Social Policy and Social Work

An Introduction

Jo Cunningham,Steve Cunningham

• Editorial: Learning Matters
• Año: 2017
• ISBN:
  9781473933835
• Edición: 2
• Categoría: Sciences sociales
• Categoría: Travail social

An understanding of social policy is crucial for social workers as it underpins and shapes the legislative framework that they work within. From safeguarding service users and enabling them to improve their lives, to protecting the most vulnerable in society, social policy also has a vital role to play within social work education. It is important therefore for students to engage critically with social policy. This book introduces policy and shows how it has changed and evolved over time, how it reflects changes in society and how it is applied to everyday practice.

Part one

The historical and theoretical context

1: Social policy and social work

Achieving a social work degree

This chapter will help you to meet the following capabilities from the Professional Capabilities Framework:

• Professionalism – identify and behave as a professional social worker, committed to professional development.

• Values and ethics – apply social work ethical principles and values to guide professional practice.

• Diversity – recognise diversity and apply anti-discriminatory and anti-oppressive principles in practice.

• Rights, justice and economic well-being – advance human rights and promote social justice and economic well-being.

• Knowledge – apply knowledge of social sciences, law and social work practice theory.

• Critical reflection and analysis – apply critical reflection and analysis to inform and provide a rationale for professional decision-making.

• Intervention and skills – use judgement and authority to intervene with individuals, families and communities to promote independence, provide support and prevent harm, neglect and abuse.

• Contexts and organisations – engage with, inform, and adapt to changing contexts that shape practice. Operate effectively within own organisational frameworks and contribute to the development of services and organisations. Operate effectively within multi-agency and inter-professional settings.

The chapter will also introduce you to the following academic standards which are set out in the 2016 QAA social work benchmark statements:

4 Defining principles

5.2 Social work theory

5.3 Values and ethics

5.4 Service users and carers

5.5 The nature of social work practice

5.13 Analysis and synthesis

5.16 Skills in working with others

5.17 Skills in personal and professional development

6.2 Teaching learning and assessment

7.3 Knowledge and understanding

7.4 Subject-specific and other skills

Introduction

The discipline of social policy has a long been seen as a crucial element of social work education. Its links with social work training can be traced back to the early twentieth century, when concerns were raised about the overly moralistic training provided to social workers by the Charity Organisation Society (COS), which located the blame for poverty, squalor and other social ills in the ‘inadequate’ social habits of the poor. Attempts to promote the development of a broader social policy-based social work curriculum, which sought to acknowledge the wider structural causes of disadvantage, were, we will show, prompted by a desire to provide social workers with a more critical awareness of the causes of economic and social ills. The historical perspective we provide in this chapter will help you understand the development of the links between social policy and social work. However, we also want to stress the contemporary resonance of social policy to your social work studies. Hence, towards the end of the chapter we examine some recent, important social policy developments, in particular the cuts in welfare spending that have been introduced since 2010. As well as assessing the impact of these upon service users, we will examine their implications for social work practice.

The origins of social policy

The origins of social policy as an academic discipline can be traced back to the early twentieth century, when a Department of Social Science and Administration (DSSA) was established at the London School of Economics (LSE) in 1912. The initial aims of this embryonic version of the subject were narrowly vocational and its syllabus was geared mainly towards meeting the perceived training needs of untrained voluntary social workers. It is intended, stated its syllabus for 1912, for those who wish to prepare themselves to engage in the many forms of social and charitable effort (Titmuss, 1966, p15).

Before this, social work training had been undertaken by the COS at the LSE’s School of Sociology. We will look in more detail at the work of the COS in Chapter 2; however, for now it is just worth noting that its ‘social policy’ courses had contained an overtly moral undertone. In keeping with the prevailing philosophies of the day, as well as the COS’s own moralistic philosophy, students were taught that poverty, squalor and other social and economic evils were a result of the ignorance or inappropriate behaviour of the poor. As Jones (1983) argues, at the core of the COS’s provision was the notion that poverty and destitution were a consequence of a lack of morality or foresight rather than a lack of material resources. Accordingly, its courses focused upon the benefits of self-help and thrift, while bemoaning the idleness, profligacy and drinking habits of the ‘lower orders’.

Those involved in creating the new DSSA, including the Fabian socialist Sydney Webb, were at least partly motivated by recognition of the failings of the COS’s methods (Attlee, 1920). They felt that governments could and should intervene to promote citizens’ welfare. In the context of the times, this was understandable. This was, after all, a period when the pioneering poverty surveys of Charles Booth and Seebohm Rowntree were laying bare the depths of urban squalor and poverty, provoking the consciences of politicians and social reformers. The failure of the COS’s provision to acknowledge, as these exhaustive poverty surveys had done, the structural determinants of social problems was seen as a fundamental weakness and one which the new DSSA would seek to address. As Clement Attlee (1920, pp144–5), an early appointee to the Department’s teaching staff, put it: The days are, it is to be hoped, past when people without any qualifications other than a good heart and the means of obtaining money plunged straight into social work without any consideration of . . . what the effect of their actions were going to have, with the result that they only increased the evils they tried to prevent. Or as Richard Titmuss (1973, p48), a leading post-war social policy scholar, frankly stated, there was a general sense of dissatisfaction with the existing methods of training upper-middle-class girls in the technique of instructing the poor how to manage their poverty.

That said, pathological, behavioural interpretations for social problems continued to find expression in the new DSSA’s early social policy provision, which, like that of its predecessor, had a tendency towards the adoption of an overtly moralistic tone. Academically speaking, Titmuss acknowledged, it was not perhaps a very respectable affair in those days. Students continued to be seen as ‘moral entrepreneurs’, who would utilise their missionary zeal to put the ‘lower orders’ back onto the ‘straight and narrow’. As Titmuss explains, If poverty was a matter of ignorance then it was the moral duty of one class in society to teach another class how to live, and to lead them, through sanitation, soap and thrift to a better station in life (pp18–19). Hence, for the princely sum of ten shillings and six pence, students enrolling in the DSSA could undertake a six-lecture course on The Household Economics of the Hardworking Poor, whereupon they would be taught how the working population bought their food, stored and cooked it. There was no recognition here of the fact that large sections of the labouring poor were simply unable to afford a healthy diet, and that it was this, and not ‘ignorance’ as to ‘correct’ eating habits, that lay at the heart of the nutritional problems they faced. Another course, taught by the renowned eugenicist Karl Pearson, focused upon the links between drink, alcoholism and infant mortality, while remaining silent on the impact that poverty, squalor and poor sanitation had upon premature infant death. As director of an influential national eugenicist organisation which viewed health, ability, crime and much else besides as ‘inborn traits’, immune to the influence of social reform, Pearson was perhaps hardly the best choice lecturer for a social policy course. Thus provision at the DSSA, initially at least, continued to be shaped by more than the ‘faint whiff’ of individualistic, behavioural interpretations of social problems.

The quality of teaching did improve, though. Under the tutelage of a more radical generation of lecturers, such as RH Tawney, TH Marshall and Clement Attlee, a more progressive curriculum emerged, one which encouraged those intending to work with poor, marginalised individuals and families to understand the social and economic constraints that shaped their lives. Titmuss (1966, p18), an LSE student at the time, recalls being mesmerised by an inaugural lecture given by Tawney, a new appointee to the department in 1913:

The problem of poverty, he said, is not a problem of individual character and waywardness, but a problem of economic and industrial organisation. It had to be studied at its sources and only secondly in its manifestations.

The appointment of Clement Attlee to the department in 1915 represented another significant milestone. His views of social work training, expressed in his 1920 book, The social worker, could not be further removed from those of the COS. Attlee used his book to condemn the COS’s approach to social work education, accusing it of encouraging the adoption of harsh and tactless methods:

. . . a general assumption is made that all applicants are frauds unless they prove themselves otherwise, and this induces an attitude in the COS workers that is profoundly galling to the ordinary applicant, and is apt to bias those who receive their training from the Society. (Attlee, 1920, p65)

COS workers, Attlee argued, had a tendency to clothe themselves in the filthy rags of their own righteousness, and their lack of sympathy makes their charity a hard and unlovely thing. Attlee emphasised the need for social work students to be provided with a much broader, political education, which, when taught alongside their practical vocational studies, would better equip them to assist the people they would be working with. Rather than ‘blaming’ individuals for their predicaments, social workers should, he insisted, empower service users, and indeed even campaign for progressive social and economic change. Attlee argued that the social worker should be a social investigator, a pioneer and indeed an agitator, who has some clear conception of what society he wishes to see produced. Those of you with a rudimentary grasp of political and social history may be aware of the future role Clement Attlee would play in transforming Britain’s economic and social landscape, as the leader of the most radical, reforming, progressive government Britain has ever seen. For as the Labour Prime Minister between 1945 and 1951, Attlee presided over the introduction of the array of welfare services and programmes which we now know as the welfare state.

The reforming impulses of those such as Attlee, Tawney and Marshall did influence social work training at the LSE. By 1923, it was offering a two or three year course to welfare workers, which, as well as providing practical welfare work experience, offered a theoretical grounding in economics, social history, local government social and political philosophy, industrial legislation and ‘current problems’ (Lloyd, 1923, p3). Similar social administration courses (social policy courses in all but name) also emerged in other universities across the UK, including Bristol, Birmingham, Leeds, Liverpool, Edinburgh and Glasgow (Attlee, 1920). This trend towards the incorporation of a greater ‘social policy’ element in social work training was prompted by a desire to move beyond individualised, pathological explanations for human misery, and to understand the wider structural causes of disadvantage that were largely beyond the control of poverty-stricken families. As we shall see in Chapter 2, social work ‘in practice’ prior to the Second World War (and indeed after 1945) may not always have lived up to these laudable ideals, but this shift in thinking did nonetheless represent an important change in attitudes to social work training.

The development of social policy after 1945

The huge expansion of welfare services after the Second World War undoubtedly contributed to the further development of social policy as an academic discipline. As new publicly funded services grew and absorbed more workers, so too did the demand for social policy courses and the discipline became established in higher education institutions across the UK. Initially, with a few notable exceptions, it developed on a somewhat narrow, relatively vocational basis, sometimes doing little more than providing welfare workers with descriptive information about the institutions they were employed in, as well as the legislation – or policy – that shaped their practice. However, as Brown (1983, p93) points out, social policy gradually developed into a more lively and critical subject, which began to ask more penetrating questions about the origins, values and shape of welfare provision:

A new generation . . . looked at the services and asked: how far had they succeeded – and how far had they failed? Who had benefited from them? Whose interests did they serve? What had influenced their operation and determined their outcomes?

At the forefront of this shift were academics such as Peter Townsend and Richard Titmuss, who, as Brown notes, ensured that the discipline developed an overriding interest in the actual impact of social policies on individuals (p94). The scope of the discipline thus became much broader, theoretical and critical, analysing the extent to which the post-war welfare state had succeeded in achieving its aims. Instead of simply describing social service structures, policy and legislation, social policy courses focused upon evaluating the ethos and principles that underpinned welfare, as well as assessing its impact on the social and economic well-being of citizens. The notion that social policies were motivated by altruistic, benevolent intentions – that they were, to quote one academic, a good deed in a naughty world (Donnison, cited in Brown, 1983, p95) – began to be challenged, as evidence of the failure of the post-war welfare state to respond to citizens’ needs emerged. Indeed, as we show in Chapter 4, by the late 1960s social policy academics were drawing attention to the disciplinary, controlling functions that welfare policies, including those related to social work, could perform. As Chris Jones (2011) points out, attempts to infuse this more radical social science perspective into social work education were not always welcomed by a social work profession that, in some cases, was still wedded to a conservative, vocationally orientated form of training. However, in the context of the civil rights campaigns and protest movements of the late 1960s, it was a perspective that many social work students themselves welcomed. Many had become disillusioned about the failure of their professional courses to tap into the critical and challenging insights provided by social policy/social science literature. Jones recalls his experiences of social work training around this time:

I remember all the professional lecturers promulgated views of poverty as though they were manifestations of pathological personalities and inadequate mothering; of how the well-functioning family with the mother at the hearth was the ideal and how clients were both devious and childlike. It really was so much stuff and nonsense and a million light years away from what we were discovering about class inequalities and the reproduction of poverty and disadvantage under capitalism. (p30)

Social policy today

So what does social policy as an academic subject focus upon today? As Brown (1969, p12) states, whatever are generally accepted as social problems, together with the complex human needs that underlie them, must be the first area of study for the social policy student. Basically, at the core of social policy lies an evaluation of societal responses to social problems such as poverty, social exclusion, unemployment, homelessness, crime, health and education inequalities. Hence, the subject seeks to develop an understanding of the ‘very real’ policy issues and debates that affect people’s life chances and opportunities. In this sense it is a dynamic and constantly moving discipline, at the cutting edge of policy debates which ultimately determine government and non-governmental responses to issues like child poverty and neglect, pension provision, asylum and immigration, as well as health, education and social service reform. However, it is perhaps the subject’s dynamism, fluidity and breadth which make it somewhat difficult to define precisely. Because social problems and societal responses to them change and evolve, it is impossible to give a once and for all definition of ‘social policy’, or to provide a definitive list of the issues that it c...