Dialogue: Get back to basics for training social workers

JOHN DEARNALEY* suggests that CYFS may be struggling to keep a lid on child abuse because it does not have enough qualified field workers.

John Dearnaley says that one of the merits of the Brown report on child abuse is that it highlights social-worker training and employment practices.

Child abuse - the extreme of child neglect - can be affected to only a limited degree by agencies as long as basic causes for its increase are left out of the equation.

Economic factors are important, but the breakdown of communities comes not from these causes alone, as the ministerial report of retired principal Youth Court judge Mick Brown accepts.

The situation in Maoridom has its historic causes. But other influences in the community today - not least through the meretricious effect of the more arrant kinds of individualism, an old villain, and a new regard of competition - contrive new "values" broadcast from every angle of the markets into homes.

One of the more crucial effects is the breakdown of taboos, not least sexual ones, and with it the flourishing of indifference under the dubious banner of "freedom."

Although the Brown report falls short in a few respects, it has the great merit of underlining - as the various Mason reports on psychiatric care did, but to little effect - what should have been most evident all along.

It points not only to the short supply of fully trained and suitable field workers, but also to the employment by the Department of Child Youth and Family Services of untrained people, on the basis that they can then be trained on the job.

This suggests that the department is not facing up to a key problem.

It was once received opinion in Britain that a large number of well-intended applicants for pre-employment social work training were hardly able to understood their own personal problems.

Could this, as well as unacceptable work burdens, be a factor behind the significant dropout rate of CYFS employees in this country after just two years service?

Would doctors or lawyers learn on the job these days, as they did over a century ago?

Supervision on the job continues to be necessary, but the extra imposition of initial training must reduce the time available for the vitally important task of supervising long-term employees - a double drain on the department when recent recruits leave in short order.

As for those who already have some degree of training, the report does not address the root question of standards at tertiary institutions.

Helpful contributions from universities are acknowledged by the report, but it does not examine the situation overall in formal tertiary-based courses.

Social work departments in British universities, with intakes of up to 30 or 40 students, were at least in the past headed by people with considerable experience of field work.

Supplementary lecturers were drawn in from psychology and law faculties. Student applicants were vetted on entry and then throughout the course, aided by the scrutiny of three different types of social work agencies.

These included child-care psychiatric centres, probation services and personnel departments of large firms keen to recruit social workers.

Students had two weeks of each term vacation taken up by this vetting. At the end of a course, those qualifying for Home Office certification received indications as to what area, or areas, of field work might be applied for.

This is no longer the case for all applicants for work in British agencies. There was a deterioration in the late 1960s when social work was amalgamated throughout the country - a jack-of-all trades policy impelled by economic and management priorities and by early "rationalising."

Applicants for work in children's homes, for example, were no longer vetted or trained other than on the job - with some disastrous results in several counties, as reports have shown.

It is also doubtful if social work in multiple localities can be adequately organised from one central and distant location, where managerial aspects tend to become the sole priority.

The importance of locality had long been recognised in British social work. Each child-care field worker, for example, was allocated his or her own locality within the larger county unit.

In this way the worker became well-known and the immediate agent of referral in the neighbourhoods. Coordination with other social agencies was assured by regular regional meetings when statutory and voluntary workers gathered to discuss and refer problems.

The valuable Brown report provides evidence of such a proliferation of agencies serving the community at large as first referrals - both statutory and voluntary - that many who come across child abuse are probably uncertain where best to refer their reports to ensure that the right action is taken.

This is possibly a reason for some of the many difficulties encountered by CYFS.

One must sympathise with the department's workers who, as the Brown report makes clear, have been given an almost impossible task. But the greatest concern for all of us must be the welfare of children.

The "managerialising" of social work has not worked. The roots of the problem must now be examined. A big first step could be taken as a result of the Brown report.

* John Dearnaley, a retired Hamilton teacher and university lecturer, worked for 11 years in Britain as a social worker.