Amy Norris, a child protection social worker who also acted
as a media spokesperson for the now defunct College of Social Work, describes
in the Guardian how a year or so ago
she began to develop reservations about how the College was being run.
Apparently a blog she had been writing for the College was taken down after “a
prominent government adviser” had questioned Amy’s comments on a report on
social work education. She complains that she was being censored.
Despite this Amy remains strongly committed to the concept
of a College of Social Work and deeply regrets its passing. She feels that
things would have been better had more people joined.
I can understand how she feels but what disturbs me in Amy’s
story is that it reveals the ingrained paternalism that seems to ooze from
every pore of the children’s services establishment. My own experiences of
trying to get people at the top – civil servants, MPs, ministers, senior
managers, academics - to listen to new ideas (such as Human Factors training
for child protection workers or Critical Incident Reporting as a means of
studying error in child protection) has revealed to me just how much of an
establishment-enforced consensus there is. Small groups of faceless people sit
in offices and decide how it is going to be. They expect that the rest of us
will just get on with it and implement their
visions. People with different ideas may be tolerated for a short time, but
they are not welcomed and hidden hands intervene to silence their voices and
quietly rubbish their ideas.
That was what was wrong with the College of Social Work.
‘The great and the good’ set it up for the rest of the profession. They did not
want to allow its members to control it. They were interested in telling people
what to do. They were not interested in hearing from people working at the
front line what their experience is and what they think should be done.
It seems to me to be a bleak vision. Unless we move to more
open and pluralistic approaches, driven by information and ideas from a wide variety
of sources, developments in child protection will never result in real
improvements. They will just reflect a slowly changing establishment consensus that
lurches from one disaster to another because it is increasingly making itself
immune to unpleasant external influences, such as the facts and the truth.
