At the annual GSCC conference today. As one of the final speakers implied by identifying herself as a registered social worker thus distinguishing herself from all the other speakers, one increasingly wonders whether anyone associated with telling social workers what their job is and how it should be done has ever actually done the job themselves. They have a newish director who is a former civil servant (are we to regard the social care professional registration body as just another civil service job?) and a director of strategy who realised the problem. He concealed what he was a director of in the two councils he worked for, presumably not of anything to do with social work, because of how he described his job in a glorious example of what John Harris calls businessology, that is turning everything that isn’t business into business. This is it: ‘[Mick Lowe] is responsible for helping to set the organisation’s strategic direction through policy development, business planning, legal services, communications and business development’.

The wonders of social work were revealed by a television producer advertising herself by showing excerpts from tomorrow night’s television programme about a deprived child and his trying-hard-to-cope mother, avoiding showing what the social workers actually did, presumably because it was confidential. Any social worker could show you a dozen such people, and this presentation as part of the major conference of the professional registration body discredits the GSCC. Here it is, speaking to the people it registers and whose professional value it is supposed to uphold and it gets a television producer who has nothing to say to advertise her wares to people who are actually doing the job.

Another thing about this conference is that it is free if you apply early enough (and inaccessible if you don’t); as one of the attenders said to me: ‘how much of our registration fee is going on this?’ Another attender said to me that this was the only training event that she was going to this year, as her local authority allocated no money to staff development, and here is the GSCC promoting staff development as a basic requirement for professional practice, with this and that programme and set of requirements. So what is it doing about the benighted attitude of many local authority employers to training and professional development? And the lack of money that the government is putting into social care professional development? If you work in the NHS, continued education is taken for granted and funded: why is social care different? I met another group who missed the minister’s speech because their local authority let them come, but wouldn’t agree to fund peak rail fares. Well I suppose that’s business for you.

Harris, J. (2003) ‘Businessology’ and Social Work, Social Work and Society 1(3): http://www.socwork.net/2003/1/debate/400/index_html/?searchterm=Harris