[Closed] Social Services in the UK. Marks out of 10?

I work closely with a number of SW. I am regularly frustrated by lack of action to support me in my role (education), but more importantly, the kids in our care.

Behind all of this is the knowledge that the local SWD is understaffed and under pressure. A number of the SW are relatively young and inexperienced, and poorly paid relative to surrounding areas.

It is important to remember that the 'clients' are not generally the most responsive or supportive members of society, and are often looking for someone else to take responsibility.

Schools have kids for 6-7 hours a day, and society expects SWD to be on the ball for the other 17-18 hours, often forgetting about the support that families - uncles, aunts, grandparents, brothers and sisters - are capable of providing, yet do not feel compelled to do so.

In short SWD are underpaid, understaffed, and under pressure. This means priorities have to be established, and your priorities may not be the same as mine, and they're both likely to differ from the next man's.

What's required is a societal mandate to fund and support the necessary interventions. Currently we're desperately short of Foster Carers, and this needs adressing too...

... but who wants to take on destructive 14-year-old with a drink and drug problem and a severe attachment disorder? Form an orderly queue now...

Roll on the day when we staff frontline services with management consultants, [i]Daily Wail[/i] editors, internet blowhards and political think-tankers. They need to show us how it's [i]really[/i] done.

[i]Far better to try and explain the good, and to try and reassure people that it isn't as bad as the media would love us to believe.[/i]

Salutary words, given UK media-idiocy. Quiet success doesn't tend to make for good copy, sadly.

In an ideal world, yes Captain.
Here, where wild and ill judged internet warrior nonsense is the chosen currency, why waste even virtual ink?
The kind of comments seen here are like the ramblings of a tramp who wrapped himself in the Daily Mail after a hard day shouting at pigeons.
Laughter, the best medicine.

Trout Wrestler has it spot on - though I may be biased as MrsSwadey is a highly qualified SW currently enjoying a well earned career break by trying to bring up our two little ones in such a way that none of her former colleagues have to get involved.....

TroutWrestler - Member
I work closely with a number of SW. I am regularly frustrated by lack of action to support me in my role (education), but more importantly, the kids in our care.

I work in healthcare, and in my local area the 3 local SWDs seem to do anything except take kids on, often citing the Common Assessment Framework as a multiagency responsibility, which it is, but their lack of action on a child in my responsibility last year resulted in a unplanned teenage pregnancy, because the young person was "co-operating" with the agencies (health & education) involved.

Individual SWs are good, but the systems (& maybe managers on a local level????) hinder what they can & cannot do.

After reading the thread in full I feel I need the help of a social worker. some good opinions ruined by egos baiting with one another. For me its a hell of A job to take on & one I'm not even. Remotely qualified to comment on.on the whole they do a hell of a job from what little I know.

Utter bobbins most of them. In my personal experience I've seen horrific incompetence. Girl in my daughter's nursery class wasn't picked up from school, SS called. SS take three hours to turn up, then leave the kid with a neighbour who happens to be in the front garden a couple of doors down. Meanwhile the mother is being raped and tortured to death in the house they didn't even knock on the door of. Another time, rather than organise a proper place of safety for a child who turned up battered at school, sent the kid home with the school bursar who was pressurised into it as she had sat till after 6pm waiting for someone to drag themselves the two miles from the office since 10am. Another case a child needs a place of safety after parental assault, SS turn up late with nothing organised, asks the abusive parent if they can suggest somewhere. He suggest his mate up the road, SS agree. His mate's children are subject to a child protection order due to neglect, battery and sexual abuse, SS happy to use it as a place of safety. There might be three people in the whole department locally I might trust to even try to do a proper job. Welcome to Doncaster. At least if they sacked the lot and didn't have a service at all, people wouldn't assume the job was done, and the criminal behaviour of abusive parents could be dealt with by the Police as it usually should be.

Don't forget, the managers are struggling to implement the (ever changing) political will of their elected leaders.

MLC, asa result of your concerns, are you now registered as an emergency Foster Carer? Sounds like Donny are in need.

midlifecrashes - 2 issues - Doncaster social services are acknowledged to be failing following the recent cases so hopefully will get sorted out now at last and why did no one turn up? How many staff on duty? How many hours had they worked? its a service struggling to cope with a shortage of staff and those there are demoralised

Finally - is your knowledge direct or hearsay?

Girl in my daughter's nursery class wasn't picked up from school, SS called. SS take three hours to turn up, then leave the kid with a neighbour who happens to be in the front garden a couple of doors down. Meanwhile the mother is being raped and tortured to death in the house they didn't even knock on the door

The mother is being raped and tortured to death in the house ? That must have made the news surely.........have you got a link ?

BTW, I can't believe that it took social services [i]three hours[/i] to turn up when a child wasn't collected from a nursery school 😯

OK, maybe 20 minutes - or even half an hour, but THREE HOURS !

What do these lazy social workers [i]actually do[/i] all day long ..... ffs 😕

.....and as you quite rightly point out, just a simple knock on the front door, would have put a stop to the raping and murdering nonsense.

TJ is your knowledge of ss direct or hearsay?

midlifecrashes - if they had knocked on the correct door I suppose it would have been their job to prevent the alleged rape, torture and death?

One thing that Social Workers have to deal with a lot is other agencies passing on cases or situations to them because of a 'social work might be able to help' attitude, sometimes it seems as if the buck is being passed. Admittedly this may stem from the lack of clarity about just what Social Work's role should be and to be fair joint working seems to be improving.

To lighten to mood a little, and this is totally true by the way, our local SWD has 'Walk On By' as one of the tracks on the telephone hold music, whilst Psychological Services has 'Closest Thing To Crazy'. Incredible, but true.

zeicke - go and do a bit of googling. It's not exactly a secret that Doncaster Social Services has experienced several of the issues that TJ describes with tragic consequences over the last few years.

zeicke - Member

TJ is your knowledge of ss direct or hearsay?

A mix

if they had knocked on the correct door I suppose it would have been their job to prevent the alleged rape, torture and death?

Well maybe not. But if they had at least been bothered to knock on the door, then they would have perhaps been able to identify the rapist murderer after he had opened the front door.

Direct and current TJ. I'm chair of governors of a primary school with a varied catchment. Deputy head spends 75%+ of their time on CP issues, since without that there would be no consistent attendees to core meetings, you never see the same faces twice, and every new face starts at the front of the notes and is never up to speed before they move on. I've spent a lot of time shadowing this work (it's a big commitment for a school and we need to be on top of what happens) and offering support. We've pioneered systems between schools in the area to make sure kids don't fall out of the system as they were doing previously since abusers twigged long ago that moving your kid to a different school made all SS involvement magically disappear since a referral from a new school triggered a new file. We work closely with the SureStart as they have similar issues. If we didn't stay 100% on top of the cases and left it to SS, we know from previous experience preventable harm would occur. We've made the commitment that's not going to happen on our watch. As for the SS management in Doncaster, well there have been some changes at the top, but unfortunately the corruption and incompetence extends so far around Doncaster that it's not somewhere where the good guys want to come to work.

So, after all this, how do you/we/they fix it?
How do we develop, maintain and operate a system of social care that keeps everyone happy?
Given that social workers are considered fair game by the majority of the right wing press, how do we fund it?, given that people are encouraged to think of social workers as either interfering busybodies or ****less do nothings, how do we staff the service?

Given that we expect expect miracles, how do we go on?

The STW keyboard jocks seem to be in full force tonight 🙁

Keep reading the Daily Wail to cultivate your sneering attitude on life in general or as been suggested already, offer to assist those less fortunate than youself.

It's good that we only ever see the bad side of things, you never see the good side, why because it doesn't sell papers, or get the public interest going.
If I could afford to go to uni full time I would happily retrain as a social worker, why? I've seen what a crap one can do or not do as the case may be, and I've also seen some good ones in action, and i'd certainly want to be one of those.

So, after all this, how do you/we/they fix it?

Well midlifecrashes suggests that we scrap social services :

"[i] if they sacked the lot and didn't have a service at all, people wouldn't assume the job was done, and the criminal behaviour of abusive parents could be dealt with by the Police as it usually should be. [/i]"

You can't really argue with that, can you ?

And I bet it wouldn't take the police so long to turn up to a nursery class when a child isn't picked up.......for a start, they've got proper stuff like sirens and blue flashing lights.

Maybe split it up, some under Police some under health authority control, maybe some in education welfare. There are simply too many agencies involved in many of these cases. There is also an overextension of a culture of localism, where national statutory duties don't really need reinterpreting and prioritising at a local level. This might be partly that national government doesn't feel like getting it's hands dirty with messy services like social services, care for the elderly etc. Better for them to delegate this stuff to local level, without adequate funding then they can blame someone else when it goes tits up.

But there's problems with the mental health service as well.

I'm lucky enough to have never had any need to deal with social services at all, however as having no knowledge of a subject is no bar to expressing an opinion on here, then I'll chip in my tuppenceworth.

I strongly suspect that for every horrific case that makes the papers there are another 1000, maybe 10000, where the job is done properly and the kids/adults are helped.

That's not to say mistakes don't happen. They do in every job. I work in IT and we screw up on a regular basis. However when we do we don't have some hysterical tabloid or ill-informed forum poster berating us.

But there's problems with the mental health service as well.

Only in that it's not directly controlled by central government. There is an overextension of a culture of localism. This is because national government doesn't feel like getting it's hands dirty - better for them to delegate this stuff to local level, without adequate funding, then they can blame someone else when it goes tits up.

Bring mental health under the control of the national government, and everything will be just fine.

Midlife crashes - fair enough - and it sounds like you are trying to do your bit. Good for you

Failing depts as Doncaster social services is can be turned round - but it takes time and will. Hopefully getting somne good folk in at the top will be the start.

I think things will be different when Shiny Dave points his blue light sabre into the dark corners of English life.

Once we work out who the deserving poor are, then we can make sure they get what they deserve.

Wow.

I think things will be different when Shiny Dave points his blue light sabre into the dark corners of English life.

Even more localism ? Replace VAT with a local sales tax so town halls can fund themselves ?

[url= http://www.guardian.co.uk/commentisfree/2009/sep/11/michael-white-political-briefing ]Tories learn to love localism[/url]

Not read all of this but some of the work that is done by these people is amazing, as always it is the odd incident that grabs the headlines and all get tarred with the same brush, what about the ones who have to visit on their own, going in to houses that are no-go for the police, gangsters, pimps, drug dealers, every move being watched by some gun toting thug, dealing with ethnic families where beating sh1t out of women and children is a 'family value', dealing with people under threat of honour killing etc, etc - and all this is inevitably handled by an unsupported woman on a very poor wage - my hat goes off to ALL of them and to the thousands of men, women and children that they help

MLC,

I applaud you on your commitment. You seem to be doing more than your fair share.

However, the only "fix" I see for social services and most other parts of society is when lots of other people join in and do their bit too.

OTOH are you not being just a bit unfair if you are linking

Meanwhile the mother is being raped and tortured to death in the house they didn't even knock on the door

with

unfortunately the corruption and incompetence extends so far around Doncaster that it's not somewhere where the good guys want to come to work.

As ernie lynch alluded to, it seems you are blaming some things on SS that aren't actually their fault, or if they are, might well be down to overwork and poor leadership (right from government) rather than corrupt or incompetent individuals.

But given all that, don't you personally feel better for being involved in society and dong something positive?

One of the massive problems we (society) needs to overcome is to get over to people that far from being just a chore, getting involved in community matters is actually rather satisfying.

One of the massive problems we (society) needs to overcome is to get over to people that far from being just a chore, getting involved in community matters is actually rather satisfying.

Let's not bring Tony Blair into it !!!

Ti29er - Member

No, but I can help you with your [b]puncuation[/b].

........it is about time people started helping themselves instead of blaming others

I couldn't agree more.

All these "abused" children - why don't they sort their own bleedin' problems out ?
........ instead of always expecting others to do it for them.

The problem as I see it, is that we have a useless and incompetent government. Plus all social workers are,
as we've discovered, fundamentally evil.

How much better would it be, if the relevant authorities reflected more the level of simple wisdom, and common humanity, which is expressed by so many on here.......

are trying to do your bit. Good for you

People have different experiences and opinions and you think they're wrong because you're employed by the NHS and know-all, but as usual this has been somewhat exploded, again.

This whole SS debate is very much in the public spotlight and it's not working very well.

Very interesting ,everyone of you either works with social workers or has met one,not one has been screwed by them,and not sexually thank god,when they screw you then your whole image of them changes.

30 years ago we didnt have sw we had families and if all else failed prison and asylums and they worked well.

Maybe a bit patronising but I was trying to say that people who try to do their bit to make the world a better place should be aknowledged and thanked.

Whereas people who denigrate and snipe from a position of ignorance should be called to task. Many questions have been asked of you on this thread and you haven't answered one.

Your postings on public services shows the depths of your ignorance. How do you know social services are not working very well? How about the 40% reduction in murders of children?

Your ignorance, arrogance and stupidity is breathtaking. Its an unpleasant and dangerous combination.

30 years ago we didnt have sw we had families and if all else failed prison and asylums and they worked well.

yeah right ! No child abuse back in the 80s was there. No children being killed by their families. Most child abuse and murders are committed by family members.

30 years ago ......... we had ........ asylums and they worked well.

Well you know who to blame for getting rid of them.

They weren't needed as 'Care in the Community' would deal with all the problems.

Hopefully it's already been said...Social services are well under-resourced and roles such as child protection are extremely stressful & wearing not to mention thankless.

Of course the OP et all wouldn't be "daily Fail"-style moaning if their taxes went up to pay for better services 🙄

Well you know who to blame for getting rid of them.

They weren't needed as 'Care in the Community' would deal with all the problems.

Isn't that an urban myth - long stay psychiatric facilities started closing well before the care in the community act, in the 60s, 70s & 80s.

Not that asylums have anything to do with it though, surely the vast majority of abuse is carried out by supposedly sane people?

Joe

explain why 40% reduction in murders of children has anything to do with social services please

Also, whatever you think of social services, as we've seen in Ireland recently, they are probably a lot better than farming it out to an church (or another organisation with absolutely no accountability and massive power).

Joe