffusion of neoliberal ideas is not the result of the machinations of ‘faceless, structural forces’ (Peck, 2004, p 399); rather, structurally positioned agents are immensely important in terms of how they seek to formulate and promote such ideas and establish a new ‘common sense’. Academics and consultants, as well as politicians, are playing a key role in articulating ‘change’ and in providing an ‘expert’ and (contentiously) ‘independent’ foundation for policy departures impacting on social work with children and families. In England, the London School of Economics and Political Science (LSE) has provided an ideas factory for ‘modernisation’ within and beyond Children’s Services: Giddens (1998), of course, was the intellectual architect of New Labour’s neoliberalism and he was to find a champion in social work’s academic literature in Harry Ferguson (2001). Other academics based at the LSE, such as Julian Le Grand (2007) and Eileen Munro (Department of Education, 2011), although far from being entirely at one in their vision for change, continue to function as organic intellectuals of the current Coalition’s ‘transformation’ agenda by furnishing plans, programmes and reports that map the reorientation of social work and related services. On the other side of the Irish Sea, key architects of ‘transformation’ include Frances Fitzgerald, the current Minister for Children, and also Gordon Jeyes, a former Director of Children’s Services in the UK, who was appointed by the Health Services Executive (HSE) as the National Director for Children and Family Services in the Republic. Such figures help to create the ‘spirit’ of ‘reform’ and to enlist and retain the allegiance of practitioners during a period when fractured welfare states denude social workers of resources (see also Boltanski and Chiapello, 2005). Part of this project strategically pivots on the need to eliminate counter-perspectives or untidy elements that do not fit within the ‘change agenda’.

Underpinning this contribution to the series, therefore, is the Gramscian idea that there is a need to focus on the molecular details associated with the project to create a new hegemony in the sector.2 This approach leads us to pose a number of questions about changes being promoted within Children’s Services in England and the Republic of Ireland. The tonality and texture of the ‘reform’ discourse is not the same in these jurisdictions and it operates within different professional, expert and emotional registers, but the focal questions include: how are vaunted ‘new’ ideas and plans related to older forms of thinking and acting within the sector? How is the private sector beginning to play a more substantial role? How is the case for ‘reform’ being made and orchestrated? Which groups are operating as the primary definers, providing a critique of the ‘way things are’ and mapping the ‘way things should be’? What are the patterns of association and political and professional adherences of those promoting ‘reform’? What are the new shapes of control and regulation that are emerging? What are the new surveillance practices that are now evolving, which are being directed at both the users of services and the providers of services? What are the sources of resistance? Clearly, such questions are rarely central in social work education and practice, but, in what follows, it will be maintained that being critically aware is vital in these turbulent times.

England

Hemmed in by ‘neoliberal rationality’: reviewing New Labour (1997–2010)

It is vital to try to identify some of the key components of New Labour policymaking impacting on social work with children and families because this continues to provide a foundation for the interventions of the current Conservative–Liberal Democrat Government that came to power in 2010. A number of years into the period of New Labour governments (1997–2010), I observed in my book Remaking social work with children and families (Garrett, 2003, p 139) that ‘social work is always, in a sense, being re-made and it is not possible to have nervous recourse to an authentic or timeless form of practice. Social work is always changing and evolving into something else, always in process’. At this time, a key characteristic of social work with children and families included the creation of new structures, such as Children’s Trusts, a panoply of new regulatory and inspection bodies, and a range of new agencies, such as the Youth Justice Board and Youth Offending Teams. New Labour was driven by the aspiration to embed multidisciplinary working and ‘joined-up’ approaches. This was apparent in the Crime and Disorder Act 1998 and the Children Act 2004. The New Labour administrations, perhaps especially the initial one formed in 1997, displayed tremendous reforming energy. Oftentimes, this contained the residues of a progressive politics; more frequently, it pivoted on a commitment at the top of the party to ‘roll-with-it neoliberalization’ (Keil, 2009).

Political ‘spin’ played a key role in promoting and inflecting the agenda for change, and New Labour certainly had a keen attentiveness to the importance of the symbolic. This was reflected in early endeavours to introduce a new vocabulary into social work and related spheres. Hence, in terms of children in public care, there was an attempt to promote the ‘looked-after’ alternative. Connected to this, problematic moves took place to introduce the phrase ‘corporate parenting’ into local authority initiatives focused on the ‘looked after’. During New Labour’s first administration – and indicative of the tendency to seek to vapidly ‘brand’ new programmes – the ‘Quality Protects’ initiative was launched to try to improve ‘outcomes’ for this group of children. Similarly, the ‘Every Child Matters’ slogan was to form the emblematic fulcrum for later programmes. At times, it appeared that Children’s Services, increasingly moulded as private sector corporations, were inflating their ‘products’ and capacity to ‘deliver’ services that were universally ‘excellent’ in an uncomplicated world. This approach risked, of course, ‘setting social workers up to fail’, particularly given that services were often short of staff. Indeed, unfilled vacancies, a high turnover of staff and the dependence on agency staff impacted on the ability of workers within Children’s Services throughout the New Labour period. Shortly after the furore surrounding the death of Peter Connelly, it was revealed by the British Association of Social Workers (BASW) that, nationally, about 11% of posts were vacant, rising to 30% in some of the most stressful urban communities (‘Social worker chiefs call for end to demonization of their colleagues’, The Guardian, 13 November 2008, p 15).

New Labour was also intent on direction from the centre and on imposing an audit and ‘performance’-based culture throughout all public services. Nevertheless, it appeared to fail to reach its own ‘targets’, for example, to reduce the numbers of children who were poor. Furthermore, in October 2008, the Audit Commission (2008, p 1) reported that the Children’s Trusts created by the government had been ‘confused and confusing’. Five years after the publication of Every child matters (Chief Secretary to the Treasury, 2003), there was ‘little evidence of better outcomes for children and young people’ (Audit Commission, 2008, p 1).

More politically, the New Labour approach was heavily influenced by a narrow neoliberal rationality (see Table 1).

Table 1: Seven characteristics of neoliberalisation

Characteristic	Defining feature
Breaking with ‘embedded’ liberalism	Ceasing to adhere to the social and economic settlement that existed since the Second World War, for example, aiming to achieve full employment and maintaining the welfare state. Injecting market competition into all sectors.
Remaking the state	The state is not ‘rolled back’, as some argue, but is reshaped and reconfigured to better serve the demands of capital. This relates to the installation of ‘workfare’ regimes and how the unemployed, carers and the ill (recoded as ‘jobseekers’) are cajoled into low-waged employment. Coupled with the evolution of a ‘surveillance state’.
Being pragmatic	Refers to the tendency to depart from theoretical purity (‘textbook neoliberalism’). In practice, neoliberalism is resilient, has a ‘dogged dynamism’ and ‘fails forward’ (Peck, 2010).
Accumulating by dispossessing	Taking from the poor to give to the rich and super-rich.
Injecting precariousness into lives	Often deploying the rhetoric of ‘flexibility’, injects uncertainty into lives, in and beyond the workplace.
Imprisoning	‘Lockdown’ is a key feature of neoliberalisation, with the greater use of imprisonment and forms of quasi-confinement for marginalised groups. This process can also be connected to racialisation.
Articulating nationally	Neoliberalism has an affective as well as material dimension. It looks, feels and sounds different in different places (eg Colchester and Cork have branches of MacDonalds seeking to make vast profits but the micro-practices will vary).

Neoliberalism served – often implicitly – to provide the dominant, or hegemonic, core for the ‘modernisation’ of Children’s Services and associated spheres. Some academics and political commentators maintained that New Labour’s neoliberalism was ‘an uncomfortable and strained construction rather than an essential political character’ (Clarke et al, 2007, p 146). However, following Blair’s ascendancy to the leadership of the party, it was to become increasingly comfortable with the neoliberal agenda. What Stuart Hall (2003, p 19) referred to as the ‘subaltern programme, of a more social-democratic kind, running alongside’ became much more subdued, increasingly marginal and marginalised. In a somewhat recalibrated form, neoliberal rationality continues to dominate the perspective of the current Conservative–Liberal Democrat Government.

New Labour was a governing party with a proclivity to look to Washington for direction in shaping policy. Here, Blair was, of course, the most powerful and primary definer. His project to discursively reframe social security benefits as ‘handouts’ and to incrementally introduce workfare impacted adversely on many of the families engaging with social workers. What remains extraordinary (in England and the Republic of Ireland) is that this inclination to try to replicate approaches from the US is rarely contested within social work’s academic literature, despite the fact that the US, one of the most economically unequal societies in the world, hardly represents a successful template for policy relating to children. Figures released by the US government on children (0–17 years) reveal that in 2009, 21% (15.5 million) lived in poverty. This marked an increase from 16% in 2000 and 2001. In 2009, 36% of black children, 33% of Hispanic children and 12% of white, non-Hispanic children lived in poverty. These are increases from 35%, 29% and 10%, respectively, in 2007. Significantly, the percentage of children who lived in families with very high incomes (600% or more of the poverty threshold) nearly doubled, from 7% in 1991 to 13% in 2009 (ChildStats.gov, 2011).

Specifically in terms...