Madmutt’s Blog

As I walked down the sharp and slippery steps leaving the college for the last time on completing my degree, I looked at the rambling sprawl of non-descript buildings that made up the campus and said to myself, “I’ll do anything but social work”. Little did I know that within four years of that day, I would have obtained my social work qualification and was about to start my first job as a probation officer in Winchester.

Thus begins my social work career, one that I was not expecting nor wanting. I was hoping for something far more glamorous: certainly one with more money and status.  It has been fourteen years since that first day as a probation officer and my passion for the profession of social work has grown inexorably. I get angry when it is used as a scapegoat for all of society’s ills by the populist press. I weep when I see social workers suffocated by the bureaucratic processes of setting up funded care packages, a colleague’s exhortation, “care management is a process not a profession!” ringing in my ears.  I long for social work to be a confident profession once again, clear in its mission and its values, proud of its achievements and in charge of its destiny. I cannot imagine the medical profession allowing itself to be bullied by the media and dictated to by government, with an agony aunt from a cheap red top newspaper on a committee making decisions its future. Why do we as social workers allow this to happen?  Just because we work with the vulnerable and the voiceless, just because we work in the gutter of society clearing up its mess, it does not follow that we should not be treated with the dignity and respect we attempt to show our service users, our voices listened to and our perspectives understood.

As ever, I can see the problem clearly: I am less clear about the solutions. I do wish that the General Social Care Council and the British Association of Social Workers be more public in its defence the profession in the way that the General Medical Council and British Medical Association seem to do for doctors. But, I feel that the answer lies with individual social workers finding a voice to say, “enough and no more!” and being proud of what they quietly achieve with their clients day in and day out, protecting society from itself.