27th May (added later because I am away)

To Opole University in Poland to do some end of the year teaching and discussions. Now we have finished most of the editing work on a book we have been putting together from a conference last year, we started thinking about some shared research, perhaps also with academic colleagues in the UK and in other countries such as the Czech or Slovak republics.

Comparative research is, from past experience, really hard to do. Some of the contributions to the book we have been editing have been about policy and structure, for example a nice paper on responding to unemployment in Poland, and you can set up a template for comparatives. It is far harder to compare social work practice, because the legal and practice context always makes the practice in different countries so dissimilar. Thus also makes me extremely doubtful about social work texts used internationally. A study across the UK and Norway I was involved in a few years ago used vignettes of practice situations, but there had to be incredibly stylised for people to be able to recognise how they were relevant to their particular country. John Pitts and his colleagues also found this when they studied child protection practices in Europe a few years ago; the assumptions about the role of the legal system (in the UK combative, in Europe more cooperative) were so different that it was hard for people to say anything other than ‘we wouldn’t start from here’.

I feel the same about the attempts to import social pedagogy into the UK; I fear that the fundamental philosophy of dealing with children in many European countries would be alien in the UK. The European approach is to say that people with problems need help towards their personal development because personal development is a human right that everyone should be helped with. I think the UK approach is to say they are a problem and they have to toe the line and be got back into order before help becomes relevant. You can’t provide positive engagement and facilities, because this is unfair to all the ‘good’ children who get nothing because they don’t cause problems.

I sort of feel this may be true for older people too. What I’ve seen of the municipal social aid centre in Opole tells me that older people should be part of a community in which we all have the social responsibility to offer them choices and possibilities. The British approach to older people seems to me to say they should be responsible for themselves until they become a problem to others and then, if they can’t pay for help themselves, we should grudgingly provide the minimum necessary care, rather than seeing them as people who might develop further in their lives, in spite of becoming more frail. The UK system seems to deny that we have the social responsibility to empower their development.