Is there a crisis in Social care? There is a slow recognition that part of the crisis in the National Health Service (NHS) is caused by the savage cuts to social care budgets in recent years. Cuts far deeper than any NHS is experiencing. While everyone expects to use the NHS, as a residual service it is easier to make cuts to social care as most people do not expect to need it. Set in this context of increasing demand — record numbers of children in care and an ageing population — the question of social workers and resilience is helpfully revisited in Stuart Collins article.
Collins’ critically reviews research focused on resilience, and considers how to maintain and develop resilience. However, he also offers a critical view of the promotion of this concept, which is essentially an individual trait emphasising the potential to see adversity as an opportunity for growth. ‘Resilience in the face of adversity’ has become a familiar phrase and promotes the notion of social workers using their own resources to ‘manage’, to cope when encountering risks and crises. By concentrating on the promotion of social workers resilience, attention is drawn away from the social, economic, political milieu and away from broader social policy concerns. It also diverts attention away from the role of the state. Collins article balances the positives of resilience with the crucial question concerning how many demands can social workers be asked to endure and ‘bounce back’ from, without changes in government resourcing and organisational policies and practices?
New approaches to inclusion are one response to scarce resources. As with resilience, there is a good theoretical rationale to promote inclusion, but we should remain aware that current resourcing is an underlying problem. Kwan and Cheung write about social work initiatives in Hong Kong for the inclusion of students with special educational needs (SEN). Hong Kong has received more complaints than compliments regarding the necessary support that SEN students deserve, and this reflects research in the UK noting that inclusion in mainstream education does not necessarily bring about ‘actual inclusion’, in the sense that students identified with SEN have the experience of not being excluded. Kwan and Cheung emphasise the role of advocacy in social work that allows SEN students to get rid of stigmatisation. This paper supports a social work approach that facilitates the inclusion of SEN students in the community through social work-led initiatives outside the school settings.
Valenti’s article also explores methods of intervention, researching the use of family group conferencing (FGC) in social work with children and families from black and minority ethnic (BME) backgrounds living in Scotland. FGC is a method that originated in New Zealand in social work with Maori families aiming to actively involve children and their families in decision-making and counteract institutional racism, and paternalistic professional and organisational practices. It is led by the family and brings together relatives, friends and professionals to make decisions about the child’s welfare. Research suggests that there has been a far higher increase of BME children in the care system in Scotland than those of white ethnicity. Valenti identified a number of reasons that BME families were underrepresented in FGC including social workers’ unfamiliarity with FGC and shortage of information for FGC in different languages. This fits with what is known from wider research that BME families are more likely to be underrepresented in early intervention and preventative services rather than in child protection interventions. Valenti finds there is enough evidence to suggest that FGC can be used effectively with different cultures.
The final article in this edition, by Lisa Cooney and Steve Rogowski links well with Collins article drawing attention to the managerialist ethos in the public sector such that many practitioners’ focus is on completing bureaucracy to meet performance targets, and processing and closing cases as quickly as possible. Cooney and Rogoski believe this is at odds with critical feminist practice which includes building trusting relationships with young people and their families, and attempting to genuinely address their needs and issues. (I would suggest that it is at odds with most social work practice values!). They argue for a critical feminist practice in relation to social work with children and families, particularly for teenage girls and their families using child sexual exploitation as an exemplar. They contend that at a time when addressing CSE is an increasing aspect of social work with children and families, it is essential that practitioners challenge neoliberal managerialist approaches and instead develop a critical feminist approach involving a move away from concentrating on individual failings/blame towards broader structural issues not least poverty and inequality which affects society as a whole but women in particular. This brings us full circle to the problems of austerity and inequality and how this impacts on the practice context.