a monthly column from members of
SIRCC
This
month’s column is from
Claire Burns
Reinforcing the Need for
Poverty Aware Practice in Residential Childcare
The
author is Claire Burns, Senior Lecturer in Social Care at Langside College
of Further Education. Claire leads a team of lecturers who deliver the
Higher National Certificate (HNC) course in Social Care for staff working
in residential care settings. The Scottish Social Services Council has
said that all basic-grade residential workers must be qualified in both
the HNC in Social Care (or equivalents) and the Scottish Vocational Qualification
(SVQ) Level 3 in the care of children and young people.
As
a lecturer with SIRCC, I spend much of my day in the classroom with staff
from the residential childcare sector throughout Scotland. A recurring
concern for me is the lack of acknowledgement or understanding about poverty
and the extent to which this is a common characteristic in the ecology
of young people who are ‘looked after’ and ‘accommodated’.
Scotland
experiences disproportionate levels of poverty. A child born in Glasgow
has the lowest life expectancy in the UK and now has a lower life expectancy
than children in Iran or Puerto Rico (Mooney and Scott (ed.) 2005). The
links between poverty and a range of social problems is well established.
Poverty leads to decreased life chances and the harmful effects are evident
in areas such as housing and homelessness, fuel poverty, debt and health.
Poverty impacts on every aspect of residential childcare practice, as
it is the financial and material consequences of poverty that will most
frequently bring children and their family into contact with social services.
Despite
this, there appears to be a limited understanding within the sector of
the impact of structural inequalities or an appreciation of the link between
poverty and the need for residential services. This demonstrates a clear
anomaly between the skills, knowledge and values that are essential requirements
for undertaking the role effectively and the value placed on education
and training in relation to this group of staff.
Clearly,
residential workers themselves are not to blame. Historically, the residential
childcare population has remained largely untrained and unqualified, having
limited access to education and training opportunities that would facilitate
an understanding of the causes and effects of poverty. The threat to the
profession is that this gulf in knowledge may be filled by an understanding
of poverty that adheres to existing discourses based on notions of pathology
and anti-social values. Of greater concern is that these negative values
and attitudes will further stigmatise and marginalize children and their
families who already live on the margins of society.
The
influence of current discourses on poverty is potent, constructing commonly
held assumptions about the nature of poverty and those who experience
it. Periodic reconstructions of the poor as morally degenerate and culpable
are prevalent throughout history, reflected in notions of the ‘deserving’
and ‘undeserving’ poor that typified poverty discourses at
the beginning of the last century.
More
recently, ideas about the underclass and social exclusion have signified
an explicit and unequivocal return to ‘victim-blaming’ labels.
Key events, such as the death of Jamie Bulger, provoked concerns from
the media and government about a moral malaise within British society.
Condemnation was particularly focussed on lone parents and their children,
who were deemed responsible for the disintegration of the traditional
nuclear family, leading to a rising crime and social disturbances, a growing
disrespect for law and order and a general weakening of the work ethic.
It is this section of society who has been most vilified and experienced
the stigmatising effects of such stereotypes most acutely.
This
has particular implications for practice within the residential childcare
sector, as lone parents and their children constitute the dominant client
group. Residential workers, therefore, need access to education and training
opportunities that contest behavioural explanations of poverty and provide
the skills, knowledge and values necessary to challenge rather than reinforce
discrimination and marginalisation.
Social
work and social care education has a long road to travel to do this effectively.
Despite a commitment to engaging in anti-discriminatory and anti-oppressive
practice, poverty has been relegated in profile and status relative to
issues relating to race, gender, sexuality and disability. This fails
to locate oppression within a wider understanding of mass poverty and
ignores the connection between poverty and other facets of structural
inequality.
So
what should poverty aware practice look like? At the centre of the curriculum
should be an increasing awareness of structural causes of inequality and
the potent impact of oppressive attitudes in relation to service users
who experience poverty.
This
should include a greater participation of service users who experience
poverty in the design, delivery and evaluation of education and training
programmes. This requires a shift from the exclusive individualised casework
approach prominent in contemporary social work practice that engages directly
with service users, for example through locally based community development
teams.
The
background and experience of current students’ groups will need
to be addressed. Given that current social work courses are now drawing
more readily on students who are school leavers, they are less likely
to have experienced poverty and claimed benefits, minimising the extent
to which they can draw on personal experience of poverty.
Similarly,
current students are undertaking education programmes at a time when they
are being forced to contribute to their own education financially, potentially
influencing their attitudes toward service users whom they perceive as
being reluctant in contributing to their own solutions.
Clearly,
social work education and training programmes have an explicit remit to
explore issues relating to anti-oppressive practice, and this should include
equipping students with a knowledge and understanding of their own personal
values and where these may conflict with, or complement, organisational
values. A central role of social work educators, therefore, is to support
students in identifying methods of practice that challenge oppressive
discourses rather than reinforce them.
Reference:
Mooney
G and Scott G, 2005., Exploring Social Policy in the New Scotland,
The Policy Press.
