HAVING just retired after 43 years as a social worker, I’ve had the opportunity to look back at the changes to our profession since I qualified back in 1980.

Many will argue that social work has become more “professional” as a plethora of research has been published into all aspects of the social work role, alongside tools for assessing service users on all sorts of things — their likelihood of reoffending, their ability to care for their children, their need for adult services  — and frameworks for writing all sorts of different reports.

This has been presented as progress, but many of these developments have focused practice on the individual rather than setting it within the wider social and political context, understanding that the vast majority of the people we support in social work live in the poorest communities and are the most disadvantaged. The practice has become more focused on “individual failings” and social work has often been experienced by service users as both unhelpful and judgemental.