World Social Work Day took place last week, with social workers worldwide celebrating and raising awareness of the work they do.
I recently had the pleasure of meeting some of the excellent social workers who work with adults in our area. Social work is a tough job (as a social worker once said to me “it’s bloody hard work – but it’s bloody rewarding”) yet the team I talked to was unbowed. I was extremely impressed by their positivity and their commitment to finding new and effective ways of serving local people. They were full of new ideas—they have developed an interesting new programme to support newly qualified social workers, which has seen recruitment increase substantially—and I am pleased to know that vulnerable adults and elderly people in my Brentwood and Ongar constituency can rely on them.
Social work has been close to my heart for the better part of a decade which is why, I called a debate in Parliament to talk about the contribution social workers make to society. A decade ago I had the pleasure of working with Tim Loughton, the then Children’s Minister, on the Munro Review of child protection and saw first-hand the extraordinary work this profession does to transform people’s lives and help them out of the most difficult of circumstances.
I always say that social work is the unrecognised emergency service. Whereas everyone understands what health, police, fire and coastguards do, very few people ever come across social workers and so don’t have the chance to appreciate what they deal with and how difficult it is. I have never ceased to be amazed by their extraordinary passion, stamina and commitment to helping people in some of the most difficult situations it’s possible to be in.
It is, no question, a high stakes profession. When things go wrong – as they sometimes do in all professions – the consequences are severe. But too often social work only appears in the papers when mistakes have been made. Too rarely do we hear about the thousands upon thousands of cases in which lives have been changed for the better. I’ve met young people whose lives have, quite literally, been saved by a good social worker. I’ve met families who, with the support of well applied social work, quit drugs and drink, overcome their mental health problems and get back on the straight and narrow.
Being a frontline social worker is, too often, a highly complex and difficult task, but it does not have to be a thankless one.
If you’d like to read the full debate, you can find it here: https://hansard.parliament.uk/commons/2018-03-13/debates/E4E80411-01D4-457F-A4A8-875DD2B43FA5/SocialWorkers