Actually I don’t hate being a social worker and nor do I have a low opinion of most of us. What I hate and what I refuse to pamper sre the ‘professional social workers’. Why? Because in their anxiety to prove theirs is a profession just like the doctors and lawyers they are desperate to be associated with, they disparage social work more than they realise. Slavish endorsement of SWE as a regulator against all evidence of it doing anything of the sort just so they can pretend ‘regulation’ is the badge that confers on them professional
status is sad, laughable, lamentable, depressing and the perfect example of anxiety overdoing confident practice. Personally I accept that the many claimed qualities, skills and values that supposedly make social work unique are nothing of the sort. That doesn’t make me fret about how I might be seen by the ‘professions’ because I’m content and confident of the value of social work. I don’t need to pitch it against others to feel ‘seen’ or validated. Service user feed back and confidence of my colleagues are enough.
My negatives are about the inane and desperate searches to ‘prove’ social work is on a par with real professions. Professions worthy of the claim have unique characteristics. They are not magpies plaigarising psychology, occupational therapy, pedagogy, medicine, literature, philosophy, political theory and so on. The people who should take themselves somewhere else are the permanently anxious and the angst riddled status cravers. Just do the job I say.

Jon if you hate being a social worker and you have such a low opinion of social workers you should take your negativity out and over to somewhere else.

Our first task is to ensure that children get a relationship that will benefit them with both their parents and wider family. Our second is to get the relevant clauses in the UNCRC applied in the UK. These state that children have a right to a relationship with both their parents unless there has been a ruling ‘by a competent authority subject to judicial review’ that this would be against their welfare.

Our experience of our people’s contact with social workers is mostly – but with notable exceptions -dire. The potential contribution of children’s ‘second parent’ is sometimes blanked completely. More often of the perception of what the situation is has been set, by the interaction of the (usually) mother and the (usually female) social worker before he (usually) is involved.