SIR, —Your correspondents in. recent issues of the Spectator -appear to
be out of touch with the exact nature of the work of Children's Depart- ments. Mrs. MacKaill suggests that children's officers may have -to employ deputies for the purpose of routine inspection of foster-homes. May, indeed ! In the not untypical area in which I work more than 200 children are boarded-out in territory covering over a thousand square miles. Each of these children must be visited at least every six weeks (somewhat less frequently where the placing is of long standing, and where the child is in employment), and, unless the child is to be singled out by being fetched out of school to be seen, the visiting muit
be done after school-hours or at week-ends. And it must not he supposed that six-weekly visits are sufficient in a large number of cases to ensure the well-being of the child, or to give all the help a foster- parent needs. Where a difficult situation hasarisen it may be necessary to visit weekly. even daily, during the period of strain. It will surely be obvious that no one person coal(' undertake this work, and that a Children's Officer, responsible for children in homes: children coming before the courts, office administration, and a hundred and one other tasks, cannot possibly see each individual child.
One of your correspondents stresses the importance of continuity, and quite rightly suggests that it is harmful for a succession of case-workers to probe the intimate details of a family situation. Surely she has answered her own question why part-time paid social work is unaccept- able. Emergencies will not arise only on the three days a week when she is at Work. Catastrophes occur out of office hours, and the only people who can tackle them effectively are those relatively free from domestic commitments. No woman with duties to her own family can take on responsibility for the welfare of forty. or so' boarded-out children without incurring the risk of creating in her own family exactly the deprivation she seeks to alleviate for others.
Both your correspondents refer to the youth and inexperience of many social workers, and Mrs. MacKaill stresses the value of motherhood and domestic. experience in deepening understanding. She mentions that mothers may think impertinent the advice given to them by single young women ("I've buried fifteen. How many have you had ? "). Although young and single myself, I have only once met resistance on that score, and then on an occasion when the advice I had to give was necessarily unpalatable. I rather fancy Mrs. MacKaill would have met similar resistance, rationalised into an attack on her fur-coat or her income-level or her politics, or some detail quite as irrelevant as the presence or absence, of a wedding-ring and middle-aged spread !
It seems to me that the success of a visitor in assessing a foster-home and in giving advice which is friendlily received depends on her intelli- gence, her genuine sympathy for the family with which she deals, and the soundness of the training she has received. Direct personal experi- ence of the bearing and raising of a family is of course of inestimable value to the worker who possesses these qualifications,Iliut it is not a sine qua non.
When selection of social workers is made, personal suitability must be assessed together with freedom and willingness to work exacting, unpre- dictable hours, and it is probably on the latter score that young single women are usually, and in my opinion, rightly, chosen.—Yonrs faithfully.
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