About Hilary Searing

My Social Work Career

I first became interested in social work in 1965 after seeing my grandmother end her days in a grim, long-stay ward of a psychiatric hospital. I obtained a degree with diploma in social studies at Keele university and then worked as a trainee Mental Welfare Officer in 1968 in a community care centre in Newham led by the eminent community psychiatrist, Dr Jack Kahn. While there I was introduced to the theory of social casework and the practical realities of working in an urban, multi-cultural community with many social problems. The borough was facing serious housing problems following the Ronan Point disaster (the tower block which partially collapsed following a gas explosion) and many clients presented as wanting help with their housing difficulties.

After qualifying as a psychiatric social worker in 1970 I became a Mental Welfare Officer just before the new Social Services Department came into being and soon afterwards was expected to work generically. In 1974 I worked in Kingswood Remand and Assessment Centre for young offenders and in 1976 transferred to the Child Guidance Service in Bristol, which was a multi-disciplinary service. In these jobs a significant part of the social work role was assessment i.e. obtaining detailed information about the child's history, family circumstances and relationships and making recommendations, in consultation with other professionals, about any specialist provision for the child, which might include placement away from home. The child guidance work also gave me responsibility for working with parents, particularly mothers, to give support in managing the child's behaviour and improving family relationships. In addition my team offered a 'Drop In Service' for parents who had concerns about a child and I was involved in providing a Mother and Toddler Group for isolated mothers who needed support.

During the 1970's the emergence of child abuse as a 'social problem’ had a major impact on services. Statutory social work was gradually transformed from a 'child care' service into one increasingly driven by 'child protection' with a greater emphasis on procedures and the investigation of potential risks to children. As social services grew in size and complexity in the 1980's, the managerial component expanded and re-structuring of services was often seen as the solution to pressures arising from increased referrals and mounting anxieties about child sexual abuse.

In the late 1980's Avon local authority began to withdraw its managers, and then social workers, from the child mental health service. My job was axed and I was redeployed into a Family Centre where I was given a specialist role in a community-based team. This gave me interesting new opportunities for direct work with children and young people, family therapy and providing assessments in child protection cases and court proceedings. At the same time social work practice was undergoing transformation in response to the changes introduced by the Children Act 1989. A programme of in-service training prepared us well for its implementation in 1991. The new Act was highly regarded and stimulated much discussion about the development of good practice. This continued following the publication of government-sponsored research into the workings of the Act which suggested how practice could be further improved.

Between 1993 and 1997 I worked as a Senior Practitioner in children's services in a Family Centre in Cardiff. I enjoyed working in a supportive team and felt confident about my ability to carry a large caseload of complex cases. However, I found the long hours and the stressful nature of the work wore me down and left me increasingly demotivated. I therefore decided at the age of fifty to retire from social work to devote my energies to other interests. I have never regretted that decision.

The Barefoot Social Worker

I call myself the Barefoot Social Worker because I celebrate my career as a local authority social worker who never went into management. I do not accept that everyone aspires to leadership positions and think greater value should be attached to social workers who find satisfaction in being a front line practitioner.

I believe that ordinary life experience should be valued more highly in social work training. The introduction of the undergraduate degree in 2003 was intended to improve the quality of social workers but the regulation of practice standards remains a challenge and heavy workloads often undermine good practice. Social workers now seem more uncertain about what they are required to do and less confident about their ability to make difficult decisions. I am therefore sceptical about the value of academic knowledge because I know that an in-depth understanding of the professional role only really developed out of my experience in practice. I learned a great deal from the people who let me into their troubled lives, colleagues who acted as mentors and others who offered practical support.

Right from the start of my career there was never any doubt that social workers have dual roles which include statutory duties and responsibilities. In those days social work did not seem as complicated as it is today. While a student I did not have a car and had to make home visits on bike or on public transport. I may have been inexperienced but I made up for this with my concern for people suffering mental illness and my commitment to fighting injustice. I did not consider there was much difference between my social background and that of the people I tried to help. In this sense I was definitely in the tradition of 'The Barefoot Helper'.

As a young Mental Welfare Officer in Somerset I once naively went against medical opinion and refused to sign an application for compulsory admission under the Mental Health Act because I thought treatment could be provided for the teenager outside hospital. Of course I was reprimanded and taken off the case. This experience taught me that it is one thing to have confidence in my own judgement and quite another to know how to assert it effectively.

In recent years I have been dismayed by some of the changes in social work which have rocked the foundations of relationship-based work. In particular, the use of structured tools for information-gathering has become a substitute for the use of self and sound professional judgement. Further discussion of relationship-based work can be found in my article published in the Journal Child and Family Work in 2003: The continuing relevance of casework ideas to long-term child protection work

I am concerned that social workers often wish to learn about interventions as though they are technical skills rather than from an in-depth understanding of the human psyche. My tutor at Bristol University, Janet Bodman, was very supportive in helping me pay attention to my emotions, reflect on them and know when to act more intuitively. For a young social worker this was a difficult balance to strike and it is only with increasing experience and maturity that I have developed confidence in my own judgement and my capacity to handle the powerful dynamics of relationships with clients, particularly those who are hostile to social work intervention.

While I support efforts to improve professional practice, I do not think that social work can ever be a full profession, like medicine, due to the inherent contradictions within the social work role. Many problems in children's services have arisen because the profession makes exaggerated claims about its effectiveness. Policies of prevention and early intervention have been in place for a long time on the assumption that the rate of referrals to children's services would go down - but this has not happened. In fact, since 1991 there has been a fourfold increase in the number of referrals to children's services. I support the principle of early intervention but the reality is that some people are very resistant to change and some social problems, such as child abuse, will never be completely eradicated.

In the early 90's many children's services provided an open-door service to families and children in need and were committed to combining supportive services and child protection measures. Much has changed since then and it is now very difficult for me to make sense of current social work practices and processes. I am very concerned that some children's social workers seem uncertain of their professional role and may tend to fall back on bureaucratic practices. Sometimes this means that class prejudices operate and working class people living in poverty are being treated unfairly.

My particular concern is that training today does not set students on the right path towards balanced professional judgement in complex child protection cases. There should be a greater emphasis on helping children's social workers with the emotional impact of what they are dealing with and providing a career structure that encourages them to stay in front line practice.

Hilary Searing

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