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I am finding that more and more conversations in social work are ethical conversations about how we do good work in a difficult context. I hear a great deal about struggle. And I find myself wondering how we can aspire when aspiration may not seem realistic. Much of the work I do requires aspiration. It is about […]

The blogs that I have written in 2015 show the shape of my year: January’s was on stress following a survey by Community Care; for world social work day in March I wrote about the importance to me of having a college of social work; May’s blog was about the election and its implications for social work;

Last week I spent the day in a supervision workshop with 25 enthusiastic social care managers looking at how they can best enable practitioners to work well. Halfway through a discussion, one of the managers asked: ‘how do we keep motivating staff when things are so difficult, when there’s so little money and people are really

My Aunt is a Dominican Sister (Catholic religious order) in Cape Town. She recently moved into a newly built convent that is a fantastic example of supported housing. This gave me some great insight into how to do community living well. There’s a lot we can learn from the nuns. Co-production The convent was designed

In the safety announcement on planes, you are asked to put your own oxygen mask on before helping others with theirs. Social workers cannot help people effectively if they are overwhelmed themselves. I am really sad to see the results from the Community Care survey about the level of stress that social workers are experiencing.

Social work seems to be in two minds at the moment. Is it a strong profession, recognised and valued? Or is it a struggling profession, overrun by work and affected by cuts? I think it is a bit of both and that a tale about social work needs to tell both stories: a strengthening profession

I have just completed an 18-month project with Research in Practice for Adults (RiPfA) to produce resources to help assessors carry out good assessments. The main issue that I found was that all assessments have to be different – because people are different, yet we need to know that any assessment is good enough against

Last week I wrote an article for Community Care about the College of Social Work’s aim to make social work with older people more valuable and more valued. This is why… In the third week of my social work training I started a work placement in a hospice. Over the 50-day placement I learned about

There is a lot being written about leadership in social care at the moment. This is the best advice I have ever seen. It was written for me by my dad (a former management trainer) when I became a manager of other managers. “You will be expected to be on top of your job and

Recently in a workshop on supervision, I asked some new practitioners what their ideal supervisor would be like. ‘Kind’ was the first reply. I consider that a bit more kindness in social care could help us all feel better and make more progress. The word kind is linked to Old English gecynd, meaning nature, offspring, race. It