Second thoughts

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Let's show respect for children's social work
A few weeks ago, the cry went up from my nine-year-old daughter at the laptop: "Oh, no, it's the social worker!" It turned out that the appearance of the social worker on her Sims computer game signalled that her computer child was being taken away due to neglect.
With children's views of social workers already entrenched as quasi-child-snatchers, it is not difficult to see how their parents easily empathise with a tabloid-fuelled image of social workers as contributing to the problems of vulnerable families, rather than as part of the solution for helping them. A recent General Social Care Council survey found that only 40% of people viewed the contribution of social workers as "very important".
Yet good social workers are as crucial to the wellbeing of vulnerable children or to the survival of damaged families as a doctor is to the health of his patient or a teacher to the learning chances of her pupil. They are a key element in the tools we need to deal with what the Conservative party has identified as our "broken society". Not to recognise as much, and just to point the finger of blame when something goes wrong, is shortsighted and a false economy.
To that end, the Conservative party set up a commission of practitioners, service users and other experts last year to find solutions rather than apportion blame. Our report, No More Blame Game - The Future for Children's Social Workers, is published this week after a year of taking more than 100 written and oral submissions at Westminster.
Our findings start with the need for a more cohesive professional leadership for social workers, akin to that of the British Medical Association or Royal College of Nursing, which the British Association of Social Workers, with just 11,000 members, has thus far regrettably failed to provide.