#whatwedo

Perhaps it’s a bit if an indictment about me and what I find exciting but I am very excited by the #whatwedo event on Twitter today. In case you don’t know all of Scotland’s local authorities are taking part in a one day exercise where they will tweet about what they do. For someone who has an interest in the power of social media I feel that this is an exciting and worthwhile event.

My own local authority like almost has a Twitter feed. It is used as far as I can see to make announcements and as a platform to share information. If your dog gets lost and you live in the same place as me check Twitter because it is likely to be on it. During the storms last year my kids were glued to it to find out if their school was open or closed.

Some of the local councillors tweet, one in particular will share relevant information from the council as well as advertising his surgeries and sharing what he does on a day to day basis. Perhaps not interesting for some but for others this insight into the work of a councillor is invaluable in letting the electorate know exactly what he does. Wouldn’t it be equally interesting if individual Chief Executive’s and Director’s of departments did so as well?

I strongly believe that Twitter is much more than an announcement platform. The Third Sector and in some cases some social entrepreneurs seem to have captured the market in using Twitter in increasingly more imaginative ways. Social Media Week in Glasgow provided powerful evidence of a vibrant social media community that is making great advances in sharing and generating new and informative ways of engaging using the internet. Let’s hope we can capitalise on the momentum.

Equally let’s hope that today’s event is rendered more worthwhile by being part of a longer term strategy for local authorities to engage with social media in different and exciting ways. Understandably local authorities need to be mindful about the sensitivity of information that they deal with as well as being able to ensure that what goes out on social media is “safe” but it does seem that these considerations can hamper local authorities in their use of a dynamic and exciting new means of communication.

Twitter seemed to me to reach a high point during the general election with political parties seeing the value of this form of engagement, some MP’s are regular’s on Twitter (Cathy Jamieson and Tom Watson) while some organisations and individuals are pushing hard for Twitter to have a greater use in dealing with those who are in receipt of particular council services

For me Twitter offers another opportunity for engagement for those who find engagement a challenge, local authorities need to embrace this method of engagement and communication in a more sophisticated way rather than using it solely as another platform for making announcements. The possibilities are endless but if councils make information available to Twitter and encourage debate and conversation using this medium I cannot see how this could be anything other than a valuable and exciting development in how councils work with and share their approaches with the residents of their area.

Finally in my own field of social work the possibilities are there to be exploited. Local authorities need to develop meaningful social media policies that start form a strengths based approach and do not get bogged down in issues around governance and information sharing protocol, to do so would detract from what is a powerful and exciting opportunity that is there to be exploited.

Removing my own blinkers

Removing my own blinkers

I worked in local authority children and families Social Work for the best part of twenty years.  Just over a year ago I moved and became a lecturer and I still can’t quite believe the changes that this has made both to me and to the profession I work in. There are many personal changes that will at some point form a blog but for now I want to look at one of the professional changes that I have experienced. For the sake of brevity it will be generalised but I think and hope most people will see what I am driving at and as always I welcome any comment or views.

Statutory services like Children and Families and Mental Health have the primary role to play in some form of societal enforcement, when I was younger I remember the term “soft police” being used to describe these activities; the removal of children on emergency measures and the detention of adults with mental health difficulties are two obvious examples of the work of statutory services. Legislation does allow for others to make these choices but in all of my own time in social work it was always the statutory services who took these actions.

I had and have no problem with this. I have taken people’s children off them. I have instigated detention procedures. I have been out with the police in risky and dangerous circumstances and like a lot of social workers I have spent a lot of professional time in police stations, courts and prisons. That was my job (and might be again) and I accepted it and to some extent became inured with it. But most importantly and for the purposes of this blog entry I realise now that this was what I thought social work was.

Since coming here I have visited and learned about a variety of resources that provide services to vulnerable and needy groups. Charities, local organisations, and churches all provide us with student placements and I have visited and been involved in many of these. In the process of doing so I have came to realise that I was somewhat blinkered by my role in a local authority. I now feel that I can see a much broader and wider scope of services and I feel much more positively about what I have seen.

Excuse my generalisations but what I seem to be becoming aware of is that the statutory sector are involved much more in the delivery of the “soft police” services. Children and families work appears to me to be dominated by notions of risk and protection and in the current economic climate work is prioritised on the basis of risk. For some social workers the only thing that is allocated to them is child or adult protection. Services are delivered in conjunction with partners in this area and social workers seem to be spending more and more time with the police delivering services that are by nature short term.

Again, and I am generalising, the third sector seem to be developing along a different direction of travel. Some of the most innovative and exciting work I have seen in a long time is being ushered in and with the onset of personalisation service users are given greater opportunities for choice than they have had for some time. It seems that with this a blurring of a boundary has occurred. For me I am not sure where “social care” stops and “social work” begins.

Innovation and creativity are in a short enough supply. The economic crisis has seen to that. The guarantee of resources for statutory services is that they deliver high level risk and protection services. In doing so they must (and should) work to well developed and rigorously produced guidelines. These dovetail with an increased degree of personal regulation as demanded by the various codes of conduct.

This “top slicing” leaves any other service “up for grabs” and the third sector has not been slow at coming forward and moving onto the ground recently vacated by the statutory sector. While this changing of geography is all a part of public service we should be aware of the risks involved and we should I feel be having a greater and more public discussion and debates around its merits and risks.

Finally I have a nagging worry. If and it is a big “if” the statutory sector ever gets an increased period of growth what will it grow into? It seems to me that it has given up so much ground it has created a niche market that it might struggle to break out of. I know that this shift has been as a part of the various reviews around the country but I do feel that the statutory sector is in danger of becoming the “protection profession” Losing some of the ground may have some short term benefits but it remains to be seen if there is any long term thinking involved.

Re stating the obvious but doing it differently

Re stating the obvious but doing it differently

I know that what I am about to write might be familiar to many of you but I thought I would share this for two reasons. One is that although familiar it is still worth an airing and secondly I feel that using this blog, and Twitter to get it out into the public space is what blogging and tweeting is all about.

On Wednesday I was at a pre placement meeting for a second year Masters student in a community care team in a large Scottish local authority. It was an ideal placement, the student is doing their dissertation on direct payments and wanted a placement like this to link all the final year strands. The practice teacher was an independent and had worked as a senior social worker in community care in the same local authority for many years and the link worker was a very experienced social worker.

During the meeting we were discussing the importance of a second placement student being able to identify some of the organisational and cultural aspects of the placement and link these to the theory and practice. The link worker illustrated this using an example of a resource allocation group, she told the student there were weekly RAG’s as the demand for residential placements was high. The meetings used to be on a weekly basis but nursing homes were not prepared to wait. If they had beds and social workers were delayed in accessing the RAG the beds they wanted were given away so the RAG moved to a weekly basis to prevent beds being given away in this manner.

We discussed how this could be linked to the increasing marketisation of social work and bemoaned the bureaucratic nature of the profession, this led to the practice teacher reminding us all of the bygone days of resource transfer monies  (the monies NHS gave to local authorities to provide non hospital care based care packages) there was a warm glow in the room recalling these salad days and a sense of annoyance at where we were at now.

Of course these reminiscences were definitely of the rose tinted variety and there were challenges and issues then, perhaps the power of the private sector now was about our own willingness to commission them then and we are now reaping the benefits of paying that particular piper. There are other considerations about the “then” as well but that is straying from the point.

Just before going out to his meeting I was looking at a paper written by Arthur Midwinter around the time of local government re-organisation in Scotland. In it he quoted Iain Laing the then Secretary of State for Scotland who was promoting the shift away from Strathclyde Regional Council to smaller ”unitary” authorities. One of the arguments he was advancing was that the move to local authorities would decrease buearocracy and increase choice for service users and social workers (carers were not as prominent then but he would have meant them as well)

Considering that view now makes for some interesting thoughts. Weekly RAG’s? Care homes giving beds away on the basis of occupancy rates as opposed to “need” the complicated arrangements between care purchaser and providers? The dynamic of registration, inspection and ongoing professional development for workers? The economies of scale argument? All of these issues suggest to me that the development of new policy approaches inevitably bring with them the development of new arrangements to support and implement them. Unitary smaller authorities will (also) inevitably develop particular arrangements to support these based on the political, social and geographic make up of the authorities.

And now finally here is my point and indeed the point of writing this particular blog entry. The advancement of localism in all its forms contains a threat that workers become “localised” and become experts in the local environments that they operate within. This approach undoubtedly has its strengths but a potential weakness is that workers lose a big picture approach. The critical debates that go on in one particular local area will be similar to the debates in others and there is to me a risk that workers become insular. That is where this form of media offers real possibilities. My own increased blogging activity has come about as I feel there is a need to advance some of these debates and this platform is ideal for doing so.

At the end of the meeting I felt disappointed that I could offer no solution to the creeping increase in privatised, market led services or the increase in the process developed to support and possibly promote these approaches, if anyone can offer any insights I would love to hear them. What I could do was use this blog to raise them and encourage others to join the debate. In this case social media offers a powerful global engagement tool that can counteract some of the negative elements of localism.

Whatever happened to the protest and the rage?

Whatever happened to the protest and the rage?

Yesterday’s teaching for our new level 1 student’s focussed on technology.  I was developing with the students the theme of how social media can contribute to social work practice. In doing so I was encouraging them to discover and follow blogs written by social workers. This idea seemed to go down well, perhaps because it allows an insight into the profession and let’s people training to be social workers see what being a social worker is actually like. This was what I wanted to achieve, to allow students the chance to look in and interact with professionals.

Today it is ethics and values. We are introducing the concept of traditional and emancipatory values and we will spend the best part of this academic year exploring this topic with students. Our aim is at least in part to allow students the opportunity to locate themselves and their own value base and link it to the concept of values and ethics. I see a real link between these two subjects and if students take my advice and follow a social work blog they should be able to develop links using social media as a platform to develop their learning. If they do I will be very pleased. Social media is a wonderful platform for this type of activity and it is readily accessible for all of our students.

Reflecting on social media’s role I feel that perhaps we have some way to go to establish our own ethical approach to social media and its potential uses. Last night I engaged in a brief but interesting twitter debate discussing the role of managerialism in direct payments and in community care in general. We were expressing some concern that the initial laudable idea of direct payments was becoming entangled in an increasingly bureaucratic process that was in turn influenced by the registration and inspection process.

Interesting debate? Yes, but also risky. More risky for some than others. I do not work for a local authority so it is unlikely there would be any come back for me. Other’s did. Perhaps the local authorities would be happy for staff to engage in such a debate and would be interested in their opinions and views. Perhaps also they would be willing to take on some of the criticisms to look at how they needed to alter or change their approach. I hope they would be but I suspect that their (at least initial) reaction would not be so welcoming

I imagine they would be concerned over the public nature of such a debate, over the risk of a compromise of their identity or indeed a risk that service users would be identifiable. All of these concerns would be fair and reasonable and I hope they would be carefully considered before a response was given. Social media is ideal for such debates, anonymity is in this sense helpful in allowing the debate to flourish. My worry is that a lot of local authorities and indeed other organisations have not arrived at a definitive position on the use of social media in engaging in critical analysis of service provision and delivery. It is then likely that their immediate reaction would be defensive and would place staff that use social media in a risky position.

Surely a profession such as social work would see the value in social media for engaging in debate? I would hope so but there are factors that mitigate against this. I do not think I am alone in feeling that the regulation and inspection of services has in some cases stifled creativity and imagination. As has the financial retrenchment that organisations have experienced, there is a prevailing culture of risk aversion in organisations. This mixed with the (valid) concerns over possible compromises in confidentiality is a challenge for organisations.

Social media is a valuable tool that fits well with the ethical background and values bases of our profession we need to embrace it and develop its use.

This blog entry is dedicated to Vic.

Inspired by Monster

Inspired by Monsters

I have decided to be more diligent with this blog. Up until now I have been blogging about a variety of subjects that catch my attention and to be honest I feel that I should be doing much more and blogging more regularly.

This change of heart has been motivated by two events. One is the regular @monstertalk blog. The thoughts and observations of a practising social worker come on a daily basis. Anyone reading it can’t fail to be impressed by the content of the blog and the regularity of its production. The second event was that I loaded my tumble drier in the dark this morning.

The significance? Well it’s winter, or at least it feels at lot like winter in my corner of Lanarkshire.  Darker mornings and heavier jackets. This also means that it is the start of term time for our students. Our new Level 1’s begin their academic career this morning and I am teaching them.

So this seems an ideal time to blog on the subject of beginnings and teaching. We have over sixty Level 1’s, from as far apart as Kenya,  Zimbabwe and Devon last week we had a two day induction. As part of the ice breaker exercises they introduced each other telling us a little about themselves. The experience in the room was quite something. Lots of social care work, personal experience of caring, family experience of the social work profession and one student who advised they wanted a career in the “industry.”

This morning’s teaching is on a module called “Skills, Knowledge and Technology” I am responsible for this module and I am gradually reshaping it. My aim is to bring in much more content relating to social media, to encourage a shift away from the “social “ aspect to the “media.” The vast majority of our first years, and indeed all of our students have facebook. On closer examination they seem to use it to chat and arrange their social lives. I want to try to bring social media to them as a tool. I want to encourage them to read and contribute to blogs and to use to go beyond their current usage of the internet and use it to support their studies. So, bloggers beware!

The beginning of a new term is an exciting time, students are keen to get started and there is an atmosphere of impatience amongst them. Over the summer the university is very quiet, most people are on holiday. The corridors are empty and you don’t need to queue to buy your lunch. From today the university becomes like a night club. Returning students are excited to be back with their colleagues, new starts are keen to get under way to make new relationships and discover more about their chosen subjects. Academics focus on their teaching, module handbooks are printed, powerpoint presentations are checked, updated and in extreme cases re-written. Blogs are revamped and revisited and we allow all our monsters to come along and offer us their insights and opinions.

Outside might well be dark but the process of bringing the light begins just now.