Book contents
- Frontmatter
- Dedication
- Contents
- Terry Bamford
- Acknowledgements
- Notes on Contributors
- List of Abbreviations
- Introduction
- 1 Social Work in 1970
- 2 Social Services Departments: Success or Failure?
- 3 Regulation and Inspection of Social Work: Costly Distraction or Stimulus to Improve?
- 4 Continuity and Change in the Knowledge Base For Social Work
- 5 Social Work Education: Learning From the Past?
- 6 Practising Social Work
- 7 Looking Back, Looking Forward: Two Personal Views
- 8 From Clients As Fellow Citizens to Service Users As Co-Producers of Social Work
- 9 The 1989 England and Wales Children Act: the High-Water Mark of Progressive Reform?
- 10 Social Work With Offenders
- 11 The Impact of Scandal and Inquiries on Social Work and the Personal Social Services
- 12 British Social Work: International Context and Perspectives
- Afterword
- Index
7 - Looking Back, Looking Forward: Two Personal Views
Published online by Cambridge University Press: 18 March 2021
- Frontmatter
- Dedication
- Contents
- Terry Bamford
- Acknowledgements
- Notes on Contributors
- List of Abbreviations
- Introduction
- 1 Social Work in 1970
- 2 Social Services Departments: Success or Failure?
- 3 Regulation and Inspection of Social Work: Costly Distraction or Stimulus to Improve?
- 4 Continuity and Change in the Knowledge Base For Social Work
- 5 Social Work Education: Learning From the Past?
- 6 Practising Social Work
- 7 Looking Back, Looking Forward: Two Personal Views
- 8 From Clients As Fellow Citizens to Service Users As Co-Producers of Social Work
- 9 The 1989 England and Wales Children Act: the High-Water Mark of Progressive Reform?
- 10 Social Work With Offenders
- 11 The Impact of Scandal and Inquiries on Social Work and the Personal Social Services
- 12 British Social Work: International Context and Perspectives
- Afterword
- Index
Summary
Social work's a business now
Except of course it's not
There's no ‘win-win’ for shareholders
We work with the have nots
Those left behind by GDP
No second homes in France
It's Sanctions and the Food bank now
Loan sharks at the door
Social work's a business now
No need to help the poor. (Unwin, 2017)
Back in 1970 social work was practised in a variety of specialised settings. These included medical and psychiatric hospitals, child guidance clinics, probation, and local authority children’s, health and welfare departments. Only a minority of social workers in the local authority services were qualified.
Social workers also worked in a variety of voluntary organisations, mostly dealing with the care of children, elderly people or individuals with disabilities. In addition, there were highly specialised agencies concerned with distressed families of which Family Service Units and the Family Welfare Association were prime examples. Work was usually in small groups that included senior workers and team leaders. In the many welfare departments controlled by Medical Officers of Health, social workers could be overwhelmed by the authority of the medical model.
If you worked in any of these environments you carried a number of ‘cases’ and were responsible for all aspects of that work: the amount of time you spent with each, how often you visited (aware of the costs of travel and so on), the specific methods you used and when to close a ‘case’. You were of course able to seek advice and support from peers or in supervision to examine the issues you might be facing with any specific situation. In some large organisations there would be team leaders and a principal who could be called upon for extra resources, or for advice on particularly complex cases. What bound all this together was the concept of professionalism, promoted and enforced where necessary by professional associations. Social workers sought leadership, a sort of taken-for-granted function combining responsibility and a degree of charisma.
In the 1960s we were a committed, hard-working and dispersed group of workers with little public recognition or authority – a weakly defined profession with porous boundaries, often set within more powerful organisations.
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- Information
- Social WorkPast, Present and Future, pp. 115 - 140Publisher: Bristol University PressPrint publication year: 2020