It's not just children who need social workers

[Alison J Stevens]

It's not just children who need social workers

Social workers have a duty to concentrate on children's needs – but parents would also benefit from having their own separate social work advocate

• 
• • Peter Beresford
  • Guardian Professional, Tuesday 14 February 2012 11.02 GMT
  • Article history

To help their children, sometimes parents need their own social worker. Photograph: NTPL/John Millar

After almost every modern child protection tragedy and scandal, the message has been that social workers must put the interests of the child first.

The lesson has been hammered home time and again. It is the duty of the social worker to keep focused on the rights and needs of the child. All else is secondary. The problem is that social workers also have to work with children's families.

Yet simplistic assumptions about the divisibility of social work with children and adults has meant that the two are separately organised at local level and now come under different government departments, the Department for Education and the Department of Health. There has even been powerful pressure to develop separate qualifying education for social workers with adults and children, although this has so far been unsuccessful.

If there is one thing that the outstanding BBC series, Protecting Our Children, has demonstrated – apart from the complexity and merits of social work – it is the difficulties that this separation poses for social workers and the families and children they work with. We know that there can also be particular problems for parents with learning difficulties and mothers with mental health problems, where children have been removed without parents having adequate support or understanding.

The first programme offered insights into how work with families should not be done, while the second was an exemplar of how it could be done. In the first programme we saw two parents, Mike and Tiffany, whose little boy's development was delayed. Both parents seemed vulnerable; Mike appeared to have learning difficulties.

It's difficult not to feel that he might have been less aggressive and both would have been more able truly to speak for themselves if they had had an advocate. Both were clearly not able to take part on equal terms in a meeting with professionals, or necessarily able to understand all the jargon routinely being used.

In the second programme we saw the social worker and her team leader using their immense skill and experience to offer amazing support to a young pregnant woman, Marva and her partner, Shaun, making every effort to enable her to keep her fourth baby – sadly without success. The enormous emotional demands this had on the social worker, Annie, supporting both parents while primarily protecting their baby, showed in her having to take two weeks sick leave after the baby had been removed to the foster carer.

Surely what is really needed and what would put an end to the frequent accusations made against child protection social workers that they aren't adequately prioritising the rights and needs of the child, is that in complex and difficult cases, where there is a real likelihood of a child being removed, two parents have the same right to their own separate social work representation and advocacy as their children.

I have seen this happen, for example, where a mother with a life-limiting condition had her own social worker, while another child protection social worker was involved on behalf of her children. It avoided the difficult competing concerns and allegiances that can otherwise arise.

I raised this idea with Professor Eileen Munro when she came to make a presentation to the Social Work Reform Board in September 2010 during the course of her child protection inquiry commissioned by the coalition government.

She made clear that she could see the benefits of such an arrangement where families and children had separate social work support and representation.

However, her final inquiry report, A Child-Centred System, glossed over the issue of funding for child protection and child and family social work. Clearly extending social work support to families in this way could have significant resource implications.

Meanwhile, the newly established College of Social Work held a national Summit on Social Work with Adults earlier this month because of the growing crisis this field is felt to be facing, with large scale losses of jobs and support.

A view which we may expect many social workers might share, however, is that it is not so much a matter of conflicts between parents and children that's at the heart of many problems of child protection, as problems between disempowered women and men who disempower them — even if the latter are sometimes themselves disempowered too.

Certainly these were underpinning issues in all three programmes in the series. In the last programme this was highlighted in the case of the little boy removed from his mother, who was living with a convicted paedophile.

A problem that many might prefer to see as a relatively small-scale one of inadequate parents can be recognised as a far more significant one of oppressive models of masculinity that continue to exert a much broader and more damaging influence and impact on many people's lives.