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INTRODUCTION
Amidst all the traditional welfare work carried on in the period under review
came the creation of a Social Services Division as part of a larger directoratethat
of Health & Family Services-controlling Housing, Health, Welfare, and
Children's Departments. This latter event overshadowed all else and resulted in
a number of officers leaving the social services, bringing with it the difficulties
of replacement and in some instances reallocation of work. But it also brought
the appointment of an additional senior child care officer, a senior family
caseworker and a casework co-ordinator, and for the first time it became
possible to pull together the whole of the casework effort of the social services.
During this period of resignation and recruitment, so much was said and written
that one could be forgiven for forgetting the very raison d'etre for the social
services; fortunately the task of caring goes inexorably on as the statistics
which follow in the report to some extent show.
A CASEWORK AGENCY
The appointment of the senior staff referred to in the Introduction allowed
us to undertake regular consultation with professional social welfare staff and
gave administrative control over case loads of all the social workers; the senior
family caseworker with her team of four intensive family caseworkers has become
responsible for those families in the borough with a multiplicity of problems and
for whom it is thought that casework support will be beneficial. In this way child
care officers have been helped by a reduction in case loads, and social welfare
officers in the Division to some extent relieved of work with families requiring
intensive casework support.
It has also become possible to bring to bear all the resources of the
directorate in support of those families amongst us at risk of losing their homes.
At the time of writing there are over 100 families in the borough facing the threat
of losing their accommodation, mostly for reason of rent arrears, and perhaps it is
in this context if in no other that we should look at the reorganisation of social
services in the borough, and at the creation of a highly skilled and professional
intensive family casework unit offering casework support. Here let me say that
the authority delegated to the Director of Health & Family Services to rehouse
deprived families on their immediately becoming homeless, as a matter of social
priority, is the biggest single benefit accruing from the reorganisation. It is
one thing to speak of co-ordination, quite another to achieve it. It is as much
in the hearts and minds of men as it is in any administrative scheme.
Case conferences and casework co-ordination have been made considerably
easier, and all social workers now operating in the four area geographical social
work teams obviously find it simpler to discuss with each other their cases and
problems common to them. Of course we do not always win in the sense that social
workers have a magic wand which, on its being waved, changes the characters and
inhibitions of a lifetime in their clients and administers instant justice. But
if there is no winning (with our families) in the ordinary sense of the word, and
if by contrast I might use the word failure and the consequences of it, then unless
we continue to try harder the progression of our families down the slope of despair,
demoralisation and ultimate defeat will be assured.
THE CHILDREN'S SERVICE
As to the Children's Service during the period under review, probably the
appointment Of the additional senior child care officers was the most significant
factor allowing as it did for the first time regular consultation and control over
child care officers case loads. Fortnightly reviews of all cases with child care
officers have continued, allowing the concentration of their work on cases of the
highest priority.
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