The Challenges of Working with People and Systems

Many of the contributions to this issue of Australian Social Work (as with most issues) are concerned with interrogating and problematising various aspects of social work theory and practice, challenging the assumptions and adding dimensions to our understanding of the issues. This is an extremely important part of the ongoing struggle of social work to develop increasingly effective, theoretically driven, and evidence-informed ways of working with vulnerable populations. Some of the papers directly address the issue of complexity; for example, the papers by Agllias, Howard, Schubert, and Gray on emergency relief and employment, Heward-Belle on domestic violence perpetrators, and Tilbury, Walsh, and Osmond on child-aware practices in adult services. All of these articles point out that the assumptions about particular groups of people, on which policy and practice are based, need to be questioned in order to provide a more responsive and informed service. The other articles similarly illustrate the need for more nuanced understandings of particular client groups including single parents of African background in rural areas (Ochala & wa Mungai), birth parents of children in out-of-home care (Ankersmit), spouses providing care in rural areas (Cash, Hodgkin, & Warburton), and Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander communities (Day, Nakata, & Miller).

These articles point to one of the fundamental challenges for social work, and indeed all human service professions: that social work is fundamentally a profession that works with people, and that people do not fit neatly into categories or silos. On the other hand, policy almost by definition deals with generalities and always defaults to providing “mainstream” solutions to problems and dividing clients into manageable categories based on presenting problem and diagnosis or demographic characteristics such as ethnicity, location, age, or gender. At a theoretical level, this is perhaps the most fundamental challenge for social work: the recognition that social problems are principally structural in nature, reflecting the economic and societal arrangements that have been put into place to maintain the welfare state. However, many social workers have to work with vulnerable individuals, families, and communities rather than the broader structural issues.

Policy makers have to respond to these challenges, and since the 1990s a whole range of policy solutions have been developed that aim to organise services and policies so that they better reflect the diversity of the client groups that use those services. These policy solutions have included the push towards collaboration and interagency working, and the provision of “packages of care” in disability and mental health services. The evidence base for most of these approaches is remarkably thin. For example, although collaboration makes sense and is regarded positively by service providers, it has so far failed to consistently demonstrate improvements in service provision or outcomes (valentine & Hilferty, 2012) at least in child welfare.

The most recent iterations of these policies are the personalised funding models in disability services that have influenced the development of the National Disability Insurance Scheme (NDIS). In these models clients can purchase services and supports to meet their individual needs rather than rely on agencies that inevitably organise their services to meet the needs of the service provider rather than the client. Although these approaches appear to be working in the area of disability, it is not clear that individualised funding is the answer to the basic challenge of providing services that meet the diverse needs of vulnerable populations.

Another current attempt to resolve this challenge is the development of increasingly sophisticated methods for collecting and analysing administrative datasets, which allow for the tracking of individuals through multiple service systems. In theory “big data” can lead to improvements in practice by measuring outcomes for individuals and groups of clients, and measuring the outcomes produced by individual practitioners, teams, and districts or areas. The relationship between data collection and social work practice (as well as practice in all human services) is becoming more convoluted and anguished as technology progresses and data use creeps into aspects of practice that were unexamined quantitatively in the past. This is particularly the case for “big data.” The social work profession has been perhaps uniquely resistant to the provision of data for management purposes, and some attempts have indeed been made to roll back the intrusion of administrative tasks for front-line caseworkers. Notably the Munro review in the UK recommended a significant reduction in the administrative burden for child protection workers (Munro, 2011). It is not clear whether there has indeed been a reduction in administrative burden for social workers in the UK, but this was the first official recognition that administration is becoming a significant barrier to caseworkers carrying out their responsibilities effectively.

Data have become so important to the provision of human services that in some ways data have taken over from direct provision of service and it is now inconceivable for managers not to have detailed information about inputs processes and outputs as part of the basic tools of management. Data have taken on an almost magical quality, with the assumption that more and more detailed information will inevitably lead to improvements in practice and better outcomes for clients. This way of thinking has reached its apogee in the child protection client group with the development of predictive risk modelling in New Zealand (Vaithianathan et al., 2012) in which administrative data are used to predict which parents are likely to abuse their children. Big data is also colonising health and social services research. Analysis of administrative data is cheaper and in some ways much more reliable than surveys or interviews. However, as the articles in this edition indicate, it is qualitative research rather than data analysis that can identify the real challenges and opportunities of providing for the needs of individuals while at the same time working in a service system that is inevitably based on categories or sectors of the population. These issues are not ultimately resolvable. High quality research and theoretically driven policy responses, along with technological advances, will nevertheless allow progress towards the goal of relieving the tension between the individual needs and underpinning social processes.