Changing Laws Policies And Economical Ideologies Impact On Social Work Practice And Service Users

The death of Victoria Climbie in February 2000 prompted a large and thorough review of UK child protection services, led by Lord Laming. This highlighted the importance of multi-agency working and information sharing in order to protect children and prevent them from coming to harm. As a result, a number of reforms came about as recommended in various publications and updated legislation. Organisations, both paid and unpaid, are joining together to work more cooperatively towards a preventative and early intervention agenda.

Utilising theories of human behaviour and social systems, social work intervenes at the point where people interact with their environment. Principles of human rights and social justice are fundamental to social work’. Social work origins arise from the effects of a change to an industrial sociality and increasing impact and focus upon poverty. However it is argued that current social work practice, as illustrated by the broad definition of social work by the IFSW, finds itself expected to address wider social issues such as racism, sexism, and discrimination relating to physical or mental ability. Furthermore social work itself has changed from its origins of a charity style response to social problems of poverty. Banks (1995, p1) argues that the changes to social work have introduced different roles for different purposes of ’redistribution of resources to those in need... social control and rehabilitation of the deviant’ Banks further argues that as social work changes, the emphasis is less upon a helping relationship and more on the distribution of resources and on social control.

The role of the Social worker is varied as it involves the facilitation of change and empowerment of the individual through social, cultural and environmental influences. Between 1910 and 1970, the role of the social worker was significant due to the impact of the Stolen Generation on Australian society. The Stolen Generation was a dark period in the Australian history where many Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander children were often taken without consent from their homes and families by the government, police and welfare authorities. The children were taken from their homes in order to try to ‘"civilize" them by assimilation into white society’ (McCarthy 2000). The impacts of this period often resulted in severe psychological consequences for the children, the loss of identity, social isolation, depression, alcohol abuse and an increased level of violence. The role of the Social Worker was significant during this period as they were often involved with removing children from their homes and were also required to participate in the reconciliation process to improve the relationships between Indigenous peoples and the wider Australian community. One of the lasting effects of this practice is the distrust of indigenous people towards the social welfare profession.

1.3 Analyse how national and local guidelines, policies and procedures for safeguarding affect day-to-day work with children and young people

This essay will focus on how contemporary social workers work to balance the competing demand of care and control. It will start by outlining the nature of the contemporary social work and what it is like and how it works within society. The discussion will then move on to look at and discuss the key professional values of social work practitioners and analyse its relationship to their own personal values, this will also bring into account how these values and views influenced the relationship a social worker can have with both service users and other agencies. Lastly it will explore the range of challenges and dilemmas that are faced by social work practitioners in everyday practice when it comes to trying to balance the demand of care and control and how they work to overcome these problems in order to ensure an effective and fair service to all who avail of it.

In recent times safeguarding of children has once again come under spotlight with cases such as Madline McKan and the horrific murders of Jessica Chapman and Holly Wells. Prior to this the Children’s act of 1984 and updated 2004 version highlighted that all professionals have an obligation to report suspected abuse. There was a public inquiry in 2000 to address the failure of the law which was not upholding the protection of vulnerable children. There was changes to the legislation and the government set up The Every Child Maters (ECM) initiative. This works in line with current legislation Working Together to Safeguard Children 2006 Act. This Act authorised guidance on how organisations and individuals should work together to safeguard and promote the welfare of children and young people in accordance with the Children Act 1989 and the Children Act 2004. All organisations must have the succeeding policies and procedures:

Neoliberalism began in the 1970’s and 1980’s after advocates supported the economic liberalization policies such as the rule of the market, cutting public expenditure for social services, deregulation, privatization, and eliminating the concept of the public good. Neoliberalism has had a significant affect on social work practice over the decades. There are strategies social workers as well as individuals can use to challenge neoliberalism.

This essay will attempt to critically examine the importance of interagency working in the safeguarding and protection of children and young people in the UK. It will consider both the challenges and how these have or might be overcome. It will look at key government legislation in respect to child welfare and pay particular note to high profile cased where interagency working has appeared to be less that effective in maintaining safeguards for vulnerable children, in particular. Consideration will be given to models of working that support interagency collaboration and of how some of these models may have been implemented in current

In the 1970’s, England, Wales and Scotland the policy-makers focused ‘on developing mechanisms by which health and local authorities jointly planned services.’ (Hultberg, E.-L., et al. 2005) In the 1990’s attention focused on the ‘introduction of initiatives e.g. intermediate care services, conceived to improve the coordination of services in order to better the support available’ (Vaughan, B. and Lathlean, J. 1999) With policy favouring multi-disciplinary development, this would bring implications for the structure and practice of social work.

All of the policies and procedures by which I work are defined by The Children's Act 1989 which legislates for England and Wales. All our Safeguarding measures, Health and Safety policies and Child protection procedures must follow the relevant legislations. As a children’s residential home we have to follow The National Minimum Standards too and it is these

Children Act 2004 section 11 states which professional and agencies have to safeguard and promote welfare. ‘’local authorities, councils, public health, NHS foundation and trust, Policing body, crime agency, college, and any person to the extent that he is providing services.’’ (Legislation.gov.uk)

One of the criticisms of technocratic ideology is that it tends to exclude other ways of improving the skills of the workforce, for example, through staff development initiatives. History exemplifies that child protection policy and practice reform, predominantly have been shaped and driven by ideology and less so by research-based evidence Gray, Plath, & Webb, 2009; Sholnsky & Stern (2007). According to Gillingham, (2014) the explanation for this occurrence is that choosing research base evidence over ideology in policy and service practice reform is not always a simple and easy task to achieve and can result as history has shown in wrong causes of action taken and inadequate service provision, however, although it's useful to be aware of the challenging nature of using research base evidence and needs, be considered it should not be a deterrent for policy makers not to use research base evidence when creating reform.

Within the department of Social Services all the roles are in a hierarchy system. At the bottom of the system is where a service user would make first contact with the department. This is where the service user would be assessed to deem whether the potential user is eligible to receive help and to which department would offer the service user the most appropriate help, for instance whether they would benefit from being referred to the mental health team or another relevant department. It is important that the first assessment is carried out thoroughly in order for the service user to get the help they need if they are vulnerable and if there are any safeguarding issues. The structure of a social services department is organised in such a way that there are specialist teams available to deal with various issues that affect service users. If someone has a mental health problem they will be able to receive specialist help from the mental health team, who will liaise with other professionals within the mental health sector such as psychiatrists and community mental health nurses, so that the service user can access all the available resources available and receive a positive outcome to their experience. The children and family’s department will be able to offer specialist help in supporting parents and children to stay together or if needs be intervention and safeguarding. These social workers will have specialist knowledge of how to interact with children and their families to

Following the death of Denis O’Neil at the hands of his foster parents in 1945 and the Curtis report in 1946, that investigated the welfare of looked after children , the parliament passed the Children Act 1948 which created local authorities’ children’s services to take responsibility for children in care . This was coherent with the after War period of the welfare state and the idea of widen welfare services and allowances . In 1952, after lobbying by children’s departments workers representatives for a more preventive work , the Children and Young Persons (Amendment) Act extended the duties of local authorities to investigate any cases of alleged abuse or neglect . This responsibility was further extended in 1963 by the Children and Young Persons Act. The act placed a duty on local authorities to provide preventive services to families to avoid the entrance of children into care and to reduce the time spent in care.

In this essay I will be acknowledging the historical development of class, searching back over centuries and I will also be discussing how this ideological construct has influenced and impacted contemporary social work practice in Britain.