I am a social worker. Wherever you are located, and whatever experiences you may, or may not have had, that statement will draw assumptions, just as it would if I were to say I was a nurse, or a teacher, or a solicitor or an insurance broker. Sometimes, though, I struggle to understand what it is that makes ‘social work’, ‘social work’. Yes, there are some very specific functions that one carries out on behalf of the state, but that relates to certain types of ‘social work’. There’s lots of social work that happens in different spaces.
Social work isn’t always well understood, not least because there are a myriad of ways to do it. Often, in the UK, at least, it is a perception of statutory or local authority functions. Many social workers will be based in children's services, although one may come across them working with adults and in some mental health services, but that conception of what it is we do that no one else does, while still uniting us as a profession is one that has vexed me.
What unites a social worker in a mental health team and a social worker in a child protection team, with a social worker in a substance misuse agency and a social worker developing policy in central government or the charitable sector.
I know I should refer to our ‘professional values’ but are they uniquely for social workers? We talk a lot about strengths-based practice, adopting numerous models of practice, referring to an array of theories which have been developed, often off the back of multi-disciplinary learning. Yes, I can talk my way through a theoretical base or two but is THAT what makes, the things I do, social work. Is it being employed as a social worker? Well, not necessarily, because I have been employed in other roles and still fundamentally been doing my social work.
In a previous job, I remember thinking that we talk about what makes ‘social work’ unique, in the context of values and approaches, but it is not necessarily only social workers that take their views or these perspectives. We need to be able to challenge and advocate but we also need to be able to do have sets of knowledge to guide and direct appropriately. We cannot do or be social workers without a perspective that puts the person at the centre of our thinking and yet, we all have days when we might be more tired, angry or sick.
I’ve seen social workers display, what I have viewed to be values that don’t align but maybe it’s my interpretation that is wrong, rather than theirs. This makes me pause to consider if I’ve had it ‘right’ all along. Maybe it’s a lesson to me to be less judgemental, because I may only see part of a picture rather than the whole and I can’t make comments about the motivations behind the work they do.
I can reflect on what social work means for me. As someone who has been qualified as a social worker for over 20 years and has also had periods where I have had access to a social worker in a personal sense, as a foster carer.
For me, social work is about the quality of building relationships and working through challenges but it is not only that, because that can link to some of the social work we might do, but not all of it. Social work is about creating a social care model which is humane and human. We are the faces of a system which can sometimes be process-led. Our skill is in advocating for and promoting the social needs that link very explicitly to physical, material, psychological needs. Social is because we exist in communities and in families. Removing and compartmentalising social work into stages of life, may remove some of the wider thinking that we need to see in order to put together the pieces of a whole.
Children are part of families with adults, adults and children have mental health needs. People with disabilities live and need to be part of communities. We are all interdependent. We can’t exist in isolation and while we can specialise and that is important, there is a network of communities that it is important that we can hold together, through our theories and our models.
Reflection, reflection-on-action, reflection-in-action and reflection-before-action are fundamental to what we do. We act with thought but there is no ‘one way’ to do social work because people, and families and communities are different. We need to pick the essence of what is important to that person and help navigate through the services we are part of. We are the ‘street-level bureaucrats’ who can help navigate but also have a role in gate-keeping. We gate-keep with every decision we make. Which call to take and make, first thing in the morning. Which person to see at what time in the day. We need to attune to how we make the decisions to prioritise. How we work with the discomfort as well as the people we like to see, visit or talk to.
We need to balance our work so that the difficult tasks can be offset by some of the joy that this work can bring, because this work can bring joy. We need to be humble to constantly, listen, learn and grow. We need to make the most beautiful cloth woven from the materials we are given. It can be hard. It can feel impossible on some days. Those days when it fits together though, when there is a smile or a nod, when you accompany someone on reaching an outcome you had thought would be out of sight, they keep you going through the harder days, when there is never enough funding.
We can’t always change systems, including the systems we work in, but we can change peoples’ experiences of the system on a micro level and some days, that is as much as we can do and it can make a difference. Depending on the role we take, we may be the ‘face’ of the state, pulling into the most intimate family and private moments where no one wants the state to intervene, whether it is around providing care and support for a child or an adult, whether it is unexpected sickness or difficulty of some kind. Few people want to see social workers and we know that, but we can make that experience as humane as we possibly can.
I still think about what social work is from time to time. I don’t have it settled yet, in my head because I am constantly learning through hearing other people’s types of social work and ways of doing it. When we think about how to do our work, there are ways of being and ways of doing — these combine to build our knowledge, skill, competence and responsiveness.
So what is social work? It can look very different but what doesn’t change is the training and learning, the need to constantly learn, challenge and questions ourselves and our roles in the interplay between institution and individual. We can be the bridge between them, whether it is about government and individual, charity and individual, school and individual, health service and individual, whatever the institution we are based in might be. It works for those in policy and organisational roles and whatever perspective we might take.
We might be the key that pulls together and makes sense of situations, interactions, tasks, where people do not have choice, we may be a route to make these difficult and painful interactions, more humane. Whatever it is, it is important we do it well, with heart and with humility.
