Social Work Scotland Conference 2022 - presentation slides

Social Work and Social Care: Responding to Contemporary Challenges

Dominelli University of Stirling

Challenges to social work and social care

this

Why are social workers being

What can the profession

key

to rise in status and

challenges are of long-standing:

Invisibility of the profession.

Underfunding and understaffing.

Not valuing its professional credentials.

challenges are new:

Expanding the professional

Asymmetrical

Endogenously and

with health

caused

include disasters.

crisis.

Having a loud professional

Acquiring professional autonomy

historical and contemporary issue.

remote, unengaged political control.

Contemporary Challenges for Social Work

Social work and social care are in crisis:

• Should they be seen as two separate sectors?

• Both are underfunded and understaffed practice sectors.

• Understaffed and underfunded in the academy (not enough social workers trained) and inadequate support for practice educators.

• Caring for new populations, e.g., new arrivals from war-torn Ukraine.

• Poorly paid staff and very vulnerable residents facing cost-of-living crisis .

Government responses are inadequate:

• Insufficient funding for social work and social care (£5 bil to come from recent NI levy).

• Cap on expenditures, including intergenerational relations and intergenerational justice.

• Problematic integration of two asymmetrical professions in which health dominates social care.

• Ageist tropes around growing proportion of older people and absurd intergenerational rivalry.

• Changing nature of the labour force, including older people working longer and the implications for policy and practice (ageism).

• Ignoring the climate crisis and implications for older people, children under 12, and babies.

Sustainable approach to social work and social care for future generations:

• Caring for people and the planet (green social work and new ethics of care).

• Adequate funding, well-trained and well-paid work-force across the profession.

• Bursaries for students, adequate staffing with decent salaries and pensions.

Climate impact: Areas of SW concern?

Current action on climate change is inadequate, despite warnings going back to the 1860s. Most social workers know little about this.

Energy production and consumption is a key challenge for ‘net zero’.

Climate change will impact on all areas of life, e.g., cities and rural areas, health. The 5 key points of concern identified by Quiggan et al., (2021) are:

• Heat, productivity and health.

• Food security.

• Water security.

• Flooding.

All these areas need social workers.

Tipping points and cascading risks. These become more frequent as complex disasters become the norm, e.g., heavy rain can lead to flooding and landslides. A tipping point is a sudden shift from one state to another.

Inadequate measures to tackle climate change endanger lives in the future, especially of young people from now on

By 2040, 50% of the population in West, Central, East and Southern Africa, the Middle East, South and Southeast Asia, as well as Central America and Brazil will experience major heatwaves.

By 2050, more than 70 per cent of people in every region of the world will experience heatwaves every year. Urban areas will endure the greatest challenges concerning people’s capacities to work and survive.

Leaving young people behind through adultism

• Social exclusion, is a form of social relations that leaves people out of the structures that govern the allocation of resources and decision-making; devalues their contributions to society; denies their agency or control over one’s life or right to make decisions about it, and relevant to antioppressive practice (AOP).

• Power relations termed adultism, form a process whereby adults deny young people the right to agency and decision -making on the basis of their age, and that leaves young people behind.

• Young people have exercised their collective voice over the climate crisis to demand that adults address climate change, e.g., the Fridays for Future Movement following Greta Thunberg of Sweden in 2018.

• Young people will be badly impacted by today’s cost-of-living crisis and asking for social work support, which can be critical for care-leavers.

Scotland’s School Students Demand Climate Action on this

and went to

Use cautiously, resilience is a contested concept in SW

Resilience is a concept that:

• Has no agreed definition but refers to having the capacity to cope and move on.

• Refers to process, outcome, an overall objective, or a dimension of sustainability necessary to adapt to conditions and survive (and thrive?).

• A buzzword that can mean everything to everybody.

• Resisted by community groups when the state uses the word to mean, ‘do everything for yourself’, e.g., during austerity, e.g., Cameron.

• Communities become resilient if they can organise people to work together to ensure that everyone can cope with whatever confronts them.

• In disasters, people seek to recover from a catastrophe whose enormity has deprived them of the means for coping – fatalities, damaged infrastructures including hospitals, clinics, schools, transportation, sanitation systems, and mental ill health as they try to cope with the enormity of their loss.

• The emotionality associated with enormous loss and grief can undermine resilient responses, making people unable to cope with the horrors of their situation.

• Coping with grief and loss is recognised as an issue, but responses are undertaken by third sector agencies, e.g., Cruise.

• Social workers have an important role to play in mobilising communities to enhance their resilience sustainably and mitigate harm and losses, including during a cost-of-living crisis..

• Sustainability means meeting today’s needs without damaging the potential to meet tomorrow’s needs by caring for people, all living things and the physical environment (Dominelli, 2012) (Not business as usual).

• Hope is an essential ingredient or motivator of ‘moving on’ and creating emotional wellbeing.

• Social workers can build hope and sustainable intergenerational relationships.

can social work learn from its successes?

SCOTLAND SCOTTISH GUIDANCE ON RESILIENCE PREPARING SCOTLAND,

AND SPOKES’ MODEL PREPARING SCOTLAND

Ways Forward?

• Having a vision for the profession.

• Being clear about what social work and the social care sector is and does and why it is important to social wellbeing.

• Becoming media savvy in communications about the work of social work and social care.

• Raising the status of social work and social care – training and consciousness raising about how skilled and important the work is.

• Getting more men and young people valuing and doing social work and social care work.

• Lobbying and campaigning for adequate funding for the sector – should be a universal service like the NHS, but raising taxes to fund it by pooling risks – the most actuarily sound way forward. But it will be difficult with tax rise deniers in the ascendency politically in the UK (since Thatcher).

• Evidence-based practice and research undertaken by the sector itself.

• Becoming led by a high status professional body composed of practitioners, academics, and service users (Royal Society of Social Work and Social Care).

Conclusions

Social work and social care in the UK have a huge agenda to fulfil:

• Become a universal service available to all and free at the point of need.

• Well-paid staff working in well resourced universities and service facilities.

• Free university education and training.

• Free life-long learning and professional development.

• Working for a balanced, egalitarian and sustainable society.

• Lobbying to get government support to raise taxes to provide the best services possible for all.

• Introduce new materials into the curriculum – climate change and disasters, health pandemics, digital service provision and education in these areas..

• Lobbying to get government support to reaching ‘net zero’ by 2030.

• Creating a Royal Society of Social Work and Social Care.

References

• Davis, M (1998) Ecology of fear: Los Angeles and the Imagination of Disaster. New York: Metropolitan Books.

• Dominelli, L (2012) Green Social Work. Cambridge: Polity Press.

• Giddens, A (2009) The Politics of Climate Change. Cambridge: Polity.

• Klinenberg, E (2002) Heat Wave: A Social Autopsy of Disaster in Chicago. Chicago: University of Chicago Press.

• Matyas, D., and Pelling, M. (2012) Disaster Vulnerability and Resilience: Theory, Modelling Perspective. Report produced for the Government Office of Science, Foresight Project, Reducing Risks of Future Disasters: Priorities for Decision Makers, UK.

• Mitchell, A. (2013) Risk and resilience: From to good idea to good practice, OECD Working Papers, No. 13, Paris: OECD Publishing. On https://www.oecd-ilibrary.org/development/risk-andresilience_5k3ttg4cxcbp-en

• Oven, K, Curtis, S. Reaney, M. Riva, R. Ohlemüller, C.E. Dunn , S. Nodwell, L. Dominelli and R. Holden (2011) ‘Climate change and health and social care: Defining future hazard, vulnerability and risk for infrastructure systems supporting older people’s health care in England’, Journal of Applied Geography, doi:10.1016/j.apgeog.2011.05.012.

• Schmidtlein, M., Deutsch, R., Piegorsch, W., Cutter, S. (2008) ‘A sensitivity analysis of the social vulnerability index’, Risk Analysis, 28(4): 1099-1114.

• Wisner, B. et al. (2004) At Risk: Natural Hazards, People’s Vulnerability, and Disaster. London: Routledge.

• WHO (World Health Organisation) (2013) The Public Health and Social and Environmental Determinants of Health (PHE). Geneva: WHO.

[Justice] Social Work, Recognition and Misrecognition

Seeking Social Justice?

• Fraser (2007)

Redistribution, representation and recognition

‘…people can also be prevented from interacting on terms of parity by institutionalized hierarchies of cultural value that deny them the requisite standing; in that case, they suffer from status inequality or misrecognition’ (Fraser, 2007: 20).

• Misrecognition denies status

Maldistribution denies resources, misrepresentation denies voice

Misrecognition: ‘Blankface’

The clock spins, zero hour begins

This is the end, the end again

Here sits Blankface and she spins my tale

I’ve stopped listening now I know that I’ll fail

Tick by tick and line by line

Thread by thread now you weave mine

A web of shadows, a silk spun tomb

A windowless room, windowless room

Sliding doors open and they welcome me in

This is the place, the place we pay for sin

These four seasons they reflect in glass

Trapped in a jar here where the time will not pass

Tick by tick and line by line

One day ending, a new day begins

Tick says ‘he’ll do it’, again and again and again

You see what you want but I know it’s not real

Anyone out there who can feel what I feel?

Recognition:

Grace recognizing Mary

• She moves towards her (socially)

As opposed to maintaining hierarchy and distance

• She practices hospitality

As opposed to hostile authority

• She listens attentively

As opposed to lecturing (like the judge and the first PO)

• She hears and validates Mary’s story

As opposed to imposing another story on her (unlike everyone else in her life)

• She shows Mary her potential (the tearoom ‘turning point’)

As opposed to cementing her current position

• She sets about co-authoring a new story with Mary

By licensing silence about a discrediting past

Comparing Teejay and Mary

• Teejay’s misrecognition by ‘Blankface’ means that he is stuck in an unequal, vulnerable and degraded social position; one which entails immobility, irrespective of his changed disposition.

• Mary’s recognition by Grace means that her movement (not just through probation but in her wider life trajectory) is enabled.

personal

Re-defining re/habilitation

of equal citizenship

of moral and political worth/rights

a community

a member

Towards

‘Generative Justice’

• ‘…social processes and community practices involving justice-affected people that are somehow generative of relationships characterised by solidarity’. – Mary Corcoran (Keele) and Beth Weaver (Strathclyde)

Subsidiarity and Solidarity

• “Put simply, subsidiarity is a way to supply the means of constructing ‘we-ness’ – a way to move resources to support and help the other without making him or her passive or dependent. It allows and assists the other to do what must be done to realise his or her priorities or aspirations. Subsidiarity cannot work without solidarity which means sharing a responsibility through reciprocity (Donati, 2009)” (Weaver and McNeill, 2015).

• N.B. This describes personal rather than professional relationships (usually), but…

Common features of Generative Justice Projects and Communities?

Conclusions

• JSW misrecognizes where it is monological; the state and its agents impose narratives of people on people. This creates problems of legitimacy and of immobility (often by reifying risk).

• JSW recognizes (and finds legitimacy) where it is dialogical (listening and hearing before it speaks) and where it enables forward movement, respecting people both as they are and for what they can become.

• In this sense, JSW is less about enabling return, and more about ‘reintegrative momentum’ (du Bois Pedain, 2017) and onward mobility.

it take for social work to thrive?

Iona Colvin

What does the profession need to thrive?

National Social Work Agency

The NSWA’s objectives are to support and invest in the social work

profession by providing national leadership, and overseeing and supporting social work in the following areas:

• education (pre and post-qualifying)

• improvement, by establishing a Centre of Excellence, and scaling up good practice

workforce planning

training and development

• national approach to terms and conditions (including pay and grading)

Since the policy intention is for the NSWA to be established within Government as part of the NCS structure, no separate provision within the Bill is necessary.

Key work strands

NSWA: Key work strands

Work already underway

Work

University of Cumbria: a people, places, partnerships focused organization

and Leading

This Photo by Unknown Author is licensed under CC BY NC ND

THE LANGUAGE OF THE VIRUS

The Professional Task

COMPLEXITY UNCERTAINTY RISK

Evolving Practice Landscape

Fifth Industrial Revolution

This Photo by Unknown Author is licensed under CC BY

DESCRIBE AN IMAGE(s) THAT REFLECT YOUR SOCIAL WORK/ SOCIAL CARE PANDEMIC EXPERIENCES…?

Pre-pandemic, Pandemic, Post-Pandemic Social Work /Social Care

Business continuity

Research IRL

30+ + + + years knowledge base

"Convinced of the value of information technology forthe future of human services’,

despite the fact that ‘the majority... still look on thefield as rather esoteric and distanced from the true nature of the caring professions’ they believed that itwas the work of husITa ‘to convince… [how] inaction would result in resources being placed elsewhere – and their ill-informed applications of IT would result in systems which donot model human service value systems’ (1987, inBallantyne, 2017, p.3).

In a publication following the conference they, urgedsocial work to take the role of the master and not the slave to new and emerging technologies, in particularthe ‘human problems, human values, human ethics’intersections (LaMendola and Glastonbury, 1989, p.4 in Taylor-Beswick, 2019).

Digital knowledge and skills crisis…

Emergent social world…

This Photo by Unknown Author is licensed under CC BY

This Photo by Unknown Author is licensed under CC BY-NC-ND

Sophia the humanoid. The first robot to be granted citizenship by the UN

This

Emergent social need…

SOCIAL PROBLEMS IN UNFAMILIAR FORMS

How far has the social care and technology relationship moved on?

• Mary Richmond offers the first mention of technology and social work. Richmond (1917) noted the importance of using the telephone in social work practice. Turn-of-the-century social workers were somewhat fearful of telephone technology. However, they eventually accepted the telephone as an important practice tool.

Social Work and Technologies

a troublesome intersection

Examining the contribution of social work education to the digital professionalism of students for practice in a digital world

Findings…

• ‘When I came on this course no one told us much, if anything at all, about technologies. There was no formal training’

• “I’m still trying to learn for myself. I don’t know enough, and I see my peers getting it wrong all the time and I don’t want to. I think I’ve just got risk on my mind a lot”

• “I see my peers getting it wrong all the time”

• “I notice others, like if they put something a bit dodgy"

• “I have seen examples of where people have crossed the line"

• "There are far too many assumptions made about what we know [with reference to digital technologies] and what we can do with all this stuff"

• "No, none at all [referring to formal teaching and instruction] and that meant you didn’t really know how to use them [technologies] properly"

• “You can ruin your career; it can go to pot if you’re not careful“

• "Amanda, the practitioners on placement don't know about this stuff"

A research concern

• “The fact that digital errors and errors involving the digital continue, and that they continue to outdate the completion of this doctoral study provides further evidence that digital development continues to lag across the profession and, unsurprisingly, not solely within the English jurisdiction”

• (Taylor-Beswick, 2022, p3.).

liminality

and

Scoping professionalism through a digital lens

Interrogate intersections…

A. What are the current digital potentialities and perils for practitioners?

B. What are the current digital potentialities and perils for organizations?

C. What are the current digital potentialities and perils for the social care professions?

D. What are the current digital potentialities and perils for people and societies?

E. How should we go forward on all of the above – maximizing on the potentialities and addressing perils ?

Balancing protection with ethics, rights, and values

WEARABLE FEASIBILITY STUDY

Line in the sand…

Social Work, Technologies, Covid 19

This short chapter employs a pre-pandemic, pandemic, and post pandemic frame to contextualise aspects of social work’s response to COVID19, a digitised response to the global crisis that continues to alter educational methods and approaches to practice in the field. It was the measures put in place to control the spread of the virus that forced social work to seek digital alternatives to face-to-face, in-person or proximal practices. In common with most human service professions, this pivot online has not been without tension; gaps in digital knowledge and infrastructure, and the absence of digital leadership and funding are amongst the many difficulties the profession is experiencing.

Pandemic Digital Social Work/ Social Care

It is completely understandable within the context of a highly contagious pandemic that human service professions would exploit the affordances of social type technologies (for example: Yavnai and Lafrenière, 2020; Dewar and Akingbulu, 2020; Mitchell and Ali, 2020). The absence of a safe and robust public sector digital infrastructure led social work to use platforms designed for commercial purposes.

Arguments for the continued use of, what are often, data risky digital platforms, are primarily grounded in notions of convenience. Ease of access, the perceived lack of cost and the functionality of a platform are favoured over safer digital alternatives. When adopted for use in professional practice digital platforms must be subjected to the same level of scrutiny as any other practice environment. Inviting service users into unexamined digital spaces presents a very real risk to rights and privacies (Eubanks, 2017; Noble, 2018; Goldkind et al., 2020).

Discussions amongst the online social work community continues to illuminate a variance in opinion, regarding which digital platforms might be appropriate for professional practice. Information about appropriate and acceptable digital practices has been slow to emerge in policy and guidance. The viability of commercial social technologies as a substitute for ethical face-to-face practice has yet to be resolved within the social work community.

Post-Pandemic Digital Social Work / Social Care

Whilst the adoption of commercial platforms was driven by the need for business continuity, there appears to have been little pause to consider the implications of these digital choices. Platforms known for scraping and mining vast amounts of personal and sensitive data continue to be used across education and practice.

Commercial platform usage in a human social service raises a host of tensions and issues and challenges the premise from which social work is practiced. Fundamental therefore, is the practitioner’s ability to assess the safety of a digital environment and have the knowledge and skills to communicate this to others (Kolah, 2018).

Whilst the affordances of digital technologies should be taken advantage of and exploited, social work should also guard against colluding with market forces. The ‘McDonaldization of social work’ is how Dustin (2017, p.5) might explain it, based on her work to better understand the roots of new managerialism in care management, particularly when thinking about how to achieve ethical human engagement over that which is thought of as free, and convenient.

Time to decide

In the wake of COVID19 it will be important to reflect upon the changes that have be made, both in education and practice, to think about the changes that were a crisis response and those that will have become established aspects of professional practice. Decisions will need to be made about the appropriateness of both digital and traditional methods going forward, with close attention paid to those that no longer serve us, or those that no longer assist us to serve. Furthermore, a position will need to be taken on tech-capitalism, surveillance, data rights and data exploitation.

Fundamentally, 21st century social work, needs 21st century technology specific regulatory requirements and guidance, and up to date QAA Benchmark statements (QAA, 2016). In England, the Digital Capabilities for Social Work project offers a significant starting point from which to leverage these developments (BASW/SCIE, 2020). An acknowledgment of the urgency of this work from across the profession is vital now that we have entered a new and more dangerous form of capitalism. We need to prefix everything with the word ‘digital’ to understand the magnitude to the issue at hand, until this issue is given the rigorous attention it deserves.

This Chapter urges social work to engage more judiciously with the phenomenon that is digitalisation. It calls for the profession to be more attuned to, not only its own digital future but the implications of the digital on our collective futures, so that the integrity and efficacy of the profession and the value of humanity, can, on some level, be preserved.

Thank you, any questions or comments

• Presentation: Social Work, Professionalism, and the Hyper Connected Age Social work, Professionalism, and the Hyper-Connected Age LCC Aug - Nov 2022 CPD.pptx

• Digital Professionalism Mapping Tool https://stream.cumbria.ac.uk/ap/cdt/d/ [reflective mapping tool]

• CoActEd Learner https://rise.articulate.com/share/xAU9dYJoTD6lwGJFXU8Q65Wtn-fMo1ni#/lessons/NEksb2fTOqSxzxEkI340m4SoTEuupc5D [professional network mapping tool]

• Digitalizing social work education: preparing students to engage with twenty first century practice need https://www.tandfonline.com/doi/full/10.1080/02615479.2022.2049225 [academic paper]

• Digital Relationality, Rights, Resilience: Conceptualising a Digital Social Ecology for Children’s Birth Family Relationships When in Care or Adopted https://academic.oup.com/bjsw/advancearticle/doi/10.1093/bjsw/bcac140/6651766?login=true [academic paper]

• Social Work, The Digital, Covid19 https://pureadmin.qub.ac.uk/ws/portalfiles/portal/233104336/Social_work_the_digital_covid_19_Amanda_Taylor_Beswick.pdf [book chapter]

• Social Work Research Podcast. 30. Digital Learning: Dr Amanda Taylor-Beswick talks about how social work students are being prepared for the digital world and what can be done to improve this https://martinwebber.net/archives/podcast/30-digital-learning [podcast interview]

• Lisa Cherry Podcast; Season 3, Episode 11, Dr Amanda Taylor Beswick on the digitalisation of social work education https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=XrWyqSuBdZQ [videocast interview]

• iactivism in, and for social work https://amltaylor66.wordpress.com/2021/02/08/iactivism in for social work/ [blog]

• New Beginnings GM Family Intervention Service Pandemic Digital Shift Dr Amanda Taylor-Beswick vlog: 'New Beginnings Digital Shift' https://youtu.be/vdcQdCAwINE [vlog] and Parents and Team blog: 'Ordinary Magic and the New Beginnings' Maternal Commons https://www.newbeginningsfoundationcio.com/post/grow-your-blog-community [blog]