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EDGES MAGAZINE Issue 18 |
Jul-Aug 1999 |
| THE CHANGING
FACE OF THE WELFARE STATE |
| Tony Murray is on our Management committee.
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In the case of children and
young people, the great leap forward was the Children Act 1948 which
required Local Authorities to set up children's departments. By the
time I became a Child Care Social Worker in 1963, children's
departments had been running for fifteen years. Indeed running might
not be quite the right word: more like racing. Numbers of
professional staff grew year by year; university courses were
established to ensure a flow of well trained recruits into the work
and a lot of money was spent closing the huge, impersonal, gloomy
children's homes and replacing them with smaller, more user friendly
units. Even these smaller homes were largely regarded as staging
posts on the way either to a return home or to a future with
substitute parents in a foster home.
As Social Workers in
the system, we shifted our focus from planning futures for children
away from their parents to helping parents rebuild their lives and
their homes so that the children might be returned to them. By the
end of the 1960's the emphasis had changed yet again towards helping
families before they hit crisis point in the hope of preventing the
need for care placements. Parliament gave us the power to spend
money to bolster stretched family budgets and the tax payer and the
rate payer seemed happy to stump up the money.
This was
the time of optimum confidence and bravura. Social Workers all over
the country spent time organising summer camps for kids on their
'caseloads'. Christmas was a time for parcelling arid delivering
food and toys. Magistrates called us 'softies' but usually responded
to our pleas for 'another chance'. And all the while our managers,
recognising our commitment, our energy and our sheer know it all
arrogance, let us do and spend pretty much what we wanted.
But then, step by step or blow by blow, things began to change.
The Maria Colwell case showed that far from having all the answers,
Social Work was an uncertain science, could get it wrong and that
when it failed the results could be fatal, The 'battered baby
syndrome' was identified not merely as a significant phenomenon but
one which Social Workers had been blind to even when it happened
under their very noses. Rapid growth, the whiff of scandal and
strains on the public purse demanded tighter management. The age of
the baggy sweatered long-haired male Social Worker and his kaftan
wearing female colleague was slowly coming to an end.
The
1980's was a different decade altogether. Social Workers were seen
as subversives trying to blunt the message of personal
responsibility and self improvement. The system was OK. Tax payers
were over burdened. If you had a problem it was because you weren't
trying hard enough Pull yourself together.
At the end of
this decade I left the Statutory Social Service Scene. I joined the
(gospel based) Voluntary Sector. Here I discovered that those
concerns, those values and those ways of working which, with all
their shortcomings I cherished in those early years, were still
alive and well. Had they not been, then T.H.O.M.A.S. might never
have got started. Because they have survived, So too T.H.O.M.A.S.
will survive and grow stronger. If that sounds optimistic it might
have something to do with the fact that I am an inveterate optimist.
To be anything else would be not to hear the message of Easter, the
message of the resurrection, which is essentially one of hope.
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