What would a College of Social Work do? And what would it look like?

The Social Work Task Force (http://publications.dcsf.gov.uk/eOrderingDownload/DCSF-00752-2009.pdf) is recommending a leadership body for social work called the College of Social Work. Perhaps more realistically, the Children etc Parliamentary Select Committee on training children’s social workers (http://www.publications.parliament.uk/pa/cm200809/cmselect/cmchilsch/527/527i.pdf)
is recommending reforming existing social care bodies to create a body like the Training and Development Agency for teachers, which has apparently in politicians eyes helped the image and standing of teaching, although most teachers I know haven’t noticed.

Why call it a college? In England, a college is a fairly low-level training institution, although the term has a history of being a community of scholars. You will see from my public gallery of photos that the university I work for in Poland calls a lot of its sections or buildings ‘collegium’. Perhaps we should be moving into Latin as the high-prestige title: Collegium Socialis Laboriae. A bit too redolent of new Labour, you might think?

My photo gallery of Opole University at: http://picasaweb.google.co.uk/malcolmpayne080/OpoleUniversity?authkey=Gv1sRgCNGRuZ-R1tyQ9AE&fgl=true&pli=1#

The aim seems to be to have a authoritative and independent voice for social work in public debate. This has been a constant gripe of social workers since it became clear in the 1970s that the British Association of Social Workers was not getting the level of support in numbers, money nor effort to represent social work fully. The directors’ associations have done this quite well on occasions, but when speaking they have to defend the services they work for, so it comes across as self-justificatory, and they tend to speak for greater resources for their service, which doesn’t sound good in a public debate.

The problem, it seems to me, is that an independent level of authority to speak needs to come both from united professional support and from a widely recognised knowledge and skills base. So we would have to get people to join up, and we would have to collect up people who actually could speak lucidly and strongly, but most importantly with authority for social work.

Where would such spokespeople come from? Why can’t we find such people now? Partly it is because social work is socially and politically divided and would find it hard to agree on what should be said; there would always be snipers from the sidelines. Partly it’s because not a lot of people want to be high-profile public voice.

The main reason, I suspect is that there is no wide agreement that the public want a social work; most people think they do it themselves, and think badly of people who cannot cope with difficulties in their lives. The Task Force’s statement about what social work is in normal language recognises this by their sections starting: ‘You may think you already do this for your friends and family but…and You may think that you’ll never need a social worker but… (p 10)’.

Moreover, there is a political issue: people on the right are particularly committed to people helping themselves, and to the view that it is weedy and pathetic to need help, and right-wing newspapers and politicians promote this position. For similar reasons, they attack any services and anyone who does it, and anyone who has any sympathy for these ghastly people who cannot organize their lives properly. So social workers, who provide these services and seem to have sympathy for these ghastly people are always going to eb the target of right-wing vilification; everyone can see that they need teachers, doctors and nurses at times, provided they’re not pathetically soft (‘…it never did me any harm…’ etc). People who stand on their own two feet all the time are not about to have any sympathy with weepers and wailers.

Presumably the aim is to have some prestigious group like the Royal Society for scientists; you would want the letters after your name. We already have the Academy of Social Sciences, which academics can be nominated for. The problem is that this is an elite body: what effect is it going to have on standards over the general run? And most such bodies are basically academic groups; you get elected for academic achievement. Something like the Royal Society for Literature is broader, but again it is basically public achievement that is recognised. How would you set up a system to recognise practice achievement in a relatively private activity like social work? Ad remember that prestigious organizations have spend decades getting to the point, with a lot of criticism along the way. There is not going to be an instant result.

Another thing to remember is that social work is a relatively small fairly low-paid profession – we’re not talking about the huge number of incredibly poorly paid, inadequately trained and supported care workers. There are not enough people in social work to sustain, financially and with personnel, the kind of bodies that huge numbers of teachers and nurses in their professions can justify. And although it occasionally hits the headlines, the quantity of its work doesn’t justify the cost of a huge infrastructure.

To have public authority, such a College would actually have to do something. What would its role be? I guess it would have to look something like the old National Institute for Social Work, which the present government abandoned at the end of the 20th century. Its leadership generally never acquired a public face, but it was a nice billet for a research unit and for a few academics who had a period outside universities, mainly running courses and day conferences for managers. None of its leaders became professional leaders: they got on with getting the grants and doing the research or teaching the courses and pursuing their academic interests. Social care is not a big deal nationally, and people are not going to go to some small institute to achieve the kind of prestige and standing that will make them leaders of the profession. People with leadership potential want to be where the action is, not some quite academic backwater.

Rather than a college of social work, what we need is to collect up a number of lucid telly performers who are already in senior public roles or who have specialist knowledge, train them to represent social work effectively and promote them to the media.