Frances’s story

“They got lost,” said Frances. She was an experienced social worker with years of service behind her. The profession had changed quite a bit in that time. She could recall a time when her day-to-day work was with people, discussing their problems, why they had become a client, as they used to say, of social work services and how they could work together to overcome the challenges that they faced. When they did find a way forward, solutions to the problems that the client faced, that gave her a buzz, a feeling of really achieving something. That is why she had decided to become a social worker: to make a difference to people’s lives. She liked her job, she liked her colleagues and she liked the clients with whom she worked.

Over the last 20 years social work had changed considerably. The changes were always small, a drip-feed of new protocols, subtle changes in management, and an increasing emphasis on recording the progress of each client, though they were now called service-users. All of those little changes eventually added up. The job was now totally different. The team in her office began to work longer and longer hours. Lunchtime disappeared. There was just so much to do and the pressure to complete tasks and meet benchmarks was unyielding. Anyone who took any time off from their work to grab a five-minute coffee or, heaven forbid, leave the office to buy a sandwich was immediately treated with suspicion: why could they take time away from their desk? They mustn’t have enough to do. The easy and happy camaraderie between colleagues disappeared.

The ever-increasing workload was bad enough, but what really frustrated her most, made her depressed, angry and frustrated, was that she hardly ever saw a client. That was always the highlight of the day, meeting someone and sitting down and trying to work things through with them. Instead, it was report after report after report. Endless reports to fill in that had obviously not been designed by a social worker. The reports somehow imagined that clients’ lives improved in nice straight lines that could be measured on some arbitrary scale.