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POLICY


Will ‘Cinderella’ go to the ball?


Social work’s role will be ‘at the heart’ of the care and support White Paper. Joy Ogden takes soundings from The College of Social Work’s London summit on what it might say


as the people who use services gain more choice and control over their own services. Many social workers see this trend towards


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personalisation as a threat to their jobs and a signifi cant number have been made redundant in local authority cuts. But now they are fi ghting back. Social workers are making their views


known to the government through a series of events mounted by The College of Social Work, which culminated in a February ‘summit’ held in London to share the latest thinking on the role and tasks for social workers in adult care. A summary of the lessons of the summit


for the remit of the profession has been sent to social care minister Paul Burstow, who has promised that social work will be at the heart of the care and support White Paper due to be published in the spring. The title of the keynote speech by Glen Mason, one of the minister’s senior offi cials in the Department of Health, was perhaps a good omen: ‘Cinderella You Shall Go to the Ball’. He sought to dispel any lingering doubts about the role of social workers in the era of personalisation, despite evidence that some local authorities are cutting back on them.


18 SOCIALWORKMATTERS MAR12


instein reportedly remarked: ‘I never think about the future. It comes soon enough.’ But most of us do think about it, not least when it comes to the future of social work with adults,


It was a vision of social work in which


practitioners freed themselves from the shackles of the care management regime that has imprisoned them for 20 years. Instead, social work could look forward to being a strong, independent profession in which sound relationships were established as the basis of casework, group work and community work. Other speakers echoed these views of care management. Dr Adi Cooper, director of adult social services and housing in Sutton, spoke about the ‘disempowering and de-skilling of two decades of care management,’ while Peter Beresford, chair of user group Shaping Our Lives, said it had turned social workers


Safeguarding should be used proactively to improve outcomes


rather than putting all the emphasis on investigation and monitoring


into a kind of ‘Mr or Ms Fixit or mini- manager, who is supposed to create packages of support for service users rather than provide the valued advocacy and support they can uniquely off er.’ Beresford said the evidence from service


users was that skills and qualities like respect, empathy, reliability, practical help, a sense of judgement about risk and seeing people’s lives in the round, not just as problems, were what mattered.


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