enthused by Reclaiming Social Work’. ‘While the circumstances were diff erent, the model was clearly applicable whether you were a two-tier rural county or a fairly small borough. The social work task is still the same wherever you are delivering that service.’ As a result, and
after an extensive consultation period, Cambridgeshire has begun to reshape its children and family services in a way that ‘mirrors the Reclaiming Social Work model almost in its entirety’. This means dismantling the traditional manager-led social work teams and replacing them with ‘units’ incorporating a practising consultant social worker, two other children’s service social workers, a clinician and a unit co-ordinator responsible for running the unit’s business and administrative tasks. Cases are
The dramatic difference is
that we meet every week to discuss every child. That generates a focus on the casework that we didn’t have before
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shared within the unit rather than allocated to individual social workers. There are now 12 units up and running with a further 32 planned by the end of the year. ‘We are doing it over a gradual period
of time because it’s a very diff erent way of working and you’ve got to manage that transition carefully,’ says Niki. One of Cambridgeshire’s fi rst consultant
social workers is Maggie John. She describes the unit model as ‘enabling us to be social workers in the way that all of us want to be’. ‘It’s not so much the personnel that makes
the diff erence; it’s what we do,’ she says. ‘The dramatic diff erence is that we meet
every week to discuss every child. That generates a focus on the casework that we didn’t have before. There’s a sense that we are all in it together; we are not isolated with our caseloads. We allocate a lot of time to our cases and that generates a quality of thinking with checks and balances built in. We challenge each other and we review what we are doing, so we don’t get stuck