Social work: are we in at the death

With high profile system failures such as the Baby Peter case, focus on social work provision has switched firmly to children. Professor Peter Beresford asks whether this is a good or a bad thing for disabled people

Disability Now columnist and pioneer, disability academic and campaigner Mike Oliver, wrote a damning indictment of social work with disabled people. In the new edition of his key text, Understanding Disability, he concludes “we can probably now announce the death of social work at least in relation to its involvement in the lives of disabled people”. He sees social work as doomed because of its failure to adopt the social model of disability and connect with the rights and needs of disabled people.

At a time when policies tend to creak along rather than change dramatically, some might think Mike’s guilty of exaggeration and over-simplification. As someone with experience on the receiving end of social work, as a social work educator and with a belief in the fundamental value of social work, I would say we ignore his words at our peril.

Social work is undergoing radical review. Following the tragic death of Baby Peter a social work task force was established to recommend reform. Since then a social work reform board has been set up with cross-party support to carry this through. Attention predictably has tended to focus on social work with children and families. That’s become code for child protection work as policymakers have increasingly shaped and narrowed the role of social workers. Their cure-all is the setting up of a College of Social Work – although how this is to change everything remains unclear.

Adult social work meanwhile remains on the periphery, for all the highly evidenced cases of comparable abuse, neglect and hate crime that can be set alongside examples against children. But the truth is that those people government chooses to see as “vulnerable adults”, who the rest of us might see as people whose rights are regularly put at risk in a discriminatory society, don’t carry the same political, media or popular priority as children. Add to this that the push for personalisation and individual budgets has been used as a cost-saving measure to cut back on qualified social workers and the scale of the threat becomes clear. Good social workers offer disabled people two key things.

First is support that is based on a social rather than medicalised approach. Second, are opportunities for careers themselves as social workers, offering prospective service users the added value of first-hand experiential knowledge.

Government determination to convert adult social work into mechanistic care management has undoubtedly undermined its credibility, converting it from a source of support to a rationing system.

But if there is to be any prospect of support truly being based on the values of independent living and the social model, then we all need to be part of the fight-back to save and renew adult social work.