Centre for Social Work Practice

Centre for Social Work Practice

London Regional Group

March 1st 2011

Professional confidence: How we lost it, how to find it, how to keep it…

Andrew Cooper

It’s about justice…

I wrote the first version of this evening’s talk in November 2010 when the present coalition government were well bedded down, but before the radical shape of their political and economic programme had become clear. Towards the end of that version of the talk I made reference to the idea that a confident profession would know how to orientate itself to the politics of the period we are in. But to my mind his question – how should, or how can, social work respond to current developments now assumes much greater urgency. Writing in yesterday’s Guardian, John Harris gets it right when he speaks of ‘not just cuts, but the most far-reaching attempt to remodel British society in 60 years, undertaken with speed, and with a breathtaking disregard for what was offered to the country only months ago’.

The coalition does not want to destroy welfare, but it does want to destroy the welfare state or anything resembling it. Their plan is to burn to the ground most of what we have in place – our sophisticated if imperfect system of state funded or state sponsored health and social care provision developed over 50 years – and promote something different – the so called Big Society - to emerge in the larger social spaces that will surround a drastically shrunken state at both national and local level. I believe the model they have in mind is what you see in the more right wing American states, and I will tell you a little of my limited experience of this later.

So, we should make no mistake. We are witnessing a revolution, or as John Harris’s calls it ‘a polite kind of coup’ and as he adds, the most amazing thing is that ‘we are sleepwalking into it’. Against this backcloth, our profession’s history of struggle with its own identity, and its lack of collective self-confidence, may turn out to be a distraction we can’t afford to indulge in, but equally, perhaps not. Maybe it renders the more detailed analysis I offer of our difficulty in believing in ourselves the more relevant and urgent. I will leave you to judge this in the end.

So, professional confidence – it’s a big subject. Before setting out in more detail what I will talk about this afternoon, I want to dive straight in. I think that in a host of different ways the problem of professional confidence in social work is ultimately about justice and injustice. Let me explain. I began thinking about how social work is afflicted by a sense of professional under-confidence at about the same time as a lot of other people began to give voice to the idea that we must work to be a more confident profession. I can pinpoint the moment almost exactly. It was two years ago in December just gone. This is what happened for me.

It was the first week of December 2008, and the Baby P crisis was at its absolute height. The Sun had mobilised its mob petition, Ed Balls was about to sack Sharon Shoesmith, the media was hungrily fuelling the blame culture. It was eight in the morning and I had just dropped my son at his childminder and was driving to work. On Radio 4 John Humphreys was interviewing (I think) Christine Gilbert, Chief Executive of OFSTED. He was challenging her, challenging OFSTED’s record, suggesting they were not blameless in all this – after all they had they not just given Haringey a clean bill of health? Out of nowhere someone was fighting a different corner – just a little. Suddenly, I experienced a surge of anger. In retrospect it felt like about 30 years of repressed protest: ‘Stop attacking social work and social workers. Stop scapegoating us. Stop bullying us. Whatever mistakes may or may not have been made, the treatment being meted out to social work by the press, by government, by OFSTED, is unjust. And injustice is damaging – to all sides, perpetrators, victims, bystanders.

Somewhere in me my sense of injustice had already been stirring. I had submitted an article to a national newspaper – clear in its stance, but also very reasoned and reasonable I think. But reason was suddenly no longer enough. I felt it was time to fight. The sense of fight carried me through that week, and I needed it. The article provoked a number of requests for radio and TV appearances, and at times I found myself on air and on TV alongside some incredibly stupid people. This is what happens in the interests of media ‘balance’! Quite eminent people, some of them, but as I kept reminding myself, people who really did not know what they were talking about when it came to social work, child abuse or child protection. Whereas I, I again reminded myself, did know and needed to be confident in this. And I needed my anger, my sense of injustice, to sustain this confidence.

So, that, in nutshell is one set of linkages I am proposing today. Confidence, righteous anger, a clear sense of justice and injustice; they go together. I was tempted to say to you at this point – well that’s it. That’s enough from me – let’s just discuss for the rest of the time we’ve got, because you all know at least as much about this topic as I do, and I’m sure have just as much to say if the opportunity were granted to you. But I thought that might not justify my fee, and like all hard pressed public sector agencies at the moment my organisation needs the money. Besides, there is more. I will tell you one other story from that week that evoked a different set of feelings and thoughts.

At the height of the ‘Baby P’ crisis the public domain felt to me unusually volatile, as though there was a chance that government might do something truly panic-stricken and damaging to the social work profession, or that the vigilante climate might result in the murder or suicide of one of the social work staff involved. On the other hand, the article I wrote suggested that some people who abuse, torture and murder children need to carry on doing this. They are expelling something intolerable, dangerous, and murderous in themselves into someone else, and might be severely destabilised in themselves if stopped. They also usually know what they are doing, and that it is a dreadful crime. For them, the stakes could not be higher in relation to those people – social workers – charged with recognising and naming what is happening. This exceptionally powerful and primitive work with really dangerous abusers, and the vulnerable children in their care, is not the everyday experience of all child protection staff, but it is a permanent shadow cast across the work by the fact of that society – like all societies – does have some very dangerous people living in its midst. To make matters more complicated all of these dangerous people themselves have dreadful histories that explain, if we do not think they excuse their behaviour towards children.

When social work is accused of ‘failing’, I tend to think that the charge is really that we have failed at a certain point to shield the general public from awareness of those very realities that we do succeed, most of the time, in protecting people from having to contemplate. But maybe a bigger proportion of the public understand this than we imagine is the case. During the week I am talking about, the most intelligent conversation I felt I had was with a London cab driver. I was on my way to a radio interview and we got talking about the subject. I was a trifle apprehensive, London cabbies not being always well known for their liberal views. But he said, ‘I can’t read about that case in the papers – it’s too distressing…I couldn’t do that job, I wouldn’t be able to sleep at night’. He laughed a little nervously and looked at me in the mirror, and said ‘I suppose I wouldn’t have been a very good social worker’. Well, this is one thing social workers do at a societal level – help people sleep at night, not because we are defending the realm against communists, terrorists or insurgents, but because we are protecting people from the emotional impact of intolerable knowledge - about the torture or murder of babies that may be happening just down the street from where each of us lives.

That idea – that we perform a kind of psychological task on behalf of society is one I will return to. More immediately, I have to say that when I tell this little story, I often find myself wanting to cry. I think it’s because I was taken by surprise once again, that out of nowhere, someone seemed to understand. To put it as concisely as I can, how can you have confidence as a profession, if you don’t feel, or believe, that you are understood and loved – even just a little bit? It’s hard to imagine as a person that this would be possible. Are we as a profession loved, admired, revered, praised, understood, accepted even? I’m not sure we much feel we are a lot of the time. But without this how can we find a proper sense of self love, or to put it better professional self worth, self esteem? What does it take?

What does it take? A summary

And all of that brings me to the start. I want to propose that it takes the following, at least:

A recognition that issues of professional confidence are both external and internal to the profession, and very much about the interaction between the two – which is to say about what happens at the ‘boundary’ between us and the rest of society, and between us and our colleagues from other disciplines.

A recognition that we need a proper theory for ourselves, a story that makes sense of who we are as social workers and what we do for the society we are embedded in. This is not a simple matter.

A recognition that we need sound methodologies for actually doing our work with people. It is shocking to have to say that I don’t believe we really possess these or teach them on our trainings. I think we are the only profession laying claim to the status of a profession that suffers from this lack. How this came about is something I will discuss briefly.

Without a confident sense of how we can intervene in the world, I think our sense of identity is fatally weakened. I believe we abandoned faith in methods of doing social work with people about 30 years ago, and filled the resultant hole with something we call values. We need our values – absolutely we do – but they cannot do the job of conducting ourselves effectively to facilitate change in people’s circumstances and relationships, any more than taking the Hippocratic oath provides a heart surgeon with the skills she or he needs. Identity is by no means entirely given by what you ‘do’, but we all know how hard we find it to answer the question – what do social workers actually do?

And we need professional leadership, embedded within strong independent institutions that represent our interests and the unusually, exceptionally complex set of roles and tasks we perform. I hope we are making progress here through the work of the Reform Board and the College. Without strong representative institutions leadership is reduced to isolated acts of public defiance, protest, self-justification and so on. Despite lacking the robust social legitimation that other professions often seem to enjoy, I don’t think senior figures in our profession – including academics like me - have served our cause as well as they might in recent decades, in promoting, defending and explaining ourselves to the wider world.

Outside In…Inside Out

So, I begin with the interaction between the professional interior and the social exterior. The best account I know of how this works is in a very good book written 20 years ago called ‘Making Sense of Social Work: Psycho-dynamics and Systems in Practice’ (Preston-Shoot and Agass, 1990). It’s a few pages in a chapter called ‘Downward Spirals and Double Binds’.

. I believe it’s important to grasp a basic distinction – between what might be called the ‘reality’ of the social, familial and personal situations social workers engage with – and the arena of public and private anxieties, fantasies, myths, projections and defences against facing these realities. Social work is charged, like it or not, with managing the uneasy tension between these arenas on behalf of society. Abuse and abusers exist. Poverty exists, organised and institutional racism exist. Controversy and disagreement about these matters are partly political and ideological, but also what I call psycho-social , a function of collective dynamics of denial, turning a blind eye, amnesia. It is this level of things that I believe we find it harder to contend with as a profession. On this view, social work exists to perform a dual social function – for example, to actually prevent or protect children from maltreatment and neglect, but also to relieve the rest of society from the anxiety of thinking about these things, or as I thought my taxi driver was implying, to help everyone sleep at night safe in the belief that ‘someone else is dealing with it’. As we know, eruptions of public anxiety about single cases of child death bear no relationship to the everyday realities of either our success in protecting children or our failures to do so. Strangely, even at the height of a crisis like that surrounding Baby Peter Connelly, no-one was much interested in the fact that about 40 or 50 children die at the hands of their carers each year in this country, many more are seriously harmed, and all of these the subject to intense retrospective scrutiny through the Serious Case Review process. This is Preston-Shoot and Agass’s rather abstract way of representing this uneasy boundary between the realm of practice realities and the realm of social anxiety and fantasy:

Society is full of sources (and representations) of anxiety, threat and disturbance for the general population. These representations also resonate with people’s fears about themselves (who hasn’t at some point felt uncontrollably angry with their own children or partner, tempted to steal, fearful and blaming towards strangers or minorities etc). This evokes an ambivalent response towards those agencies charged with responding to social problems – on the one hand moral indignation, outrage, demands that these matters are ‘dealt with’ or at least put out of sight and mind; and idealisation of the same agencies in so far as they are felt to be succeeding in their task. Social work can internalise this idealising script, and unconsciously we find it difficult to set realistic limits to its aims, objectives and capacities. So long as the defensive social function of social work is broadly effective, the wider society can remain oblivious (we can sleep at night untroubled by thoughts about crime or child abuse happening down our street), but this idealisation is wafer thin and collapses in the face of evidence of ‘failure’, exposing people to fears they hardly know they have most of the time. The public and government turns on social work, punishing it with disproportionate vehemence, beating it back into line. We try harder and harder to ‘get it right’, but driven now by unrealistic expectations of ourselves and fear of public and political opprobrium. But the failures and tragedies keep happening and the whole cycle sets off again…demoralisation and loss of confidence is the insidious outcome.

It can be hard to disentangle and distinguish this dynamic from what we might call ‘realistic’ appraisal of our performance – how much responsibility should we take for ‘mistakes’, how fair are OFSTED’s judgements? What exactly are reasonable expectations of social work? I don’t have a clear answer to this question. But what I am proposing is that we have all need to be thinking about this difficult boundary all the time – and one task of organisational and professional leadership is located at this boundary, defending and protecting our sense of self-worth without resorting to complacency, defensive denial or professional arrogance.

I think Eileen Munro’s review of child protection is attempting to address this dimension of the problems afflicting our system and our profession. She has established a sub-group to examine media relations and public understanding with respect to child protection work, and is engaging with government about this. Nothing harms our cause as much as politicians standing up in the wake of another tragedy and declaring they are about to put in place measures to ensure that this never happens again. Eileen Munro’s reports are explicit that this destructive notion needs to be challenged.

In systemic terms it is about ‘punctuating’ or interrupting the cyclical, self-replicating nature of this ‘spiral’ and mobilising a different and more reality based set of connections and perceptions that link society, social work and the difficult nature of our social tasks. A confident profession would feel better able to take on this job of challenging the myths and unreal expectations that are visited on us, especially when we are deemed to have ‘failed’.