In 1980, June Lait and I published Can Social Work Survive?, the first critique of British social work aimed at the general public. She was a lecturer in social policy and a former social worker; I was a psychiatrist who had regular and friendly contact with social workers. But we both felt that social work had become vague and grandiose, and we compiled quite a lot of evidence to make our case. We even reported studies showing that well-intended social work interventions could be not just unhelpful but harmful. Our work was published in The Spectator, and it touched a nerve. ‘Of course social workers don’t do harm,’ one critic fumed.
This week we have seen the horrifying report of the multiple failures of social services in Rotherham, which meant that at least 1,400 children have had to suffer terrible sexual abuses at the hands of (predominately Asian) paedophile gangs. The Rotherham report suggests, as June and I suggested 34 years ago, that social workers excel at empathy but lack the ability to carry out ‘coherently planned action’. Social work with troubled teenagers is doubtless even more challenging today than it was in the 1980s, yet the report’s conclusions reveal many of the unhelpful institutional and ideological features that we identified are still with us. In one major review, we noted, 82 per cent of the statutory reports for children in foster care were overdue (in 53 per cent by more than three months). The Rotherham report by Professor Alexis Jay, a former social work inspector, also noted that ‘referral and assessment teams were responding too slowly…assessments were not completed on time’. Even when they eventually arrived, ‘Many reports failed to assess the risks to children and their families.’
It seems these were not just individual failures, occasional and regrettable exceptions in a generally efficient professional culture, but a persistent feature of a profession that emphasises doing good rather than doing it efficiently.
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