Why have a Social Work Awards?

This is an edited and revised version of my previous blog 'The Social Work Awards — A critical perspective’, which, aside from making many of the points below, critically examined the Awards’ sponsorship by businesses whose operations run counter to social work’s stated missions, principles and values. Last year, this aspect of the Awards came under a great deal of scrutiny with well-publicised results. I don’t intend to re-run that debate but rather focus here on the more philosophical concerns I have about the Social Work Awards…

Many respected and esteemed social workers see much of value in the Social Work Awards. I’ve been told that many service users do, too. It’s 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 about the impact of good practice. Such narratives encourage practitioners to forge ahead in confidence with the shared mission to contribute to a fairer, more just and equal society.

But is it really necessary for social work practitioners to hear such things — and, moreover, through a platform like the Social Work Awards — in order to feel valued and confident in their work? Speaking for myself, the satisfaction I derive from my work stems from the knowledge I’ve used my knowledge, skills and abilities to address difficult, often seemingly intractable, situations in the hope of contributing to better outcomes for people affected by adverse social circumstances. I’ve seen how this sometimes leads to measurable and tangible benefit to people who most often are having a pretty rough time of it. Sometimes, they express their gratitude or appreciation for my efforts, for my approach or for some small act or gesture that has had made a bigger difference to them than I realised. Sometimes it’s for just listening without judgement, or for not interfering when it wasn’t needed. I welcome their gratitude and appreciation, try to receive it with as much grace as I can muster, being not very good at recieving praise (or criticism for that matter, but that’s another story) but I never, ever expect it. Sometimes - and this is a difficult but important truth to acknowledge - our work serves merely to limit damage when the state’s apparatus crashes, often rudely and unexpectedly, into private lives. 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 devastating removal of children from birth families, has great value, for, without that crucial function of social work, things could and would be even worse for the people affected.

The point I’m trying to make — the question I’m fumblingly trying to articulate — is about whether social workers need congratulations to feel confident and valued. Shouldn’t confidence flow from the knowledge we are doing the right thing as well as doing it right, with reference to human rights and the legal and ethical frameworks which guide our work? 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 every day. That practitioners don’t always feel well supported — organisationally, politically, legally — to do the right thing is indication of wider structural and systemic issues that the Social Work Awards could never address.

It’s said that a key contribution of the Social Work Awatds is the promotion of positive, more realistic counter-narratives 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, with horrible and lasting consequences for many of those targeted. Perhaps understandably, such things are taken as proof that social workers are unjustly distrusted and reviled by the media and by the public. This narrative has 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 resonates with a powerful idea: that social workers are, to the extent of their everyday influence, empowered to generate positive narratives of social work through their daily practice, that the public will carry and transmit these narratives according to their experiences of us, and that it is within the power and the gift of each of us to shape public perceptions of the profession through 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 also shape these narratives 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 the most public of platforms and our every post may well be contributing to perceptions of the profession, for good or ill.

The public perception of social work is 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. Further, I would argue there are other, more socially just, authentic and productive ways to generate positive narratives of social work practice. The Social Work Awards slot 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.

The Social Work Awards are positioned as a diversion from the perceived shroud of overwhelmingly negative press said to beset the profession. The glitz and glamour of the ceremony itself serve to underscore the sense that the Awards are a salve. Rather than offering an actual, useful response to the complex issues that lead to social workers feeling undervalued, they are, in effect, a kind of cultural gewgaw aimed at mollifying us — a populist, feelgood distraction from the unfair derision we seem to have come to believe comes from all quarters. If the Awards' lasting contribution is to instil a collective sense of pride in social work and its achievements, I suggest we need to think deeply about why we need an awards ceremony to do that. I’m not convinced they do, anyway. What the Awards actually do is single out individuals as particularly praiseworthy, and the focus and attendant rhetoric becomes, problematically in my view, about how remarkable the chosen individual practitioners are. By all means, celebrate good practice, but upholding individuals as exceptional seems to me contrary to the egalitarian, collectivist spirit of social work. Or is it? I realise this is not a popular view. People need individual examples to act as focal points, to embody principles and ideals. But, still, it bothers me. There’s a special concern in social work among other professions for collective endeavour and achievement. In the same way as we condemn the deed, not the doer, shouldn’t we celebrate the practice, not the practitioner? A recalibration of the Awards along those lines would in my view be more in keeping with the values and principles of the profession because celebrating practice rather than practitioners would surely be just recognition of the fact that we social workers are only participants in a joint endeavour with those we hope and aim support.

But, even with that, there are fundamental problems with the Social Work Awards' upholding of particular examples of social work practice as warranting particular praise, because doing so carries the concerning implication that, in general, social work practice falls short of the highest standards. Of course, we know it doesn’t, though we also know that too often (once being too often in my book) social work practice does fall woefully 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 be experienced as a further affront, which would be dreadful for them and counter-productive to improving the image of the profession, further entrenching ‘anti-social work' sentiment among people and groups whose experiences give them reason to be critical. If we are truly for people who are marginalised and oppressed, then we should make it chief among our aims to reach out to those who have had adverse encounters with social work and seek to address their profound disenfranchisement. 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?

I often wonder how the Social Work Awards seem to those people whose contact with social workers resulted in adverse experiences. Social workers 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. Yet, the profession’s collective response, epitomised by the Awards, seems to be to deny the validity of the public’s concerns about the less desirable aspects of what we do on the false belief that they swallow whatever the media tells them about us. The Awards seem to say, 'You’re wrong about social work, you’re mistaken and misinformed. You just need to understand…’, reinforcing that we know things about social work that those who receive it do not. That being the case, the real gap is not between theory and practice, but between practice and real life. We will not resolve this if we continue 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 and the good truth would dawn upon them. But we will risk further fuelling the notion that social workers are a distant, unassailable lot, dispensing wisdom and charity from positions of power over those we are meant to be for. I wonder if we have moved on as far as we would like to think from the paternalistic impulses of yore. 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 doing their jobs, however well. Shouldn’t excellence in practice be the norm, rather than an exception worthy of a parade?

Further, the singling out of individuals, teams and organisations for particular praise is redolent of the justly reviled 'hero narrative' in social work. Any awards system arguably constitutes a triumph of individualism over egalitarianism/collectivism. (Many would argue they constitute a triumph of meritocracy — itself premised on the myth of equal opportunities.) Casting its shadow over all of this is the oppressive dyad at the heart of the hero narrative: saviour/saved, hero/victim etc. Is this not antithetical to social justice, which is concerned with empowerment and emancipation, access to rights and citizenship, the redistribution of power and capital? Are the Social Work Awards, in giving credence to the hero narrative, reinforcing the inherent power imbalances that we, individually and collectively, should be seeking at every turn to redress?

When I first learned of the Social Work Awards, some four or 5 years ago now, I was immediately struck by the apparent lack of representation in the judging process from those who have received social work. I believe some attention has been given by organisers to that matter since then, but you can never do enough to amplify and uplift the voices and viewpoints of the people we hope and aim to support. Without question or qualification, theirs are the most important voices. Therefore, it’s self-evident that those who have encountered social work in their lives should be represented to a very substantial degree in the judging of the Awards. I note recent, welcome steps in the right direction. But it remains the case that, for the most part, it’s social workers and affiliated professionals deciding what ‘excellence’ in social work looks like, and so, for me, troubling questions remain. If social work is for the people who receive it, who — and what — are the Social Work Awards for?

Perhaps the best way to judge the success of the Awards would be to ask whether they’ve succeeded in their stated mission. Have they enhanced the image and understanding of social work among the public and media? Have they positively impacted on social workers' morale? The answers to both should give us all pause to reflect.

Reference

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