My book takes on the question of what will fix social work in Scotland

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THE Care Reform Group of Common Weal has long argued that if social care services are to be reconfigured through the creation of a National Care Service in Scotland, they have to be localised (see Caring for All).

As social workers provide both a gateway to services, and also important support in their own right, social work services have to be relocated back into communities – one of the premises of the pioneering but sadly discarded Social Work (Scotland) Act 1968. This is not turning the clock back but recognising that the communities we all belong to – whether locality, faith, ethnicity, or through other forms of identification, are the bedrocks of mutual aid and prevention against descent through isolation into crisis.

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My new book, A Practical Guide to Community Social Work Practice in the UK, published this week by Policy Press, provides history, explanation and examples from across the UK, of community social work and community orientated practice.

It argues that social work as a profession took a wrong turn through the neoliberal drive of the 1990s: Becoming proceduralised, obsessed with risk and its avoidance, budget driven, and centralised to the extent that bland and universalised approaches to need moved downstream to deal only with severe crisis.

(Image: Getty Images)

The ability of social workers to use their skills and relationship-based approaches to prevent people falling into crisis in the first place, was lost. The results are well known to all those who work in the sector – increasing referral rates as need escalates (because of the lack of focus on community prevention), stretched budgets resulting in rationing of services, and demoralisation amongst staff.

Social work has always involved a tension between those who see human problems as located in the individual and their reaction to events and circumstances, and those who see the harmful social situations of individuals as the root causes that need attention. This book is based on the latter radical tradition – the deindividualisation of social problems.

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With never-ending austerity, core funding to councils has been reduced so that resources are directed only to crisis services. Prevention and community development rely now on short-term funding often picked up by the third sector – sometimes appropriately by local organisations, but often by giant national charities run on marketised business lines, with mouth-watering salaries for CEOs and poor pay and conditions for those at service delivery level (the subject of our CRG paper Welfare to Charity).

The insecurity and temporary nature of such approaches have become an industry, often involving repetition of previous failures, and armies of civil servants allocating funds and evaluating outcomes. The book argues that community social work has to be mainstreamed and made an element of the services councils provide, and not relegated elsewhere.

(Image: Getty)

This perfect storm can be avoided: Although investment is sorely needed, a redirection of services from crisis to preventative orientation could pay dividends and save the huge public expense on mopping up the mess that could have been avoided. This is evident across the range of services: From the social care crisis for older vulnerable individuals, Scotland’s drug and alcohol problems, crime and justice services, and the break-up of families as children are received into state care. Our communities are in crisis and whilst attention and focus are rightly made on the victims of inequality, poverty and alienation, little is paid to how social workers could contribute to making our communities stronger and more self-sufficient.

This book looks at how that might be achieved – from changes in individual practice by social workers, to team approaches such as the recent experiment by Fife Council.

The Fife initiative involved a team of committed social workers engaging with selected localities and building community-based preventative services from the bottom up. Despite its notable achievements the service was wound up after just two years and its staff dispersed – almost a rerun of what happened to such projects in the 1980s.

Lessons must be learned: Curtailment (usually because the money has run out) can only be avoided through system change at every level so that security does not depend on the whims of managers forced to make difficult decisions for budgetary reasons. This means support at government level and enablement from senior managers – the creation of such services should be based on local need and bottom-up creation rather than externally prescribed templates.

The book also looks at other different and inspiring attempts to orientate towards communities across the UK – from approaches taken to work with Gypsy Traveller communities in Wiltshire, to preventative initiatives by an amazing women social worker in a GP practice in Derry, and two wonderful and unsung examples from Wales.

Although aimed at social work staff, students and educators, the book is written in an accessible style and might appeal to all who recognise that social work is broken and needs a reset, and who want to rebuild communities. It unashamedly draws inspiration from the collective work of the Common Weal Care Reform Group.

A Practical Guide to Community Social Work Practice in the UK is now available from Policy Press.