Social work recruitment drive hitting the road

“clunk, click - hey, did I just hear a penny drop?”

“Wow! Security services knocking off pensioners to cut costs and social workers stealing children away from innocent parents to make a "profit" by some vague unspecified means.

I think we should all be seriously concerned by these allegations, they do rather prove that care in the community isn't working don't they..?”

“What d'you mean, Omni? I can only assume that you haven't got round to seeing Johnny English 2 yet? With so many inexperienced and, frankly, desperate recruits being employed on temporary contracts by the security forces (not to mention social services) these days, it's hardly surprising they're opting to bolster our archaic institutional framework rather than perform their intended function by reforming it.

That's left to poor suckers like me, by the looks of things. I hate that song, BTW... to me it smacks of the kind of tit for tat psychological projections that undermine any kind of personal commitment these days... rather like the mediated relationships the state media invariably try to control us with day in day out...

Oh well, might as well get it all off our chests before they pull the plug on us, I guess?”

“Children homes operated for the profit of staff? What planet are you on Chunder?

Courts "always" act for social services against innocent parents? You have no idea how ignorant this statement is do you?

Karen - I have to agree with you about the tendency towards organisations and those within them thinking within tramlines, having a tick box mentality and general arrrse-covering. You rather lost me when you seem to be suggesting that the security services knockoff people whose longevity threatens budgets but hey - 2 out of three ain't bad.”

“The bottom line is social services have got away with corruption of power and have taken kids from perfectly acceptable homes and parents and put them into these childrens homes which are mainly operated to make profit for staff. It's mostly all paper work with these people. THe fact they are given power and the courts act on this is concerning. THe courts always jump to the defense of social services in cases where parents haven't done wrong. Nobody is a perfect parent”

“rational doesn't have an e, BTW”

“I'm on your side, remember.... I don't actually work in the industry and am merely a researcher. I'm not sure it's always cock up, though. All institutions and those who work in them invariably form protective layers around themselves - hospital personnel traditionally cover one another's backs when surgeons are negligent or misdiagnoses are made, teachers close ranks when a complaint about bullying or exam cheating is made, and police officers have been known to hold grudges that stretch the length and breath of the globe and sometimes last for generations if someone says something to upset one of them. Since all this guff about multi-agencies was introduced, it now means if you try to take on one institution, you effectively take them all on... precarious as that may sound. Wasn't that what the Blair Witch Project set out to prove, after all? (ouch!)

The trouble is, of course, in these days of career carnage and economic stability it's all so easy for anyone to fall foul of this kind of institutionalised defensiveness. The trouble with social workers is that many of them still work to a long-term plan and, rather like psychiatrists, who've gone to immense trouble and built their reputations, over years in many cases, on determining or engineering someone's ultimate outcome, they don't like to mark their copybook by having their verdicts overturned. This is why there's such a tendency to take institutional prisoners because they work on the rationale assumption that it could be their own head on the block next time if they don't cover up for the daft prat who got them into all this **** in the first place. To me this kind of scenario has sadly come to symbolise the demise of public institutions in general.

Call it cock-up if it makes you feel any better, Omni, but this collective failure to acknowledge when mistakes are made has seriously damaged the public's perception of public institutions and their faith in any credible complaints process capable of sorting the messes out. Particularly when it's the security services who provide the final nail in the coffin when they're drafted in at the end game stage to do a clever, if grubby, pr job because the Revenue had already factored someone's early mortality into the final pension projections 10 years earlier. Is it any wonder anarchy is so in vogue again at the moment?”

“I think in academia that would usually be taken to mean someone with a doctorate Hugh.

if not, given that I have o levels in maths etc I am a qualified mathematician”

“What on earth is a "qualified sociologist"?”

“that's an interesting take on "empirical" Karen - I can't think of too many sociological studies built upon the evidence of what some bloke said another bloke told him, but there again I'm not a qualified sociologist so what do I know :)

I have to agree with you that there are deep structural issues in both mindset and practice in social work - but that this is grounded in the "cock up" rather than "conspiracy" theory of institutional failings. most people are doing ther best in a climate in which they are "damned if they do and damned if they don't."”