BJSW Advance Access originally published online on December 11, 2007
British Journal of Social Work 2009 39(3):506-521; doi:10.1093/bjsw/bcm118
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Tensions in the Delivery of Social Work Services in Rural and Remote Scotland
Colin Turbett manages social work services for North Ayrshire Council on the Isle of Arran in the Firth of Clyde on Scotland’s west coast. He has lived and practised in this setting for twenty years, and has made past contributions to the published literature on rural social work issues.
Correspondence to Colin Turbett, North Ayrshire Council—Social Services, Council Offices, Isle of Arran, North Ayrshire, KA27 8JY, UK. E-mail: cturbett{at}north-ayrshire.gov.uk
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Summary |
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 Top Summary IntroductionThe rural contextThe design of services...Dual relationshipsWorking with local contextsSummary: what is to...References |
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This paper is based on a premise that social work practitioners in rural locations, especially those in remote areas, will often find themselves the subject of policy and resource decision-making processes that are not sympathetic to their situation. This is based on a lack of awareness of rural practice issues both from the inside as well as the outside of such contexts. Social workers in rural areas are in fact well placed to engage in imaginative and proactive rather than purely reactive types of practice. They can promote effective community capacity building as well as help individuals in need. If they are to achieve these potentials they have to take responsibility for exploring such themes themselves, within frameworks and understandings created through professional training alongside proper recognition by employers.
Keywords: Scotland, rural, remote, management, dual relationships
We do not live in the back of beyond. We live in the very heart of beyond(Kevin MacNeil, The Stornoway Way, 2005).
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Introduction |
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TopSummaryIntroductionThe rural contextThe design of services...Dual relationshipsWorking with local contextsSummary: what is to...References |
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Twenty-two per cent of the population of Scotland’s 5.5 million inhabitants live in officially described rural and/or remote areas (Scottish Executive, 2006a); a sizeable proportion of social work activity is therefore, by definition, devoted to such communities. How this is reflected in resource allocation and attention to service delivery in social services will necessarily depend on the awareness of both policy makers and senior social work managers of rural service delivery issues. This paper will argue that evidence from practice might suggest that such attention is patchy and that this might be an area worthy of further examination and attention by policy makers. Its particular focus is on the remote end of the urban/rural/remote spectrum, as found in the rural and coastal hinterlands of Scotland’s highlands and islands.
Tensions between senior management and front line staff over service delivery matters are well versed in contemporary UK social work literature (Jones, 2001; Beresford and Croft, 2004; Ferguson and Lavalette, 2005). However, despite a small but growing volume of writing on rural social work issues (Pugh, 2000, 2003, 2006; Turbett, 2004, 2006), this area has not received particular attention in the UK. In the USA, Martinez-Brawley (2000) refers to these tensions, but argues positively that rural social workers enjoy an advantage because of their position at the crossroads at which the vertical systems emanating from remote policy makers and agencies meet the local horizontal systems found in rural communities. This positive view might seem at variance with Cheers’ (1998) account of the obstacles found to rural social working in the Australian context, echoed in Lehmann (2005)—perhaps illustrating the difference between possibility and oft-met reality. These writings, and others, suggest that the experience of social workers in rural areas internationally with similar social work systems to the UK might be usefully examined: recent rural social work literature will be explored in this paper, and particular issues in the Scottish context identified:
- the particularities of the rural context and their significance for resource provision;
- the impact of dual relationships on practice;
- absence of understanding, by employing agencies, of cultural and community frames of reference within rural contexts.
A way forward will be suggested for further discussion. This paper is rooted in practice, offers a practitioner’s perspective, and real examples will be given to illustrate the issues raised.
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The rural context |
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TopSummaryIntroductionThe rural contextThe design of services...Dual relationshipsWorking with local contextsSummary: what is to...References |
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Recent rural social work writings bring themes of rural disadvantage to the fore (Pugh, 2000; Turbett, 2004; Lohmann and Lohmann, 2005; Lehmann, 2005), in contrast to the traditional and romantic view of rural living found often in popular literature (e.g. Bryson, 1996). Not everyone will identify with the portrayal of the island community riven by alcoholism, double standards and repression described by MacNeil (2005), but this is closer to reality than the Monarch of the Glen parody of popular television. In Scotland, it is therefore useful to explore social work delivery issues within the context of disadvantage and inequality, key factors being discussed briefly below:
- A rural housing crisis. The poor, the low paid and even those on public sector secure incomes (e.g. social care workers) are finding themselves increasingly squeezed out of the rural housing market. In the writer’s own island setting, a recent official report identified that a household income of £70,000 per year was required to purchase a modest family-sized home, whilst the average household income was £27,600 (North Ayrshire Council, 2007). The supply of housing in rural areas has changed to meet a market demand for speculative investment opportunity (Cloke et al., 2002)—a trend evident in rural America as well in the UK (Rollinson and Pardeck, 2006). The fact that this problem means that ‘rural life as we know it is under threat’ (Shelter, 2004, p. 2) has resulted in serious attention being given to how affordable housing might be made more readily available for those who live and work permanently in rural communities (Scottish Executive, 2004).
- Low pay and poverty in rural areas. Whilst worklessness in Scotland continues to be associated with the urbanized and former industrial heartlands of West Central Scotland, low pay is most prevalent in the rural areas of Dumfries and Galloway, Moray and Clackmannan. Other poverty indicators also feature highly in remote rural areas: low income for those over sixty, deaths of those aged under sixty-five, chronic ill health amongst those aged under sixty-five, those aged sixteen to sixty-five seeking paid work (Palmer et al., 2006).
- An ageing population. Official reports recognize that many older people in rural areas suffer additional disadvantage (Rural Poverty and Inclusion Working Group, 2001), are increasing in numbers and make up proportionally more of the population than their urban counterparts (Commission for Rural Communities, 2006). Disadvantage is seen in transport and access to practical and advice services, although a proportion of older people in rural communities enjoy affluence and are there through choice (Rural Poverty and Inclusion Working Group, 2001). Population imbalance and housing difficulties for those of working age who might provide services throw up obvious challenges to those planning services for older people in the future.
- Transport problems exaggerating geographical isolation. Dependence on poor public transport systems can result in difficulty in accessing a range of opportunities almost taken for granted in urban areas, e.g. employment, health care and social services, food shopping, social and leisure activities, and advisory services. Transport disadvantage contributes to social exclusion in urban areas, but causes it in rural areas (Commission for Rural Communities, 2006). In health studies, this has been described as ‘distance decay’: the further the user is from the source of the service, the lower the take-up, with obvious negative health consequences for the populations affected (Asthana et al., 2003).
- Financial restraints on public service provision. A recent document produced by the Association of Directors of Social Work presents a gloomy picture of social work funding in Scotland: it is estimated that underfunding for 2006–07 was as high as 87 per cent in community and residential care services (primarily for older people) and 63 per cent for children’s services (Midwinter, 2006). These figures reflect demands created by a proliferation of legislation in the devolved parliament—by September 2004, the new Scottish Parliament had enacted seventy-four Acts of Parliament and 2,691 Statutory Instruments compared with a very small amount of specifically Scottish legislation prior to devolution in 1999 (Association of Directors of Social Work, 2005). For social work, these had created new regulatory and inspection bodies with clear remits to establish measurable standards for service delivery and drive up quality of provision. The tensions were acknowledged by the Executive itself in its response to the major report in to social work in Scotland Changing Lives (Scottish Executive, 2006b), which suggested that a refocusing of work activity might meet extra demand. As Midwinter (2006) notes, ‘There is little point in ministers flagging up the ways to improve the service if they fail to provide the means’. What were required were more resources and more funding.
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The design of services for rural areas |
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TopSummaryIntroductionThe rural contextThe design of services...Dual relationshipsWorking with local contextsSummary: what is to...References |
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Rural campaigners have long complained that they lose out to their urban counterparts when it comes to resource allocation. This is not really surprising: recent figures show that the worst pockets of poverty in Scotland are concentrated in urban areas (Palmer et al., 2006). It seems reasonable to expect that public spending on social care services should be directed towards these areas and then shared out proportionally elsewhere. Social inclusion policies and strategies such as those of the Scottish Executive in its first two parliaments are supposed to do just that. The problem, however, for rural areas, and especially the more remote ones, is how to organize services that target those in need when they are scattered over vast tracts of country. In Scotland, there is at least some recognition of this issue and the means that should be used to measure poverty and exclusion (Rural Poverty and Inclusion Working Group, 2001), whereas, in England, this is not the case and services tend to be provided where need equates with population density (Hindle et al., 2004; Commission for Rural Communities, 2006). Too often, the rural dimension is not taken into account when looking at service provision across the public sector (Hindle et al., 2004), with the result that services are not provided at all, or that they are so inaccessible that uptake is low and they appear not to be in demand. This factor, and the generally high levels of poverty and deprivation in Scotland anyway (Scottish Executive, 2006a), explain the allocations behind the Barnett Formula system (Twigger, 1998) employed by central UK government to decide how much finance is required to run Scotland’s public services and government. Whether this is always reflected in the manner in which the public sector generally determines resource allocation to remote and rural areas is quite another matter, just as, of course, whether there are enough resources in the first place.
An example of how this impacts in the local context: criminal justice social work services are now delivered on an increasingly uniform basis (Smith, 1998). This being the case, it perhaps matters not how they are delivered so long as the service to the courts is offered consistently. Efficiencies dictate that specialized teams deliver such services, sometimes based where the court sits, but generally in the urbanized areas which, for a variety of reasons, generate offender activity. Without denigrating the professionalism and commitment of colleagues in criminal justice, areas a distance away from the base can lose out. A nineteen-year-old in a Scottish island community was offending regularly and, being shunned generally by his more mature peers, sought comfort and material reward in the adulation of much younger teenagers. His influence over them created serious problems for many parents who were struggling to exercise control over their own children anyway. This resulted in an increase in police activity, local social work interventions with the adversely influenced young people, and problems within the local High School, much of which could be traced back to the one nineteen-year-old. Inevitably, the courts referred the young person to the mainland-based criminal justice team and he was placed on probation. His failure to attend for appointments (in the mainland criminal justice office) resulted in the closure of his case pending referral back to court for non-compliance. It never crossed the minds of the criminal justice workers to consult with island-based generic social work staff: their fairly rigidly based and programmed approach to criminal justice social work had no room for a more localized approach based on good rural practice, and no arrangement existed for such a process unless it involved inter-familial child protection. A possible opportunity for a joined-up approach to a community-wide issue was lost.
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Dual relationships |
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TopSummaryIntroductionThe rural contextThe design of services...Dual relationshipsWorking with local contextsSummary: what is to...References |
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The question of issues for workers in the personal services who live and work in the same community has been addressed at length in the international literature on rural human services (e.g. Cheers, 1998; Pugh, 2006). The principal question for practitioners and service users is that of ‘dual relationships’—put simply, how people relate as neighbours and community members at the same time as through a worker–client relationship. Some Australian commentators write that ‘Issues for individual rural practitioners include managing high visibility, informality, self-disclosure, trust and mistrust of professionals, dual and multiple roles and blurring of professional and personal boundaries’ (Green et al., 2003, p. 95). Lack of understanding of these issues by distant agencies and their senior managers can itself result in additional pressures that can compound the situation for workers on the ground.
A social worker known to me was periodically telephoned at home by an elderly lady who lived alone in the same community in which the worker resided and worked. These calls concerned requests for help with form-filling or straightforward debt matters. Whilst her supervisor’s tendency was to encourage the worker to direct the caller to the local Citizens Advice Bureau or, if deemed necessary, the office and the duty worker, the social worker felt that any such attempt would only drive the service user away from the help she needed and would deepen her anxiety and stress. She also discovered that the same person similarly contacted others in her own time at home, e.g. a worker in the local bank, the local medical practice nurse and the mobile librarian. The service user relied upon the informal neighbourly networks she had grown up with in her remote home community. Such encounters are commonplace in rural practice: Cheers (1998) argues persuasively that these informal services should be supported and not forced into non-recognition in workload statistics or, at worst, secrecy. Martinez-Brawley (1986) also discusses their merits. There have to be limits to such relationships and, beyond obvious proscriptions covered by professional codes of ethics (sexual relationships between workers and service users is specifically referred to in such codes e.g. in Scotland: Scottish Social Services Council, 2002), should be discussed within the context of professional supervision. There are also questions about the effective circumventing of systems that ensure that the scarce resources of the agency are properly targeted and fairly allocated: these, too, have to be considered and negotiated on a local basis.
Failure to recognize the validity of and nature of dual relationships can result in the scenario described by Pugh from an example originally provided by myself:
Another example of this was noted in one remote rural location where the actions of a social care worker sent to provide cover disturbed and disrupted local practices and service user expectations. The department concerned had revised their eligibility criteria for some services for older people but had left significant local discretion in the allocation of home-care provision. However, the temporary replacement worker perceived the practice of local workers as inappropriate and collusive, and thought that the criteria were not being properly applied and that there was favouritism in the allocation of services. The replacement worker also disapproved of the erosion of boundaries between working and leisure time, and disliked having to receive out-of-hours telephone calls from users over what seemed to be rather trivial matters. In contrast, local workers and service users viewed the behaviour and decision making of the replacement worker as being insensitive and overly formulaic. They thought that the worker was failing to take proper account of relevant local information about social networks, needs and problems. Subsequently, upon return to the central base, the replacement worker’s report to managers resulted in changes which further reduced local discretion in decision making (Pugh, 2006, p. 7).Workers in rural areas also face a greater level of public scrutiny over their decisions in situations of controversy (Schmidt, 2005), due to the absence of anonymity in a small community. Whether this is over the high level of support being given to a family who are not accepted by neighbours, or the perceived opposite in the case of someone considered deserving of help, judgements and assumptions are made that are difficult to challenge because of confidentiality. Such ‘no wins’ can be illustrated by the following example: two young children in a small and tight-knit rural village were cared for by their grandmother, whose motive for moving there in the first place was not unconnected with a desire to be a safe distance away from her mentally ill and alcohol-abusing daughter (the mother of the two children), who lived in a town about thirty miles away. It took some time for the insecurities and uncertainties surrounding the whole situation to be made known to local social workers. Whilst it was their opinion that statutory measures were necessary to safeguard the children, the grandmother was resistant, preferring to keep control herself, and not have social workers seen visiting her home. Informal local arrangements were made by the grandmother for neighbours to care for the children, at a time of acute ill health, and she proudly refused to take up the offer of social services assistance. When these informal arrangements began to break down, demands were made by the neighbours involved for social workers to step in and sort things out. This was difficult to manage, as resources were not easy to access at short notice. Local opinion about social services workers shifted from being over-interfering one minute, to being ineffectual and unresponsive the next. Efforts were made to overcome barriers and manage local opinion, through quiet behind-the-scenes work with the local GP and primary school head teacher, so that there might be more understanding of the limits and possibilities for social work intervention, and a realistic view of the options for the children’s welfare and well-being.
With especially difficult and complex situations such as that confronting workers in the Orkney child protection saga of 1991 (Clyde, 1992) or the Western Isles (Eilean Siar) child protection inquiry of 2004, both of which involved dilemmas beyond the range of normal expertise (Social Work Inspection Agency, 2005), individual professionals were under immense pressure from within their own communities. The solution for Lord Clyde in 1992 was support from outside including from a newly established central resource (Clyde, 1992); in the more recent situation, the Social Work Inspection Agency similarly recommended a national team of experts who could be deployed to assist local workers (Social Work Inspection Agency, 2005). It remains to be seen whether action will follow the more recent report.
Problems associated with living and working alongside service users are sometimes more personally threatening than the examples described above. The tensions and difficulties of working in potentially conflictual statutory areas such as child protection can be brought into sharp relief in such settings. Physical threats against workers or verbal or emotional abuse are inevitably carried over into life outside work when community space is shared, with concerns about the consequences for the worker’s family including children. This is well versed in the international literature (e.g. Green et al., 2003; Coholic and Blackford, 2005), but only rarely mentioned in the UK context (Pugh, 2000). Green et al.’s (2003) Australian study of the problem reports commonplace harassment of staff including ‘verbal abuse, invasion of privacy at social events and in public places, episodes of stalking and excessive phone contact. Theft of personal belongings, sexual references and unwanted romantic attention was reported in a few instances, as was (sic.) malicious gossip and complaints’ (Green et al., 2003, p. 100). Most of these have been experienced by colleagues or myself in over twenty years in a remote Scottish location. Special consideration has to be given to protecting staff through attention to lone-working protocols, passing on work to colleagues and the sharing of concerns with other agencies, particularly police and health.
I recall an occasion on which, alone in the island office (the part-time administrative worker was off-duty), a man from the travelling community appeared at the door seeking financial assistance. Unbeknown to him, he was being sought by social services at the time so that a child who had run away to join him could be removed and returned to her other parent in another part of the country, the father being known for abusive and violent behaviour. This goal of removal was achieved through careful if somewhat risky negotiation; after this, resources were increased and mechanisms put in place to ensure that workers were not placed in such danger again.
Good relationships with colleagues such as the police are necessary to prevent abuse between agencies based on knowledge of how easy it is to make contact with a worker who is not on duty or only available for ‘emergencies’. Workers in remote rural settings can expect ‘greater community involvement, more after hours interruptions, greater stress’ (Sidell et al., 2006, p. 29). Pugh (2000) discusses the implications of public knowledge of a worker’s own family situation within small communities. All of this challenges the popular notion that rural workers are in less stressful situations simply because the environment is one sought after by urban dwellers: the wistful ‘it must be so nice working here’ syndrome heard frequently from visiting work colleagues picked up from the ferry in my own island setting.
Pugh’s recent paper examines in detail issues surrounding dual relationships and their impact upon the worker and the need to examine this in research (Pugh, 2006). The tensions surrounding rural service delivery deem this an imperative for agencies and executive bodies, who require knowledge of the extent to which service users and workers’ daily lives are affected by the remote/rural situation in which both are bound. This is in terms both of the opportunities that such a context presents, as well as the difficulties that can arise.
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Working with local contexts |
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TopSummaryIntroductionThe rural contextThe design of services...Dual relationshipsWorking with local contextsSummary: what is to...References |
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Martinez-Brawley (2000) discusses how it is that social workers in rural locales might require knowledge of the cultural/language context of their clients’ lives. Her account of the concept of high context/low context language provides a useful way to explain the importance of an understanding of communication and its place in work with people who quite literally live on the margins of urban dominated society:
They may assume the clients are non-verbal. However the issue is not so much the client’s inability to communicate as the social worker’s undeveloped skills in receiving high-context messages. These combine body and verbal language into an idiom shaped and coloured by the immediate socio-cultural environment, with unstated references to common experiences that constitute the cultural basis of interaction (Martinez-Brawley, 2000, p. 237).The usefulness and relevance of this insight are explored further by Martinez-Brawley (2000) in explaining difficulties in obtaining ‘low-context’ information:
Low-context, information-centred interviewers looking for specific answers may become impatient with high-context respondents. Their impatience, despite attempts to cover it, is readily apparent to high-context people who are skilled at reading non-verbal signs. Lack of information, a problem for low-context professionals, is caused not by the absence of information but by the interviewer’s lack of skill in entering the high-context linguistic world of the respondents. Often as a result of their education the knowledge of professionals is not grounded in the eventful lives of real people (Martinez-Brawley, 2000, p. 238).This will ring true with any rural community care social worker who has tried to glean the information needed for a single shared assessment pro-forma from an elderly person who seems to have little interest in the worker’s agenda and script, and even less in their performance-indicator considerations. In my own setting, social workers assessing older people often find that a firm and carefully reached decision has been made by that person to go into permanent residential care in a particular local care home, and the assessment process that the worker has to go through is, for them, painfully irrelevant. Tools that are friendly to local interpretation and use are required, rather than the type of computer-friendly-tick-box-information-gathering systems that are becoming a norm. This could be a question of language itself—although there does seem to be awareness of the importance of policies that promote the use of the Gaelic language where this is still used (Social Work Inspection Agency, 2006b). It is a question of understanding community, culture and the frames of reference through which they are expressed—a consideration important when discussing anti-discriminatory approaches in other areas of social work, e.g. ethnic minorities (see Thompson, 2001). Social workers entering remote rural communities require induction into such processes, and not just the usual agency concerns with procedures and policies.
Linked with this concept, and important to its understanding in the Scottish context, are the differences and potential conflict areas between indigenous rural dwellers and the incomers who have moved into many rural communities in large numbers (Martinez-Brawley, 1986; Pugh, 2000), in line with the changes in housing ownership remarked upon earlier. In my own setting, this process has been completed to the extent that, nowadays, one rarely hears of these tensions. However, I recall that they were live ones as recently as ten or fifteen years ago, when the influx of people from a particular corner of England was a matter that arose in conversation regularly and one village was known as ‘Little Yorkshire’—proudly by its incoming residents but derisively by many others. In more isolated communities such as that described by Martinez-Brawley (1986), issues of culture and history will be more relevant, and surround efforts to retain the Gaelic language as a living entity.
Absence of understanding of rural networks can actually impede joint working through clumsy application of policy. Joint Futures—the Scottish Executive’s top-down strategy to ensure that health and social services providers were working together properly for the benefit of older people (Scottish Executive, 2000)—is a good example. I recall a conference some years ago when workers from the health services and the local authority social services in a particular remote locality were brought together to hear a senior manager outline the government’s agenda and the local authority and health board’s plans for implementation. When he had finished, he asked for questions: to general applause, a worker present told the manager that staff had been working together effectively at a local level for years and nothing he had told them was new; the manager’s response was to tell the audience that they cannot have been, as ‘there were no protocols in place’! His failure to acknowledge and then seek to build upon the existing strengths within the rural setting undermined his credibility and set back his own agenda.
Difficulties have also been experienced in rural areas of Scotland in relation to the ‘modernization’ of services for older people which, in moving emphasis from residential care to community care as required by government (Scottish Office, 1998), has resulted in care home closures and service reduction. In Highland, a council decision to privatize a number of units in order to release resources to make up for a deficit in care at home services (Social Work Inspection Agency, 2007a) was met by such widespread opposition that it became an election issue and resulted in a u-turn (Paterson, 2007). In my own area, this same process is underway, but lessons have been learned from elsewhere and a concerted effort is being made to involve service users, elected members and other stakeholders—something entirely possible in a small community. This will hopefully avoid conflict by finding solutions that include the views of all, and not just distant social work budget holders.
Failure by agencies and their staff to understand and appreciate particular communities has had serious consequences in Scotland which have to be acknowledged in a paper such as this: in his public inquiry findings, Lord Clyde felt that this was a component of the 1991 Orkney Child Protection situation referred to earlier. His final recommendation, whilst not alluding to this directly, suggested that Orkney Council and, in particular, their Social Work Department take active steps to improve their relationship with the local community (Clyde, 1992). Unfortunately, evidence from Scottish Social Work Inspection Agency reports in rural authorities to date suggests that little emphasis is placed on attention to locality and rurality when inspecting and assessing the quality of services (Social Work Inspection Agency, 2006a, 2006b, 2007a, 2007b). A universal ‘Performance Inspection Model’ is used (Appendix 1 in each of the reports cited above) that takes no account of the urban/rural continuum and its implications for service design and practice.
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Summary: what is to be done? |
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TopSummaryIntroductionThe rural contextThe design of services...Dual relationshipsWorking with local contextsSummary: what is to...References |
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This paper has argued that there are particular issues with rural-based practice in social work, which increase as one moves further along the urban–rural continuum. These engender tensions between front line workers (alongside their front line managers) and the agencies by whom they are employed. These can be summarized as arising from:
- the particularities of the rural context, including the characteristics of poverty and inequality, and the requirement by policy makers and funders to understand these effectively when determining and allocating resources;
- the notion of dual relationships and their impact on professional practice;
- absence of understanding by employing agencies of the rural context (which will vary from locality to locality) and its significance for service design and delivery.
Proper recognition of these factors will establish rural social work as a mini specialism in its own right. Although perhaps not widely accepted in the UK and Scottish context (Turbett, 2004, 2006), many international commentators view generalism as the best model for social work in remote rural settings (e.g. Australia: Mason, 2006; Canada: Collier, 2006; USA: Lohmann, 2005). The social worker in the remote rural setting, to use the terminology of systems theory (Pincus and Minahan, 1973), must be aware of the dynamics of change system, target system, action system—as well as client system, and might work within all four to help a service user achieve a particular outcome. This approach has been more recently refined through the mapping process developed by Smale et al. (2000, p. 58) (Figure 1).
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The usefulness of such mapping can be seen in the following example from my own practice setting. Over a period of time, High School staff, social workers and the police saw the growth of a trend for children and young people to stay away from home on ‘sleepovers’ with friends. This practice enabled the young people concerned to operate outside parental boundaries and place themselves at risk through alcohol (and drug) abuse. To the professionals who met together to look at the issue (the change agent activity domain), it was clear that many parents (the subjects of the indirect work and activity) did not think that these concerns applied to them; their complacency helped to create a culture of acceptance which made it harder for the agencies to grapple with the problem with the small numbers of children whose behaviour was placing them at significant risk. Funds were obtained from grant-making bodies (the domain of service delivery activity) to produce ‘Sleepover Cards’—simple reusable credit-type cards which asked parents and children to note where children were, who they were with, contact numbers, etc. Together with publicity in the local community paper, explanatory leaflets were sent to every parent in the community. The effect was to raise awareness, promote discussion and change the culture, leading to easier identification of the young people who remained at risk, who would then become the main focus of social services and police interventions (the domain of direct work and intervention). Feedback from parents and others in the community was excellent. Smale et al. (2000, p. 52) argue that such simple mapping helps teams to look at the ‘content and outcome’ of interventions and at the ‘process’ required to arrive at these. None of this would have been possible within a basic individual casework model.
Whilst generalism is possible within the type of specialist social work practice which is almost (but not quite) universal in remote UK rural practice, if based in locality teams, it is most classically employed in generic practice. This allows the worker to engage with community members whatever the difficulties they have for which they might need help. It requires skills and knowledge across the range of children and family, community care and criminal justice settings of modern specialist practice. Changing Lives (Scottish Executive, 2006b) recognizes that social workers in remote rural settings might find generic practice the best if not the only method available—belated but useful encouragement after many years of unchallenged movement towards specialism. The irony is that the last major report into Social Services in the UK—the Barclay Report (National Institute for Social Work, 1982)— argued a case for the type of practice which is inherent in generalism—community social work. Martinez-Brawley (1986) found such practice when she visited the Hebridean island of Barra in the mid-1980s. The message of Barclay, however, was lost in the neo-liberal drive that had already started in the Thatcher years and which grew to fruition in the reforms of the 1980s and 1990s that introduced the market into social care (Harris, 2003). In that sense, Barclay came both after its time and before—if one takes Changing Lives (Scottish Executive, 2006b) as an example of the rediscovery of the values and potential of social work. So as not to reinvent the wheel, it is worth at this point summarizing the principals of community social work advanced at that time (Barr, 1989):
- achievement of appreciative understanding of a community—in today’s parlance, that would mean data collection and consultation with stakeholders;
- engagement with private troubles (the micro problems of the individual) and public issues (macro problems requiring collective action);
- liberation not domestication as the goal;
- prevention rather than reaction; upstream pro-active approaches rather than crisis-led reactive responses.
Social work, it is argued, can play a pro-active role in community capacity building in rural areas, rather than a purely reactive role in helping those who fall off the edge of society. In the writer’s own setting, this aspiration is expressed in a number of activities involving community members, users, carers and colleagues from other agencies: at the time of writing, staff are involved in an ongoing local forum looking at the abuse of alcohol by young people, in a steering group looking at affordable housing provision, in a review of services provided by all agencies for older people, in a planning forum for adults with learning disabilities in the community, and in parenting skills training. The role of the employing agency and senior management should be to create a framework in which such practice can flourish (see Barr, 1989): performance targets should be established which give credit to such practice rather than confining it to the margins.
No doubt, all this is straying beyond the design envisaged by the architects of Changing Lives (Scottish Executive, 2006b). These themes, though, are consistent with the practice models proposed elsewhere in the international literature on rural social work (e.g. Collier, 2006; Martinez-Brawley, 1998; Hickman, 2004; Lohmann, 2005). The danger is that the role of the qualified practitioner in social work is moving away from preventative work to focus purely on interventions with those most at risk in society. This message is certainly contained in the description of tasks given in Changing Lives (Scottish Executive, 2006b): qualified social workers are seen as operating primarily at the third and fourth of four tiers of intervention: these representing direct interventions with people at ‘high levels of vulnerability and risk’ (Tier 3) and ‘where there are complex, unpredictable and longer term needs and risks’ (Tier 4) (Scottish Executive, 2006b, p. 31). This has been criticized on the basis that ongoing resource deficiencies will consign those who have trained to undertake the upstream preventative work defined in Tiers 2 and 3 to the upper two levels, where their main role will be assessment and care management. The other tasks at Tiers 1 and 2 (which potentially tackle social problems at base level rather than patching up those individuals already mortally wounded by such problems) will be left to workers in other disciplines, or those without formal qualifications who are, of course, paid less (Ritchie and Woodward, 2007). Whilst these possibilities are not necessarily guaranteed outcomes of the Changing Lives formulae, alternative scenarios will have to be fought for by rural practitioners who have a knowledge base in the possibilities and potentials of a specialist rural practice.
The issue about how the three themes identified above (rural context, dual relationships and culture/community/frames of reference) can be addressed must start with a greater understanding and consciousness of the processes involved on the part of front line workers themselves. There is nothing in any of this that cannot be accommodated within the existing legislative and practice framework. Change can come through a rural studies input into professional training at both graduate and post-graduate levels through (overdue) recognition of its place by government and employing agencies. In other words, both front line workers and their employers have a role to play if the rural agenda in social work is to be promoted successfully. We have a long way to go, as little attention is currently being paid to rural practice in the UK’s academic institutions—unlike Northern Canada and Australia (which have similar systems of service delivery). As far as the writer knows, there is presently no rural studies teaching within the academic institutions in Scotland, and little anywhere else in the UK (Turbett, 2004, 2006). From the practitioner perspective, this has to change if practice in remote and rural areas is not to be subsumed totally into poorly fitting urban-based models with consequent further alienation and disadvantage to service users and the workers who live alongside them.
Accepted: August 1, 2007
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