Thursday 8 November 2012

Good-one Frank!

There’s a very good post in the Guardian today by some-one called Frank who is a child protection social worker in England with 30 years experience.


Frank argues cogently and eloquently that “… (s)ocial workers' jobs are made harder by constant attacks on their profession, increased workload and deep budget cuts”. He says that in 30 years he has never seen it so bad.

In particular he complains of:

  • Shrinking resources with which to do preventative work
  • “Laborious and unwieldy” data-collection systems
  • Being “chained to the desk” by poor IT and huge levels of administration
  • High caseloads and workloads

That all sounds very reasonable and very accurate to me. If you wanted to create an environment in which people find it difficult to work effectively, and where it is easy to make mistakes, Frank describes the blueprint of it very well. That’s the reality of lots of ‘children’s social care’ workplaces in modern Britain (and I expect elsewhere as well).

I hope politicians and senior managers listen to people like Frank. He knows what he’s talking about. Which is more than can be said for some (but not all) of those who entered comments on Frank’s post. Take a look - the ignorance (and nastiness) of some people is frightening.