A new TV campaign is being launched to encourage people to take up – or return to – the social work profession. Not surprisingly, the recent string of distressing and high profile child abuse cases has made even the most dedicated social workers think twice about their choice of career. The problem, as Children’s Secretary Ed Balls said recently, is that “It is a job that makes a difference in ways that most of us can only begin to imagine,” but its success stories are “rarely heard”. The ‘Help Give Them a Voice’ campaign aims to counter the negative effect of publicity given to cases such as that of Baby P, by attracting more than 5,000 new social work recruits to the profession. This will certainly be a challenge – albeit one worth undertaking.
Of course social work is not the only one of the “helping” professions to suffer from such problems. Teachers lives can be changed forever by accidents that take place on school trips, or by the abusive behaviour of pupils in the classroom. The police face unique pressures when they respond to demonstrations and terror alerts, illustrated by the criticism and injuries suffered by those policing at the recent G20 demonstrations. I recently wrote about the health challenges facing front-line staff in the NHS, which for many includes working long hours and making life-and-death decisions while coping with constant exhaustion.
Of course, it’s essential that those we trust with our lives should be held to account when things go wrong, and there’s no doubt that the media play an important role in achieving this. But as Ed Balls says, it is so often these negative stories that grab the headlines, while even the most dramatic successes go unreported. The questions facing the new social work campaign, and others like it, are how to appeal to those who might consider entering one of the key worker professions and how to overcome the doubts raised by all the negative publicity surrounding them.
To answer these questions, the government will no doubt have been thinking about what attracts people to these professions. Edgar Schein’s excellent work on Career Anchors provides some useful insights here, with the idea that for each of us there is one core driver that needs to be satisfied for us to be fully engaged and happy with our work. There’s no doubt that the career anchor of “Service/Dedication to a Cause” is a core driver for many people who enter key worker professions, although given what I’ve been talking about here, the anchor of “Pure Challenge” might be more easily satisfied by these roles! We also need to understand the pressures created by these jobs, so we can support key workers to improve the way they manage them personally, but also the way that the organisation manages pressure for their staff. Putting ourselves in the shoes of potential key workers won’t solve this difficult problem, but it’s a good place to start. Managers and key workers must find a way to work together to make these critical jobs more fulfilling and therefore more attractive to new recruits.
Great article. And if we just reflect on the ‘long hours” that a social worker has to be prepared to undertake we see that it reflects on the ‘long hours’ that parents or as is often the case ‘the lone parent’, has to undertake or endure, we begin to see a picture emerge, of social workers trying to service already overworked, overstressed, overstretched budgetwise group of parents and children. To make the job of social workers easier, we need to make the work of parents easier so that fewer social problems emerge.
Parenting classes in school would be a great start, helping children to see “parenting” as a career choice and not just a byproduct of a social life. If Parenting were studied as an essential ‘Career choice” and parenting put under the scrutiny of Stress studies, more aids to good parenting practice would emerge.
For me as a former lone parent of two children, the greatest stress was not the low budget parenting but the LONG hours, the 24/7 on duty call, and the no holidays or sick leave. The only reason these are NOT factored into the social welfare schemes for lone parents is because lone parents are not seen as “working” despite the long hours and the very obvious ‘work” and responsibilities. If parenting were seen as a “career option”, then the study of the Care day could take lplace and I believe that the Long hours would be the first system that would come under scrutiny and something would be done about it. Perhaps a lone parent would be given a subsititute carer for a few hours a day and perhaps given a day off a week.
I guess no Government would like to undertake this idea seeing Parents as “working” because we do have laws in place in the workforce that protect workers from long hours and 24/7 shifts ….. So a lone parent would probably be entitled to a permanent Nanny to reduce his/her daily shifts to two 12 hour shifts. And if sick leave were enforced, again more nannies would be needed to stand in when a lone parent is ill.
But the repercussions for the Profession of Social Worker would be enormous, because so many of the problems they encounter at the danger level would be dealt with at a much earlier point in time. And it would be nice for Social Workers to be helping parents to cope, along the long road of parenting, rather than having to mop up after years of stressful parenting leads to abuse or crime.
15 years of Lone Parenting has led me to chronic illness, but I know it is due to stress. When I look back over the years of parenting, I can see that 24/7, 365 days a year is Inhuman and even degrading …it is not good for the parent, having no social life and no time out, but it is also not good for children to see a parent treated so badly. Even in two parent families, if one parent does not share the load, it is bad for the children as they grow up with little respect the parent who bears the brunt of the responsiliity. I have spoken to many parents who say they share the care of children but when I put it to them that each parent has 89 hours a week responsibility for the care of children …they often admit that they dont take on all those hours but leave most of it to the stay at home parent.
One solution I see is to offer a salary and status to the Stay at home parent, but only for a 50 hour week, 8 to 6, five days a week. This delineates the “work” day, and then all the rest of the hours, 118 are the equal responsibility of both parents and are voluntary. This idea would eliminate poverty amongst families and particularly lone and separated parents. It is already accepted that where two parents go out to work, the Childcare day 8 to 6, IS work, and a nanny or crechecare worker IS working, recognised and paid.
Just ideas .. that sprang from your article ! Thank you