Social Policy for Social Work by Green Lorraine; Clarke Karen; & Karen Clarke

Author:Green, Lorraine; Clarke, Karen; & Karen Clarke
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Wiley
Published: 2016-03-25T00:00:00+00:00

A return to specialization

Whilst the formal institutional arrangements for personal social services remained unchanged during the 1980s, social work fragmented again into more specialized work under a single social services organizational umbrella. There were several reasons for this. First, a series of high-profile inquiries into child protection scandals in the 1970s and 1980s consistently uncovered failures of communication between social workers and other agencies involved with the families, and also identified inadequately trained and supervised front-line workers as a contributory factor. The complexity of child protection work and the need for good communication with other agencies led to greater specialization by social workers, with child and family social work increasingly narrowly focused on child protection.

Second, two major pieces of legislation, the 1989 Children Act and the 1990 NHS and Community Care Act (discussed further later in this chapter and in chapter 6), signalled a new role for social workers as enablers and managers of services working in partnership with other agencies. Both pieces of legislation involved a move away from state social work’s centrality in providing services, to a much expanded role for the private and voluntary sectors as service providers (albeit with state funding), with social workers assessing situations and facilitating appropriate service delivery. The main exception was in child protection where local authority social workers retained central responsibility for assessing whether children were at risk of significant harm, and making arrangements for their protection (Langan 1993; Langan and Clarke 1994: 76). The legislation reinforced divisions which had already emerged for pragmatic reasons between social workers working with older and disabled adults, those focusing on children and families, and mental health social workers.

This return to more specialist roles for social workers led in the 2000s to institutional changes which continued the reversal of the Seebohm reforms and created new local institutional structures for social work with different client groups. These changes were driven by longstanding concerns about the rising cost of adult social care and New Labour’s focus on ‘joined-up government’ to achieve better co-ordination between different services and agencies as a means to deliver more effective and efficient services through the synergy they hoped this joint working would produce. Some changes also involved ‘de-professionalizing’ social work to some extent, as many new roles were no longer restricted to qualified social workers. So, for example, care managers, working with elderly people or adults with disabilities, may have qualified as occupational therapists, and those working with adults with mental health problems may be health professionals (Harlow et al. 2013: 240).

From the 1990s, social work also began to be referred to under the broader canvas of social care and from 2000 the organizations regulating social work adopted the term ‘social care’ to include both social work and the wider social care workforce (the General Social Care Council and the Health and Care Professions Council), as opposed to the original Central Council for Education and Training in Social Work. These changes also risked undermining social work’s professional status because ‘social care’ was

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