relieving officers

Relieving officers

• Care and control functions• Personally liable• Operated in the field as street level bureaucrat• Supplemented, supplanted, by volunteer

committees• Brought into local authorities en masse in the

1930s

Almoners

• 1903 Almoners’ Committee• 1907 Hospital Almoners’ Council*• 1911 Hospital Almoners’ Committee• 1920 Association of Hospital Almoners• 1922 Institute of Hospital Almoners*• 1927 Hospital Almoners Association

Psychiatric social workers

• Social work - déclassé:– Jesse Taft: “The deepest human misery, the inner

problems, are common to rich and poor alike.”

– Charlotte Towle: “Thus the relationship [between social worker and client] has been removed from a class or economic basis to an objective professional basis. This change would seem to facilitate identification on a more constructive level.”

Relieving officers (from 1930 Area Welfare Officers)Duly authorised officers (overseeing admission to psychiatric hospitals)Psychiatric social workers (in London after 1930) engaged in psychiatric units and f amily visiting after patient dischargeInvestigators of old age pension claimsProbation Officers

Central Association for Mental Welfare staffPsychiatric social workers in voluntary hospitals Charity Organisation Society officersAlmoners in voluntary hospitalsOrganisers of Councils of Social WelfareSettlement workersMoral welfare workers with unmarried mothers

Tuberculosis Care CommitteesAdvisory Committee voluntary workers (with Employment exchanges helping people into work)Local War Pensions committees (up to 1918) helping to find work and organise war pensions

Charity Organisation Society volunteers visiting older people, unemployedSettlement volunteersMoral welfare volunteers

Social work services for adults on eve of the Second World War

Public sector Voluntary sector

Paid

Unpaid

Children’s welfare visitorAsst. relieving officers -overseeing boarding out

Care committee organizers

Probation Officers (under Home Office after 1926)

School attendance officers (brought children in need of care before courts)

NSPCC agentsCAMW officers – learning disabilityCOS District offi cers – family caseworkSettlement house workersAdoption society staff‘Bible women’Anglican temperance missionaries as probation officers (1876-1926)PSWs in child guidance clinicsMoral welfare agency staff

Care committee volunteer visitors

Infant Life Protection visitors

Boarded out children’s visitors

Children’s visiting societies’ volunteers to workhouse, child-minded, & boarded out childrenAdoption society visitorsMoral welfare visitors with unmarried mothers (Anglican, Methodist, Catholic, Jewish)COS family visitors

State organisations Voluntary organisations

Paid

Unpaid

Children’s social work services on eve of Second World War

Professionalisation - 1939

• Different strategies spontaneously arrived at:– Almoners/COS– PSWs– CAMW– NAPO– Relieving Officers Metropolitan Association

BFSW

• Conference of Children’s Care Committee Organisers• Association of Children’s Moral Welfare Workers• College of Nursing (Public Health Section)• Association of Mental Health Workers• Association of Metropolitan Relieving Officers• Association of Psychiatric Social Workers• NAPO• Standing Conference of Metropolitan Boroughs’

Tuberculosis Care Comms• Women’s Public Health Officers Association

The promising 50s and 60s

• Children Act 1948 – Association of Child Care Officers’ different

approach to professionalisation• Seebohm Implementation Action Group• Case work dominant – linked now to a social

democratic ethos

Formation of BASW

• Did it work? – undermined by external factors?– leadership? Tactics? – Trying to embrace the unembraceable?

• A counter-factual: what if BASW had not been formed?

A post social work world?

• YOTs – lost social context of working with young offenders• New children’s agencies omits mention of sw• Personalisation• Care management – NPM:

– practitioners ‘need controlling’– Procedures, performance indicators, eligibility rules

• Disability advocates: social work should abandon role as definers of need and immerse themselves in disability politics

• Decline of public sector – so what??!

Daniel Walkowitz

contrasting social workers of 1960s and 70s with 90s:

“Social workers analysis of poverty has become more structural and less personal, whereas the methods they endorse have become more consensual and less radical. What had been a ‘dissenting profession’ has become a ‘consenting profession.’”– Working with class - social workers and the politics of middle class identity