Social workers hold the key to ensuring equality of outcome in this new era of personalisation, argues Jon Glasby
with its traditional values, and of returning to the people and community development skills of the pre- care management era. For others, personalisation is almost the complete opposite: an abandonment of social work values and a rolling back of public services as more and more of the state’s responsibilities are passed off on vulnerable individuals in an age of cuts and austerity. As with most policies, personalisation probably
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isn’t inherently either of these things: in many ways it’s what we choose to make it (as best we can, given the constraints we face) that is all important. In one sense, this is a key feature of being a profession. Even if it often doesn’t feel like it, we have some discretion to decide how we will respond to this agenda and to shape it as best we can at local level. For the record, my own view as a private individual
is that personalisation is a once-in-a-generation opportunity for the social work profession to seize (ie very much in the ‘friend’ camp). However, this agenda also feels very fragile, and the potential is always there for very different and negative outcomes to be achieved if we either don’t take up this new way of working, or if we allow it to be implemented badly. Ask any group of social workers why they came
into the job in the first place, and many people will say different versions of the same underlying things: to promote independence; to empower people; to help people be the best they can be; to be part of the system, but also to challenge the system on people’s behalf, and so on. This seems remarkably similar to the claims put forward by advocates of personalisation – in fact the list seems almost identical.
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n a rapidly evolving and very difficult policy context, one of the biggest challenges facing the social work profession is how it responds to the personalisation agenda. For some people, personalisation is a way of reuniting social work
At a time when many social workers feel disillusioned with increasing bureaucracy and with the pressures caused by their financial gatekeeping role, this seems a real opportunity to reconnect the profession to its underlying value base, and to rediscover and re-emphasise the value of traditional social work. Despite this, much of the current policy context doesn’t seem very conducive. With massive cuts, there is a real risk that personalisation is implemented mainly as a means of cost cutting, with empowering language used to mask a very different reality. It is also more than possible that
With massive cuts, there is a real risk that personalisation is implemented mainly as a means of cost cutting, with empowering language used to mask a very different reality
financial constraints will damage the availability of practical and peer support, and we know that choice without sufficient support can often be profoundly disempowering. In response, it is important to make sure that we
are always genuinely comparing like with like. In my view, the cuts would have happened anyway and aren’t caused by personalisation per se – we may be personalising and cutting, but these are separate issues (albeit linked in terms of implementation). Indeed, such is the financial transparency inherent in this way of working that personalisation may even make it easier to see the cuts that are taking place, and therefore to challenge them if they are not appropriate or safe. As I travel round the country, half the people I
meet love personalisation because it’s so financially transparent, while the other half hate it for exactly the same reason. Slightly cynically, I’m starting to think that our attitude to transparency can often depend