WELFARE STATE
Jobs in social work
Jef Smith
The point was very reasonably made in the course of the recent reorganisation of social work that far more jobs were created than there were able candidates to fill them. Not only at the level of directors nf social services, where top salaries now run close to five figures, was there a scarcity of applicants who could combine professional qualifications and managerial expertise; many departments have deputies and most at least three assistant directors, not to mention the host of area team managers and principal officers. The people appointed to these posts over the last eighteen months will effectively run the social services for the next decade or so, but who will be their successors in the mid-'eighties?
The situation to which social work recruitment has adapted itself during the rapid growth period of the 'sixties was one of acute shortage of suitable candidates. Salaries were in the same low grouping as those of teachers, nurses and youth workers — the other semiprofessions — and recruitment stressed the challenge and personal satisfaction of the job in compensation for the lack of material reward. Last year's amalgamation of the children's services, the welfare departments and the social work fringe of public health transformed the situation. Not only did the salary ceiling double or even treble overnight, but many individual social workers achieved rapid promotion and saw their career prospects lengthen dramatically. The imminence of local government reform in 1974 adds a further glow to the pay future; though the number of social service departments and therefore the number of directors' posts will contract slightly, those remaining will carry even more responsibility and staff protection arrangements ensure that with each reorganisation no one loses badly and most people move up. Now that the British Association of Social Workers is under way and feeling the strength of its 10,000 membership, the social workers' bargaining power within NALGO, the local authority's white collar union, is greatly enhanced. The arrival of realistic remuneration, it saddens some to admit, has rejuvenated social work recruitment more rapidly than any number of appeals to idealism.
The most serious effects of the unemployment situation coincided almost precisely with the Seebohm reorganisation, and the job outlets for graduates were contracting just at the time when universities and polytechnics were reaching new peaks in their output of social scientists. The effect on applications for fieldwork jobs has been dramatic. While senior positions often remain unfilled for months for lack of suitable candidates, vacancies for trainees and assistant social workers are vastly oversubscribed.
Recent planning of social work training has not unfortunately been carried out with the present surplus of graduates in mind. Ironically the young social scientists who were the major source of personnel for the social services a decade ago were replaced during the 'sixties by the middleaged as the prime target of the -colleges. In part this arose from the Younghusband Report which identified the need for training for many serving officers in the health and welfare departments, in part from the fact that to obtain staff children's officers and chief welfare officers began to look to mature candidates dissatisfied with other jobs. A so-called emergency course for recruits of this sort was established in London and although regarded initially as a five year experiment its life has now been extended to 1976 and similar courses started at Leeds and Cardiff. More recently still, a number of courses have been set up for unqualified officers over forty-five. Recent thinking in training as a result has concentrated on these older groups whose educational needs — a gradual reintroduction to systematic thinking, careful practise in written work, and skilful integration of new theoretical learning with previous life experience — are quite different from those of articulate young people fresh from their first degrees.
The contrast between the relatively mature middle-aged and the academically more exciting young confronts potential employers even more starkly than the trainers. Indeed many directors operating to a limited budget for seconding staff to courses will be faced over the next month or so with effectively awarding scholarships for training in the year from September between rival claimants. By and large the young candidates will be intelligent and radical, impatient of bureaucracies and reluctant to guarantee that they will stay with an authority or indeed in social work, The older workers are likely to be far less flexible, more accepting of anthority, mature in their attitudes but less able to express them, and quite prepared to settle in one area for the best part of the rest of their working lives. In planning a recruitment policy, a rar-sighted director will not concern himself merely with his immediate need for trained fieldworkers but will recognise that he is selecting now the future managers of the social services.
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