The Social Work Awards — A critical perspective

I have thought long and hard about publishing this blog. I have been and continue to be worried about how some of the things I talk about here might be seen to reflect on the profession. These concerns weigh heavy on me. If I am to be honest, I’m also concerned about the potential consequences for me — what the response might be, how people might view me in light of this action, whether it will impact on my relationships with others. But, in the context of a profession based on the core principles of social justice and collective responsibility (IFSW Global Definition of Social Work), in which we have a duty to challenge unjust policies and practices (BASW Code of Ethics) and due to my own very strong feelings about these things, I don’t really feel I have a choice. It also occurs to me that the fact I am worried about the consequences of expressing these concerns is itself a cause for concern.

The deciding factor in publishing this piece were some tweets from a prominent and respected social care professional and blogger, posted on World Social Work Day, in which she succinctly expressed some core components of great social work: critical reflection; openness and honesty; not shying away from the difficult conversations; being servants, not masters. This is a difficult conversation. This is part of my service.

I’ll say it. The Social Work Awards (formerly the Social Worker of the Year Awards) trouble me greatly. This feeling has deepened and been compounded over the years by what appears to me to be a near-absolute uncritical acceptance of the Awards as an enterprise of unimpeachable respectability and unquestionable virtue. Indeed, the apparent lack of any real critique of the Social Work Awards has led me to wonder why the profession appears to have collectively exempted the event from the core social work activity of “develop[ing] critical consciousness through reflecting on structural sources of oppression and/or privilege” (IFSW Global Definition of Social Work). I offer no comment or analysis on that, except to say that I believe it very likely that the majority of those involved truly believe they are doing the right thing and that the Awards are overwhelmingly a positive affair that advance the causes and missions of the profession. I am sorry to say that I disagree, respectfully but strongly.

This piece began with my recognising the need to address and explore my feelings about the Awards in order to develop deeper understanding of the issues, enhance my critical self-awareness and encourage what I believe is a vitally important conversation. The main aim was to reach an understanding about why I felt so uneasy about an event that is, on the face of it, a celebration of all that is good about social work. The piece was meant to be a record of that exploration — an unfurling of thoughts, feelings and ideas — rather than as considered, incisive polemic. I still make no claim to the latter but I am both sorry and sad to say that the more I looked at the Awards, the more troubled and concerned I became. I think this piece reflects that journey. The journey from expressing views and opinions to uncovering a concrete example of something which, in my view, is cause for deep concern.

Put simply, I believe that raising these issues for consideration is the right thing to do. If this piece is read at all, it will likely be experienced by some as challenging to beliefs and practices they hold to be in the interests of the profession as a whole. I take no pleasure in considering that what I write here may cause discomfit or even anger, but if it gives just one person pause to reflect on the situation in the round, then there will be some satisfaction in that for me. It may provoke counter challenge, which would be a good thing in my view, being necessary to the advancement of better understanding — again a core social work activity. I may be simply wrong, or poorly informed, or misinterpreting things; I will take it as a positive learning experience if any of these things are shown to be the case on any or all of the following points.

Other social work awards

Before we go further, I acknowledge here that there are examples of social work awards from other jurisdictions in the UK, sponsored by various bodies, including jurisdictional offices of the British Association of Social Workers (BASW). None are so heavily trailed or as prominent, or, frankly, as ostentatious as the Social Work Awards. There are also examples of awards from other public service professions, such as the police, ambulance service, fire service and nursing. Of those, the British Journal of Nursing Awards most closely resemble the Social Work Awards in style, spirit and tenor. My focus here is on the Social Work Awards, but it is interesting to reflect on the similarities, parallels and differences between the various awards schemes.

Benefits of the Social Work Awards

There is no doubt that many respected and esteemed social workers see much of value in the Social Work Awards. I have been told that many service users do, too. It has been said the benefits of the Awards include profile-raising opportunities for the valuable work of social work departments, teams and organisations. It’s also said the Awards present opportunities to highlight the achievements and successes of the individuals, families, groups and communities the practitioners and organisations work with. I agree, these are on the face of it positive outcomes. It is incredibly affirming as a social worker to hear positive narratives such as these and it encourages practitioners to feel confident to forge ahead in their shared mission to contribute to the creation of a fairer, more equal and just society, knowing that it leads to better outcomes for service users. But is it necessary for social work practitioners to hear such things — and, moreover, through such a platform — in order to feel valued and confident in their work? Speaking for myself, the satisfaction I derive from my work stems from knowing I have brought to bear my knowledge, skills and abilities on difficult, sometimes seemingly intractable, situations in the hope of contributing to better outcomes for people affected by adverse social circumstances. I have seen that this sometimes leads to measurable and tangible benefit in the lives of people experiencing social vulnerability. Sometimes they express they are grateful or appreciative of the work I have done, my approach or just some small, seemingly trifling thing that has had made a difference to them. Sometimes it’s for simply listening, or for not intervening when it wasn’t needed. But their gratitude and appreciation is never expected. Sometimes my work serves merely to limit damage at the nexus of lived experience and state intervention. And, while that might sound rather bleak or run counter to the stories we might be tempted to tell ourselves about the nature of our role and the extent of our powers, the limitation of damage caused by the intrusion of the state into the private sphere, as expressed through the unwilling deprivation of adults’ liberty or the removal of children from birth families, has value, for, without it, things could and would be measurably worse for the people affected. I once read that human rights are really about making things less bad for vulnerable people and communities, and social work is, at its core, a human rights discipline. The point I’m trying to make here is that social workers shouldn’t need congratulations to feel confident and valued. Confidence should flow from the knowledge we are doing the right thing and doing it right with reference to human rights and the statutory frameworks in which we operate. That these two things are often not an easy fit (doing the right thing vs doing things right) leads to the sorts of practice dilemmas social workers deal with daily. That practitioners don’t always feel like they are supported — organisationally, politically, legally — to do the right thing is in reality indicative of wider structural and systemic issues that the Social Work Awards could never address.

Countering negative perceptions of social work

So, do the awards offer a positive, more realistic counter-narrative to the negative, inaccurate portrayal of social work by and in the media? There have been times, historically as well as more recently, when individual social workers have been singled out for particular vilification by the press, which feeds into the prevailing narrative that social workers are unjustly distrusted and reviled by the media and, by extension, the public. However, this narrative has recently been challenged by research which found that the public, on the whole, does understand, broadly, what social workers do and, moreover, views this work as valuable (McCulloch, Webb and Clarke 2017). Importantly, the study also found that positive narratives of social work were transmitted at grass-roots level. Word of mouth. Personal testimony. The research speaks of social workers who are empowered to generate positive narratives of social work through their everyday practice and of a public who will carry and transmit these narratives according to their experience. I believe this tells us something quite profound: that it is within the power and the gift of each of us to shape public perceptions of the profession through our daily practice, our every interaction in living rooms, homes, hospitals and offices up and down the country. Further, in the era of social media ubiquity, we can shape these narratives also through our online interactions and activities. Caught up in dopamine-fuelled feedback loops where we readily find validation from like-minded professionals, we should not forget that Facebook, Twitter etc are at their core very public platforms and our every post may well be contributing to perceptions of the profession, for good or ill. It’s a complex issue and others have written far more cogently and authoritatively on these matters than I ever could, but as far as the Awards are concerned I believe the notion that they are a necessary counter to unjustly negative perceptions of social work is challenged by the fact that we are not as reviled, collectively, as we might think or that some would have us believe, and by the fact that there are other, more socially just and authentic ways to generate positive narratives of social work practice. The Social Work Awards slot conveniently into a narrative that speaks of a profession facing widespread, entrenched opprobrium and of individual practitioners disempowered to address it, offering a seductive solution to a problem that is, arguably, neither as large nor as insoluble as we might believe.

I find it ironic that the Awards are positioned as a diversion from the overwhelmingly negative narratives said to beset the profession. For me, the glitz and glamour of the ceremony serve to underscore the sense that the Awards are, in reality, nothing more than a salve; rather than offering an actual response to the issues that lead to social workers feeling undervalued, they are, in expression and effect, a cultural gewgaw aimed at mollifying us, encouraging us to feel good about ourselves in order to distract us from how unfairly derided we believe we are. Beyond that, they appear to achieve little, and if they continue in their present form, I believe they will ultimately damage the profession.

Hero narrative

A common counter to the perceived unjustifiably poor image of social work is the ‘social work as hero’ narrative popular in certain quarters. Drawing on the work of Paulo Freire, @Nickinoxford has written an excellent blog post on the hero narrative in the helping professions (https://medium.com/@nickinoxford/why-the-hero-narrative-in-human-professions-is-damaging-a-freire-perspective-8664bcac4840). I will not do Nick a disservice by clumsily summarising his excellent blog here. Suffice to say, the hero narrative is fundamentally oppressive and, due to its othering of the people we support through the setting up of a dyad (saviour/saved, hero/victim etc), essentially discriminatory.

The publicity for the Social Work Awards is redolent of the hero narrative. Indeed, explicitly so in the term ‘unsung heroes and heroines’, which has been used on the Awards’ official web site. Also implicitly, in the singling out of individuals, teams and organisations for particular praise. In this sense, any awards system arguably constitutes a triumph of individualism over egalitarianism/collectivism. (Many would argue they constitute a triumph of meritocracy — more on that later.) Casting its shadow over all of this is the oppressive dyad (saviour/saved, hero/victim etc). I believe this to be antithetical to social justice, which is concerned with empowerment and emancipation, access to rights and citizenship, the redistribution of power and capital. The Social Work Awards, in giving credence to the hero narrative, reinforces the inherent power imbalances that we should be seeking at every turn to redress.

‘Exceptionalism’

The Social Work Awards also normalise what might be called the ‘exceptionalism’ of good or excellent practice. Which is to say, the holding up of particular examples of social work practice as warranting congratulations, which has the concerning implication that for the most part social work practice falls short of those standards. Of course, we know it does not, though we also know that too often (once being too often in my book) it does fall short of being good enough, and real people suffer the consequences. I’m concerned that, for those that feel they have been failed by social work, the Social Work Awards will feel like the turning of a knife held by the collective hand of the profession, which is dreadful for them and counter-productive to improving the image of the profession because it could further entrench anti-social work sentiment among those made sceptical by experience. If we are truly for people who have been forsaken, forgotten, marginalised and oppressed, then we should make it key among our aims to reach out to those who have had encounters with social work which they have experienced as adverse, sometimes devastatingly so, in order to address their profound disenfranchisement. I strongly believe there is much to be learned from such conversations, but they are challenging and require great sensitivity. How can we hold these conversations with authenticity and integrity if, in the era of austerity, we are increasingly advancing and promoting a lavish awards bash as a cornerstone of our professional identity, a source of national social work pride? It pains me to say that I am anything but proud of these Awards and I wish it to be known that they do not represent the kind of social work that I strive to achieve.

Whose achievements?

Are the Awards meritocratic? By whose standards is excellence in social work assessed? Looking at the panel of judges for the 2017 Awards, it seems, by and large, that it is other social workers and affiliated professionals who decide who is worthy of the accolades. Surely the true measures of our successes (or not-successes, as it happens, sometimes) are the outcomes for the individuals, families and communities we support? And whose achievements are those anyway? By far the hardest work is undertaken by those we work with, often in times of great adversity, when they are at their most vulnerable. And, most often, unlike us, they have not chosen this path. Nor do they get paid. They are the real ‘heroes’ of social work in that they overcome the greatest adversity, surmounting obstacles most of us can barely imagine, just to achieve what many of us take for granted. I hesitate to use the term ‘hero’ because it is, to be frank, patronising and doesn’t reflect the fact that those we have the privilege to support are, by and large, just trying to get on with it with as little fuss and intervention as possible. It is not for us to claim social work success as our own. We do with, not to. Good social work is founded in collaborative endeavour and seeks to render itself redundant so that those we support may one day dispense with our services. A world without the need for social workers should be our goal, our stated mission, our guiding light. Social work success is measured in the experiences of those we work alongside to improve their social circumstances. They do the hardest work, whether it be to achieve behaviour change, promote their own recovery in the context of mental or physical health issues or to develop new skills. The achievements are theirs, and most often hard-won. Which leads me to ask, would we countenance the idea of promoting a Service User Awards? If the idea makes you recoil — and it probably should — I ask you to consider whose needs are the Social Work Awards meeting, and whether they are really needs at all.

(Since writing the above I have become aware of the National Service User Awards (http://www.nsua.org/) which are sponsored by Cygnet Health Care, a private sector provider of mental health inpatient and residential care services to the NHS. A cursory Google search shows Cygnet to be a recent and prolific abuser of the rights of vulnerable people. There are also examples of care leavers awards, about which I make no comment except to say that they appear to differ markedly from both the Social Work Awards and the Service User Awards on a number of key points.)

Lack of ‘experts by experience’ on panel

What I initially found most striking about the Social Work Awards was the apparent lack of representation in the judging process from those who receive attention from social work. Without question or qualification, the most important voices and perspectives in social work are those of the people we are charged with supporting. Therefore, it seems self-evident that recipients of social work should be represented to a very substantial degree in the Awards judging panels. I note the recent appointment of a prominent ‘expert by experience’ to the panel, which is a welcome step in the right direction. But it remains the case that, for the most part, it is social workers and affiliated professionals deciding what ‘excellence’ in social work looks like, which runs counter to the principle of social justice, and so, for me, troubling questions about power, trust and accountability remain.

Social justice vs the philanthropic impulse

I often wonder how the Social Work Awards seem to those people whose contact with social workers heralded adverse experiences. Social workers are mandated to intervene in the lives of people when they are at their most vulnerable to power over them. Aside from the great deal of good work they do, social workers are also responsible — directly or indirectly — for separating people from their families, for depriving people of their liberty (often against their will) and for reducing care packages due to budgetary constraints. And they get paid from the public purse for doing so. To deny the validity of the public’s concerns about the less desirable aspects of what we do on the basis that they swallow whatever the media tells them about us seems to me to betray a certain arrogance. It also serves to promote the notion that social work practice is in some way arcane or mysterious and that if only the public were educated about what we do the scales would fall from their eyes. Does this not risk further fuelling the notion that social workers are an arrogant, unassailable lot, dispensing wisdom and charity from on high? I sometimes wonder if we have moved on as far as we would like to think from the paternalistic impulses of private philanthropism and the Poor Law. This, again, has been written about by others far better-informed and more eloquent than me. Suffice to say, there is, to my mind, something quite unseemly about the razzmatazz spectacle of social workers congratulating other social workers for simply doing their jobs. Furthermore, excellence in practice should be — has to be — the norm, not an exception worthy of a parade.

Razzmatazz and links with private enterprise

If the Awards are really about taking time to reflect on and celebrate the positive contribution of social work in increasingly challenging contexts in order to enhance and improve the confidence and self-esteem of practitioners, then they are essentially a lavish exercise in collective self-care. What’s not to like about that? Well, considering a great many of the people we support experience some form of economic or social deprivation, and the causal relationships between poverty, need and visibility to services are increasingly uncovered, this very public parading of ‘our’ successes in a flurry of glitz and glamour is also, arguably, an ostentatious exercise in social distancing. And, let us not be blinded by the glitter-cloud to the fact that, at its very core, the current iteration of the Social Work Awards is really about corporate sponsorship.

The Awards reinvented

We can trace the origins of the current Awards back to the arrival of Genesis PR, a company which profits from the not-for-profit sector, who were contracted by the key player in the current Awards, Sanctuary Social Care, one of the largest social work recruitment businesses in the country, in 2011 with a specific mandate to reinvent the Awards as a lucrative corporate event. In 2012, Genesis PR won a Chartered Institute for Public Relations (CIPR) Gold Award for the East Anglia region, in the not-for-profit category, for it’s successful reinvention of the Social Work Awards. The case study is available on the CIPR website: https://www.cipr.co.uk/sites/default/files/17617691%20OKAY%20TO%20PUBLISH.PDF.

It is commendable that the Awards have achieved charitable status and are not run for profit. It is commendable also that the first objective mentioned in the document is to ‘[u]se the awards to build the reputation of social work’. Less commendable, I think, is Genesis PR’s securing of G4S (a company which at the time ran facilities that detained Palestinian children in the occupied territories and also ran The Cedars, a ‘pre-departure’ detention centre in the UK in which immigrant children and families were detained prior to deportation) as major sponsor for the 2011 awards. It’s common knowledge that G4S went on to win contracts to provide secure facilities for children and young people, including Medway Secure Training Centre in Kent, where deplorable abuse was uncovered by BBC Panorama in 2016. The case study of Genesis PR’s stellar handling of the Social Work Awards reboot contains this from Paul Cook, Managing Director, G4S Children’s Services:

“G4S Children’s Services were pleased to sponsor the SWA in 2011 and ensure that staff are properly recognised for the job they do. The event was beneficial in raising our profile as a provider of quality services for looked after children and young people and we have been able to follow up with attendees to support the work we undertake”.

G4S’s sponsorship of the Awards and the subsequent testimonial raise a disturbing question: is there a direct link between the 2011 Social Work Awards and G4S’ subsequent incursions into the marketised social care sector? Whatever the case, this document clearly shows that the Social Work Awards are far from being just about generating positive narratives of social work. They are also about business. Specifically, the fast-growing sector of profit from the provision of what used to be non-profit services. This is a rapidly-expanding unregulated space where businesses seek to profit from activities under the banner of ‘social care’ and ‘social work’, the conduct of which are not, by and large, subject to scrutiny from the perspective of socially responsible values and principles. Social work’s association with these ethically-unregulated players will ultimately prove deleterious to the profession and its ability to function in accordance with its own core missions, principles and values. It is, frankly, dismaying that G4S were ever approached as sponsors in the first place, given their record, and rather speaks to the concerns about inviting profit-making firms into the arena of public service. Dismaying also to think that the company’s sponsorship of the 2011 Social Work Awards may well have facilitated G4S’ contact with influential players in social work and social care.

Public money transparency

Business networking and brand-promotion opportunities are a central strut of Genesis PR’s reinvention of the Awards. In 2017, aside from ‘headline sponsor’ Sanctuary Social Care, sponsors included private companies such as OLM Systems, who appear to be doing a pretty good job of cornering the market on social care data entry and storage systems (itself cause for concern, in my view, for controlling the technology on which LAs rely to discharge their statutory duties surely puts the companies that design, deliver and maintain these systems in positions of inordinate power). It is in ours and the public’s interests to ask about these financial relationships. In 2017, alongside private sponsorship money came sponsorship from BASW and Unison, as well as the charity Barnardo’s. The members and benefactors of these organisations should surely be kept informed as to how their contributions are used in the context of the financial intertwinements with private enterprise via their sponsorship of the Awards. Perhaps more concerning to the general public is the fact that eight local authorities sponsored the Social Work Awards in 2017. In the interests of public money transparency, shouldn’t we ask how much they contributed, what they got in return and whether the other, private sponsors benefitted from this transfusion of taxpayers’ money? There is a sponsorship promotion leaflet (http://www.socialworkawards.com/media/1186/social-worker-of-the-year-awards-sponsor-leaflet.pdf) which states that in return for financial backing, sponsors have their brands heavily promoted in the Awards publicity materials. Someone will have to explain to me how this benefits local authorities— and moreover their citizens — in the era of austerity.

The critical component

A key component of social work is the critical-radical element. This has never been so necessary as it is today. We live in a world where, increasingly, the tendrils of big business extend, often with stealth, into public services. If we don’t take the opportunity now to pause and reflect on social work’s role in all this, the profession will increasingly find itself in difficult, if not impossible, positions, caught between the worlds of public service accountability and private money interests. I believe the net result of this predicament will be the attenuation and eventual decimation of our individual and collective abilities to strive with confidence for a fairer, more just and equal society. As a profession, we need to ask: what’s the real deal with the Social Work Awards? At what cost to social work’s foundational values and concerns comes this high profile platform for notionally ‘positive’ narratives of social work? Seeking answers to those questions will be difficult and uncomfortable. But to do so is necessary, for we can make no claims to either a critical component in social work or a social justice agenda if we fail to properly acknowledge, individually and collectively, that essential to realising these things is the willingness and ability to turn the critical eye inward.

Reflection on action: What can we do differently?

Recognising that many wise and good people see much of value in the Awards, I suggest, if we are to have an awards system at all, we should reclaim them from their current neoliberal trappings in order to ensure they reflect as far as possible social work’s missions, values and ethical principles. This would likely be a job of work, but as a starting point we might consider the following:

• Reducing the corporate sponsorship element and partnering only with ethical businesses and requiring them to publish a report on their contributions; these should be included in an Awards report that sets out how contributions from sponsors have been used and if any individual or organisation involved has profited in any way (social justice; professional/ethical accountability);
• Consulting and involving service users to the maximum possible degree in shaping the Awards, including setting missions and objectives, strategic planning, determining Awards categories and making up the majority of judging panels (equality and diversity).

In such ways we may begin to model a version of social work that truly seeks to break down barriers between those who provide social work support and those who receive it by inviting the people we hope and aim to support to define our work and determine how we do it.

References

McCulloch, Webb and Clarke (2017) ‘What the public think about Scottish social services and why’, Social Work Services Strategic Forum