© British Association of Social Workers
Towards a Model for Co-working in Family Conciliation
The author is a Tutor in Social Work at the University of Bath, and Chairperson of the National Family Conciliation Council.
A social worker, trained in 1961, she has worked in hospitals and Social Service Departments. She has also trained and practised as a Marriage Guidance Counsellor. She has taught on three social work courses in different universities before her present position, which she took up immediately after working as the first co-ordinator of the Swindon Family Conciliation Service from 1981–85. She now serves it as its consultant.
Her main interest lies in developing practice theory in the area of marriage, divorce and the family.
Correspondence to Thelma Fisher, Tutor in Social Work, School of Humanities and Social Sciences, University of Bath, Claverton Down, Bath, Avon BA2 7AY.
Summary
This article surveys the present state of co-working in the practice of those independent family conciliation services affiliated to the National Family Conciliation Council. It proposes that a model of co-working is needed that is specifically tailored to conciliation practice.
It sets out progress towards such a model in a particular agency—the Swindon Family Conciliation Service. It develops a theoretical base for this model from the concepts of ‘content’ and ‘process’ which it links with the ‘underlying’ and ‘substantive’ issues brought up by separating and divorcing couples for resolution. It draws these ideas from writings about divorce experience and negotiation procedures.
It then presents a particular case, with an extract from an actual interview in which the model is used, and introduces a diagrammatic format for analysing conciliation processes in terms of the model proposed.