EP 15 Practice and Practitioners

Social work practice is often not driven by social workers themselves. The decisions and policies are made by people who are not practitioners, which leads to the minimization of the role of social workers. The lack of recognition and support for social workers is evident in the reduced requirements for professional development and the high costs of registration. External supervision is crucial for social workers, but organizations are cutting back on it to save money, further devaluing the profession. The registration board is more focused on protecting clients than supporting social workers. Legislation changes have also undermined the professionalism of social work by allowing non-social workers to make judgments about child protection. Overall, social work is not well upheld as a profession and faces many challenges. Hiora, this is Rachel with another podcast for Bellbird Social Work Squawk where we talk about all things social work and it is a real privilege today to have Penny with me and we have got a really interesting topic that we're going to talk about and so I'm going to let Penny introduce herself. Welcome Penny, thank you so much. Thank you for inviting me Rachel. I'm Penny and I've been a social worker for in excess of 20 years now. That's a long time isn't it? Yes and today we're going to talk about how social work practice is not driven by social workers. That whole sense that the people on the ground who are actually doing the work in practice, I mean it's called practice for a reason because they are practicing social work and yet they're not the people who are making the decisions, they're not the people who are calling the shots, they're not the people that are driving policy. They're actually the unheard voices often and we have a whole system, bureaucracy that dictates practice. A lot made up of people who aren't practitioners. Absolutely and also with that comes a kind of minimising of the role of a social worker as well. When social workers aren't allowed to drive practice in the way that is best practice, they're minimised by organisations. They're not recognised as being the professionals they are. They're not recognised as people who have got a qualification and often quite a high qualification and often a postgraduate qualification as well. But also they are required to be registered by a professional body which holds their practice to account and yet often we're not able to practice in the way that we should be able to practice. And then I think we also water down that kind of social work space because then we also say well it's kind of social work but is it youth work or are we support workers or are we navigators or are we kaimahi and we give it a whole lot of names and words too that further kind of disempowers or undervalues the fact that you're absolutely right. You have people who have put a lot of time and effort, four year degrees, often with postgrad, as well as all the other stuff that goes with it, ongoing professional development, etc. etc. professional supervision at least monthly if not more. And yet we kind of still have people saying well what is social, what even is social work and do you actually have to be qualified to do it? Surely if you're just a well-meaning good person you can go out there and do social work, right? And so we kind of, it's this constantly undervalued, unappreciated role. I think people still see us as a bunch of sandal wearing kumbaya singers, you know? And yet, and I mean it's not actually helped by the registration board who have also now decided that we only need 20 hours of professional development a year. When it first came out the amount of hours we had to do was much higher and would have meant that people would have been more able to learn new ways of practising and those sorts of things. But again, I think that's been, dumbed down is probably not the right word, but reduced because employers don't want to be spending money on their social workers getting up-skilled. Yeah, and it's also, the flip side is that we have to pay, I mean if you want to be registered with a social work registration board and you want to be a member of the ANZ-ASW, that's $1,000 a year, thank you very much. You know, which a lot of organisations won't pay. They might pay for you to be registered but won't pay the other. And so we're not going to support your professional development but we're, you know, asking people to pay $400 whatever your registration. Actually, is it easier to employ people who aren't registered or, you know, the motivation to get registered, all of that stuff. Well, I mean, again, I think that what happens there too is that social workers who have got the training in social work often end up being called something else so that they don't have to be registered and yet they will be doing social work roles. I don't think the registration boards help with this. That's the whole topic we're talking about, how the practitioners themselves, what they need, what works for them to be able to uphold their profession isn't what's at the forefront, even though people would probably argue that it is, but actually decisions are made from a bureaucratic, political level or a financial level that's not that helpful. If you've got social workers who are supervisors in private practice who are trying to maintain their registration. I had a conversation the other day with somebody. They are sort of semi-retiring, moving into private practice to offer supervision but finding, you know, the cost of ongoing registration becomes prohibitive. It's a lot of money to pay out when you're kind of doing one or two days a week supervision and yet we don't have enough good supervisors. No, and the other thing that worries me too that was, you know, I'm aware of where some organisations are now saying, we're not going to be looking at external supervisors because, you know, we've got to save money on our budget and we've got to do that. So again, social workers are missing out because I think the thing about external supervision or getting good quality supervision helps you grow your practice, helps you keep yourself safe. I mean, we work in a lot of unsafe situations and we need to make sure that the safety of the client as well as our own safety is upheld. And it can be very difficult to go into line management supervision and talk about your vulnerabilities, talk about maybe things that didn't work so well, talk about exploring your practice in a really healthy way with the same person that's going to do your performance review next week. Yes, or has you already on a performance plan because you're not meeting a KPI or something. Yes, and then we have a whole lot of managers who also don't have a social work background so you're actually getting supervision from people who don't even necessarily understand your social work framework that you're coming from and it's more of a, are you meeting your KPIs, are you managing your caseload? Are you taking your leave? Yes, kind of supervision. You need to pick up some more cases. So I think external supervision is a critical factor to a well-rounded practitioner but it's a cost and so the value of the practitioner becomes very financial. And again, it devalues the profession. It's actually saying, I don't need that. I wonder if they would say the same thing to a surgeon. Well, I was thinking, I mean, when we were talking about even registration, I think nursing registration, don't quote me, but it's like something in the realm of $100 to $150 as opposed to $400 that we pay. Why is ours so much significantly higher than registered nurses? Is it because they're able to deal with a lot more complaints, do you think? Well, I can imagine you'd get a lot of complaints through the nursing council. I would have thought so too, yeah. I wondered if it's to do with the numbers. There's just more nurses than there are social workers, so proportionally, money-wise, but it does feel like nurses are support, teachers have their kind of union, and then social workers are this kind of messy space where we're not really unionized. We're not a collective group of people. No, because not everybody belongs to one ZASW. Yeah. And I mean, the registration board's not really there to help social workers. No. It's to protect clients. And that's fair enough. I don't have a problem with that. But again, they have been announced just recently in their onboard newsletter that they're not going to look at a section 13 track way to becoming a social worker, which is non-qualification, but experience. And I'm thinking, you know, it's been a long time since the registration board's been in, and everybody has had a chance to do a qualification. Yeah, but I just heard they just extended it by two years. Absolutely. I had a feeling it was supposed to be out quite early on in the process, but they keep moving the goalposts. So you still end up with people not having a qualification. I'm not saying that they're bad people or not capable of doing the work, but there is a benefit in doing the qualification. There's a benefit of understanding history and why we're doing things and why we think like we do. And like with anything, you can have some fantastic practitioners who don't have the piece of paper. And there are some practitioners out there that do have the piece of paper who may be not so good. You know, like that's with everything, right? So this isn't in any way a kind of commentary on people who aren't qualified social workers. It's about the system that is there to support or not support and really upholding social work as a profession. And it doesn't feel like it's really upheld very well. No. So before we started the podcast, you talked about the legislation change that talked about forming an opinion. Yeah. So under the old Oranga Tamariki Act as it is now, before it was amended, it allowed, you know, if you formed a belief that a child or young person was in need of care or protection, that judgment could be made by a police constable or a social worker. Now, it's a constable or the police or the chief executive. So what I know is there's lots of lines above the social worker and probably only two necessarily that would have a social work qualification. And yet the chief executive, who's another 10 steps up, can actually give that job to whoever. Again, has taken away the professionalism of social work. So the practitioner who's done the assessment, knows the situation, understands the context, got all the information together, is now having to put forward an argument to people who don't have that context, who are probably just reading it on a piece of paper as a report, who potentially don't even have a social work framework, but they're looking at it and making a decision. Or possibly not even a social justice framework. Exactly. But that's fine. They could be coming from a completely business mindset, and then there's a whole sort of fiscal layer that's put over the top of that around what's the cost of this decision that we're about to make. If we say this child is in need of care and protection, the cost of that is X. And it kind of feels like everything's weighed up in a bureaucracy. Yeah, well it is. And I think that happens across a lot of agencies. So health might say, oh, well, we won't fund that, even though it might be a health part because Oranga Tamariki's involved, so they can actually fund all of that. I actually had a vision once that I thought was a really good idea, is that you had a ministry of money that, whilst each organisation has a budget for their administration costs, their personnel costs, buildings and all of that sort of thing, that the money that would be set aside for children or young people would be placed in a separate ministry. And that would come from health and from education as well. And so when you went to say, this is this child and they have a package of needs, you're not actually fighting another bureaucracy to get help with funding it. It seemed to me like a fairer system in terms of what a child could get because you know that every ministry is trying to save money. And so that money is going to dwindle. But whereas if you have three or more ministries together who have funding for the needs of children or young people or whanau, that it goes in there. Yeah, what an ideal world that would be. Utopia. Exactly. It is, it's political. So again, decisions are made about individual people, children, whanau, people that need the support in a bureaucratic process space. It's very disempowering. And I was reading something in our local paper this morning, it was a letter to the editor by a guy who's an electrician. He's doing some work in the centre of town. And he says how shocked he is at the amount of people who seem to wander around the town. He sees them every single day carrying their lives on their back and being quite distressed. You know, obviously showing signs of depression or loneliness or things like that. And when he took a particular case to the police, they said, we can't do anything. If they have a mental health problem, we might be able to get them some help through mental health. You know, what is New Zealand coming to? I know it's quite a sad state of affairs, isn't it? And then we've got this huge kind of burnout rate in social services. And we've got all these practitioners who are leaving the workforce and going and doing completely different careers, not just kind of moving from job to job, but actually, I'm done. And some within only a few years of actually graduating. So what are we doing to actually support a healthy workforce? Because when you think about all the things we just talked about, how undervalued people are, how minimised the role of social workers and all of that, the bureaucracy that people have to go through, the overwhelm, the personal responsibility that sits with people in the work that they do, because they don't necessarily have the support around them. Also, I mean, part of that burnout is the expectation on the social worker to do a level of work which is not best practice. So in terms of numbers of cases or numbers of whānau you're working with, when you think about when you get a new case to look at and you need to do an assessment, it's not a case of just going out and spending an hour or two with the whānau and asking them a few questions. You've actually got to go out and build the relationship. You've got to have the time to go and build a really solid relationship. And you don't do that by going out and saying, Oh, we've received this referral that says that you're doing this. We go out or should go out and say, We've received a referral and I want to hear what your worries are. I want to get to know you and understand what's happening for you. I want to know about your life and what are your difficulties. And that's not going to take an hour or two. No. And then when you have social workers coming back into the organisation, whatever, you know, community, whatever, that's true, and saying to their manager, My caseload is too high. I can't take any more cases. And yet the contract says, you know, we must deliver. And the manager says, well, you know, That means that I won't meet my KPIs. That means that we won't do this. We won't get there. Exactly. So again, the responsibility is back down at the lowest common denominator, which is, unfortunately, the social worker. And I've been in several meetings where contracts are not being met and managers are saying directly to the social workers, Basically, what's wrong with you? Come on, work harder. Pull your finger out. Get on with it. And it's like, well, hang on a second. All this responsibility just filters down to them being responsible for that deliverable without taking any context into the fact that we're working in a very complex environment. Very. I mean, I've done social working for 20 something years now, and it's not getting any easier out there. No. It's much more complex than I remember when I first started out. Even getting hold of people, even knowing where people are staying, you know, our emergency motel systems, you know, people move regularly. There's a lot of transiency. Just even being able to get engagement and build a relationship is hard work. And yet, come on, KPOs, KPOs. Well, it's interesting, isn't it? I was supervising a social worker once who was working on a case that was continually being referred in. Same issues, family violence, drug use, over and over again, quite a large problem. The social worker, with my agreement, although not the agreement of a manager, I was supervising her at the time. She said, I want to try something different. She said, we get a notification or a referral about these people every couple of weeks. I want to work in a way which is quite different to how we normally work. And I said, OK, so what are we going to do? She said, I'm going to visit every week. Started that off, and it took her a month to be able to get inside, but she visited every week. And when she was told to go away in a nice way, she said, yep, I will, but I'll be back next week. Built a solid relationship, built trust within that family, proved that she wasn't going to go away, did some things that were of help to the family, but then just built up that kind of rapport and to understand everybody's place within the family. Every family has different people in it, but they hold different roles. Who's the protector? Who's the cook? Who's the one who tells you off? Who's the one who beats you up? Yeah, and all that takes time. Yeah, because nobody's going to blurt it out, are they? Hello, I'm Jo. My mother's mean. My father does this. My older brother's doing drugs and hits me all the time. You know, it just doesn't happen. And yet she built up such a good rapport. I'd love to know now whether those referrals are still being made. I have a feeling they probably aren't, because she really took the time. That's the frustration in a way for me, when you think amazing work can be done when practitioners are given the resources, the space, the scope to do the work, to focus, to the time, all of that. You know, we want to be cycle breakers, right? We want to be change agents. We came into social work because we want to help people get onto a different trajectory and help people to understand what they need to do to be able to make change for themselves. I mean, I think that we talk all the time about not intervention but prevention rather than intervention. And yet we're not putting prevention in early enough. If you think about young mums, perhaps when they engage a midwife, you are able to offer them a heap of services, do a little bit of an assessment with them about what do they know about parenting, what do they understand they have to do to be able to raise a child whose brain development is not going to be impaired or slowed down or anything like that. Who's their partner? Does he need some help with something? That's right. What is their home life like? Absolutely. What do you need? You need some other things in your home. What have you got in preparation for baby? What do you understand it means to be a parent? And again, we are disempowering so many people because I get really frustrated more and more about all these social policy things that come out around we basically have to be a double-income household. You can't really have a stay-at-home parent anymore. And we have policies around we're going to spend more money to give you free childcare so you can go back to work. It's like, well, why don't you just give me money so I can look after my child at home? But it's not. It's like, no, no, we're going to incentivise you to go back to work and put your child into childcare. And we forget. And what we know is that little people need to be able to form that significant attachment with someone. Exactly. And the first three years of their life should not be interrupted by early childhood care. That's right. I mean, for some people, there may be a kind of necessary support to have a little bit of additional childcare support in place. But that didactic relationship is critical. And yet, all of the sort of, you know, it's like, oh, we're doing a great job because we're going to pay for free childcare from the age of whatever so you can go back to work. And I'm thinking, I didn't want to go back to work three months after my baby was born. You know, like, we don't support people to be parents. You know, we almost don't trust people to be parents anymore. And that perpetuates the cycle of kind of, you know, school does half the parenting and the state does the rest of the parenting and we disempower people from that. And yet, if you look at that kind of a prevention model, like capturing people before baby's even born, I mean, I could imagine that the savings further down the track would be immense. If a lot of our young parents actually understood how important it was to be a parent and how to parent so that they meet all the child's needs, just the savings would be huge. It might cost a bit at the front, but it wouldn't. So I guess, coming back to our theme, it's kind of another example around how, what drives our practice, right? So what's driving the contracts that are being put out by the government? So much of what we do is driven by the fact that an organisation will get a contract to deliver XYZ. So our services, our practice is being driven by the contract written by somebody else. Exactly, who's got an ideology or a concept that they want to kind of try and implement. The ability to measure outcomes is really minimal, like actual, real outcomes. You know, we're counting widgets. We're counting how many times have you done something. Not, did you do it well? No, I do, and I know. Yeah, there's nothing there that looks at the quality of what service. Yes, I've visited twice a week for six weeks. What you're doing, yeah. But that's like a lot of things though, isn't it? I mean, it's like living without violence courses, yet they attended, and what? That's right, are we measuring, you know, how... How their life has changed. Exactly. What they're thinking now is, how they're thinking about dealing with different situations. No. So we're asking our frontline practitioners to be motivated, to be inspired, to go out, to help make change, to keep going out and keep going out and keep going out. In that case, it's toll, but the system kind of doesn't really care what you do. I think the other thing about that too is, is that when it's driven by a KPI or a budget restraint or a policy, you can keep going out and keep going out, but actually, are you achieving anything new? Like, what is your purpose of going out? Like, so I think oftentimes we don't think about, what is our purpose for going out? Oh, we'll just go and do a visit and see how Mary is. Not, I need to find out some more from Mary about what her childhood was like or what things are worrying her or, you know? Exactly, that's right. Well, last time I was there, Mary talked about XYZ, and I really want to pick up on that because I want to explore that, you know. But you might have like a plan overall to manage a case, but how often do you go back and revisit that to make sure that you've got all the information you need or that things have changed so much and the issue that you thought was an issue is no longer the issue, this is the issue? Right, and even when you've got plans, I mean, constantly reviewing them because there's probably 10 different ways to provide an intervention to meet a need. Is the one you're providing working or are you just doing that, you know? So how do you go back and actually have a robust conversation around, well, this was what I identified as the need was, we tried this, but actually I don't think it's making any difference, so I think we need to change tack and offer something else. But also, we need to discover, is that really the problem or is there something else underlying? Yeah. But you're not, you know, the other thing is that often you have phases of work you have to work in and to me, there's only, there should only be one phase and that's social work. So you're assessing and intervening, assessing and intervening, assessing and intervening, you know? Like, why would you, why do you separate things out? It's just social work. But my thing will be, assessing is actually understanding the information that you've got. Oh, absolutely. The analysis. The analysis, right? Like, you know, it's this horrible sort of thing, but, you know, it's the what, so what, now what. You know, so many people go from what to now what and forget the so what and then they wonder why it's not working or maybe they don't wonder why it's not working but we've just become reactionary to the what. Oh. Well, I mean, and the other thing too is we might, you know, often social workers will make the decision that's the problem, that's what we need to do. Yeah. But does that meet the person's needs? That's right. Is that something that they've got the capacity to do? You know, have we actually assessed what their capacity for change is and are they willing to do that? And if the intervention isn't working, you're exactly right. Maybe what we thought was the need actually isn't and we're being distracted by something that's sitting on top but the reason why it's not working is because we actually haven't taken the lid off and opened up the can of worms underneath. Right. And I think sometimes maybe social workers are a bit worried about opening up the lid. Oh, I've had people say to me, I don't ask them about that because I don't know what to do if they start telling me. So again, I guess coming back to this, you know, practice isn't driven by practitioners. I worry about those people who are sitting inside organisations where practice is not a strength that's held within the organisation in which they work. You know, we're asking people, everything we just talked about in terms of just do social work, right? Assess, intervene, assess, intervene, it's review, you know, do review, do review. But actually never really understanding what might be the worries and what capacity or ability that people have to change. But who do the practitioners have to talk about that with? Sitting inside spaces where we have a system that's driven by people who aren't practitioners. Well, you have systems that just say, oh, you need to close that case. They're not ticking the box, so close it, follow the process. And you know, you've got also organisations where if somebody hasn't engaged with you after two sessions, then... Yeah, gone. Gone. But no real in-depth trying to find out why they might not engage or what might be happening for them. And when people fall off the engagement, that's probably when we should be upping our intervention, not backing away, right? Something's happened that means that they are no longer engaging. Oh, well, just close it, it's fine. Because we're worried about our numbers and our KBOs and our contracts. You know, we talked about external supervision. You know, some of that is around case load and case direction and case management. But inside there, there needs to be a reflective practitioner who can sit and say, you know, what was I bringing to that? What was my analysis telling me? And you have to be able to be vulnerable to explore that stuff. You have to be able to open yourself up and, you know, interrogate... And you have to talk about your feelings rather than just what your head tells you you must do. You've got to have a portion of heart in there as well. And that requires safety. Yes, they need to feel safe to be able to talk about those things. Yeah. And they won't feel safe when the person they're having to tell is the person who's doing their performance plan. It takes a lot to create safety for anybody. And yet, we're asking our practitioners to go out and create that for the families that they're working with. But it's often not replicated inside the organisation. Isn't that interesting, though? Because, I mean, I see some organisations that have social workers in them have as many worries as the families they visit. And it's almost a mirror image. And yet, here are people who are probably not managing in the best way they can trying to work with people who are not managing. And the supervisors need to have the time to be able to deal with that and not be focused on all of those kind of other drivers that are part of the organisation. And it's a really difficult space. I mean, I have a passion for those emerging leaders that we have, often people who've been practitioners moving into kind of team leader roles, how to transition into a team leader role. Because it's a very difficult space, actually, to occupy, to maintain the well-being of your team while being pressured from above. It's a real sandwich situation. It is a sandwich. And it can be hard. And you have to know yourself pretty well to figure that bit out. And that's why we get a lot of people who just pass that pressure straight down. And it ends up being the individual practitioner, you need to work harder, you need to take more cases, you need to do this. I think the other thing that I've noticed too over the years is, you know, social workers used to be quite a bolshie bunch of people. You know, they would question everything. Prior to becoming a social worker, I was a site manager for the same organisation. It's different iterations. And you couldn't even say to a social worker, you sit down and have a cup of coffee without them thinking that the manager had some ulterior motive for that. And often you wouldn't get them to come and sit down and have a cup of coffee with you because they would believe that the manager that was some ulterior motive. So they constantly questioned. They constantly challenged. We don't have that now. You know, social workers, and I guess in a lot of other professions as well, they just accept that's how it is. And deep down they might not know that it's wrong or might know that it's wrong or feels wrong, but they don't feel they can do anything about it. Yeah, and I think it feels lonelier than it ever has before. I mean, when I started off as a social worker, I felt like I was part of a profession. It was sort of drilled into me that my job was to be a systems disruptor, an agent of change. Absolutely, absolutely. A troublemaker. Yeah. Really, you know, if things aren't working, well, they need changing then, don't they? Whereas I think now people feel, I don't know, a little bit less supported by a collective. Like it feels less like a group. It feels a little bit more separated out or people feel like it's them. It's, you know, as an individual, not as a team. I definitely feel like there has been a kind of a disempowering of the profession. I look at some of the social workers. I mean, I remember when I took over a team of people and it was a mixed group, not all social workers, but some social workers in a team and I asked everybody to introduce themselves. All of the people who were social workers all introduced themselves as saying, hi, I'm so-and-so, I have a social work degree. Not one of them said, I am a social worker, which I just thought was fascinating. But for me, I have sat in a variety of different roles. I haven't been on the front line for 10 years, but I still, when people say, what do you do? I say, well, I'm a social worker by trade. That's who I am. It's how I see the world. It's the framework that I look through. Yeah, but it's interesting too because I get the feeling now that social workers are social workers between eight and five and then there's somebody totally different. Whereas I'm a social worker 24-7, all the time. I constantly see things that I think, oh, I'm just going to go and check in on that person. Your values, it's your principles, it's how you want to work, it's how you want to see the world, it's your contribution to the world. It's not just a job. And I think there can be issues around identity, around over-identifying as a particular thing, but I found it really interesting to talk to a group of people who not one of them identified as a social worker. And I thought, gosh, that is fascinating. You've all done a four-year degree and you just said, I qualified, I've got a piece of paper, I have a social work degree. Because you would never get that from a lawyer, would you? No. They'd say, I'm a lawyer. I'm a doctor. They wouldn't say, I've got a master's in psychiatry or whatever. Or, I've got a bachelor of nursing. I'm a nurse. I think, you know, you said before about, like, I think the perception of social workers, you know, which is the hippy-dippy, you know, I saw a video once where Judy Bowley described the social workers as muesli-munching, you know, do-gooders. There's that side, and then there's the social workers that take your children. And you're kind of either one or the other. You're either the sort of slightly... Nice, tipsy one. Yeah, that has a cup of tea with you, or you're the terrible ones that steal children off the street randomly. People still don't know what social work is, and they don't claim it. I just think that's kind of sad, because it's the most amazing profession. You know, I've had conversations with nurses and other professions where they say, yeah, well, we do the kind of really, you know, we do the all-round clinical stuff. And, you know, social work, we'll bring you in later if we need you. And I'm like, hold up. The social workers, we're the ones that see the whole picture. You can do your bit. You can do your bit. Yeah, but we actually see a lot bigger picture. But we're looking at everything. The whole person in every facet. You know, what a privilege to have that. And yet practitioners almost don't, some, you know, don't feel the support of that somehow, or don't feel... But they also don't feel, I don't know, I get the feeling that they don't feel like they can speak out. They just feel like, you know, that whole sort of business of not recognising the profession makes people within the profession feel belittled. Exactly. Exactly. And that's what I mean. It's like they're not upheld. So therefore, you know, you're a bit quieter. Don't want to rock the boat. And then if you do rock the boat, you're kind of just the annoying, you know, irritating voice, as opposed to, you know, the advocate, the person whose job it is to speak out, to represent, to be the unheard voice on the behalf of justice, on behalf of equity, you know, all those, you know, important aspects. And that's represented all the time. I mean, you know, look around all the organisations. Social workers will be the lowest paid. If you've got multidisciplinary organisations where there are nurses and... Doctors and the... And whatever. The social workers will be paid the least. They're just not valued. And that gets very internalised. That's hard to shake off. And the people who introduce themselves, I'm just a social worker. I really want to get up and slap them when they do that. You're not just a social worker. Yeah. And I mean, put it in that category of, you know, I'm just a mum. Yeah. Or I'm just a cleaner. Exactly. Some of the most important people you could have in your life. But yeah, don't worry about it, it's not that important. What could be the sort of opportunities for change or, you know, if we're thinking about practices not driven by practitioners, you know, in a hopeful blue sky potential for a different world, what would be a good shift? I think what would be a good shift is for people to understand what social work is, what it's based on. You know, it's got quite a history, social work, from its very beginnings right through. But it is based on, you know, theories, on education, on actually thinking through things, analysing what's happening. It's quite a big task to do a good analysis of a case. But I think that we need to publicise it more. I think we need to be talking to people about, you know, do you know what a social worker does? Yeah. I think we need to have people within ANZASW actually promoting that a bit more, not just going and having sort of cups of tea with different managers and things about ANZASW needs to be advocating for social workers and actually being clear about what it is that social workers do and what their value is to communities. I think there needs to be more media representation of social workers. At the moment, social workers only in the media when they get a bad rep. You're in the media generally because you've taken a child you shouldn't have or because you didn't take a child that you should have. Right? Like that's the media's version of social work. I know, and I, especially I think through COVID and all the rest of it, there were lots of people campaigning for wage increases and better working conditions and all that. We had the midwives and we had the teachers and we had nurses and people talking about, you know, core kind of community professionals, you know, that are helping to create healthy communities, healthy children, blah, blah, blah, all that stuff. Not a peep about social workers. And you think they should be at the forefront of those things. Yeah. But at the moment, people are contracted to do social work for specific things. It's not like you've got a whole health system where, you know, if you had a Ministry of Social Work where across the country there was social work services for all manner of things, like there's hospital services for things. But at the moment, they're contracted to do certain aspects, so you need social workers to go out and visit so many families twice a week for six weeks and do what? Or social workers or social work-like. You've got these, like, funny terms where you, social work-like roles. So they kind of are doing the work of a social worker, but you don't have to be a social worker. And you don't have to be registered. Yeah. You don't even have to be qualified. And so, again, it really muddies the water around what's the value of the qualifications. You know, we now have less and less people engaging in tertiary education and social work. Certainly in this community, we're going to end up with less people coming out of our local tertiary provider as qualified social workers. Why do you think that is? Personally, I think four years is a huge time commitment for what is not an overly well-paid job at the end of it. It's a big loan that you're going to end up with. But I also think it's, why do I need the four-year degree when I can basically... Do social work-like roles. Exactly. You know, less and less do I see jobs actually advertised for social workers. It's community workers and support workers. But if you look at their job descriptions, what are they actually doing? Quasi-social work. And I think, and that's not to say that, you know, a lot of those people aren't doing really good work. But there's no protection for them in terms of their professional work. And there's no protection for the clients that they see either. Exactly. Was going to be my next thing. Yeah, sorry. No, but yeah, you're right. But I mean, one of the things about social work is the ethics of it. You know, and being really clear about how you work ethically as a social worker. Yeah. And intentionally. Yeah. You know, that actually, exactly like you say, you spend four years doing a degree because you are learning understanding frameworks and models and theories and concepts and all sorts of stuff that actually is informing your practice every day. We're not just going on a whole lot of lived experience or a whole lot of gut instinct or well-meaning but sometimes dangerous, you know, misguided behaviors. I mean, I think about like when I was doing my master's, we talked about, you know, there's a three-legged stool which talks about, you know, you've got three components of your professional kind of self. You've got your own personal experience. You've got your work experience. And you've got your academic knowledge. And all of those things have to be relatively balanced for you to have a good foundation. If you don't have any academic knowledge, you know, that's part of the stool. If you're only on a two-legged stool because you're working on a whole lot of lived experience and maybe a little bit of work experience, that's not a balanced framework from which to go into people's lives and start getting involved because actually there's a lot of complexity. And I'm worried that people operate inside spaces and the people making the decisions, you know, that are sending them out or writing the contracts, you know, we can talk about the levels that go into that from the managers to the contract writers to the policy makers to the, you know, the bureaucracy. And also the policy makers aren't social workers so they're hugely dangerous. And, you know, and the politicians sure aren't, you know, they're actually pushing through their agendas and their ideologies. And, you know, so you've got this massive system that's influencing that one person engaging with a family that could have a beautiful outcome or a disastrous one. And it worries me too because I think that sort of community workers and things probably don't even have it mandated that they need supervision. Youth work is a perfect example of that. And often young people get into youth work, you know, they're young people themselves engaging with their sort of age group, their peer group doing really good stuff. You know, they might have a level four youth work role. There's no requirement to have supervision at the site, accountability, but they're still engaging with vulnerable people. Yeah, and simply, you know, rangatahi or taiohi that are really, you know, at critical points in their lives and their decision making and their behaviours and where they're going. Are we doing good work? I'm sure a lot of people are. Absolutely. But I think we could do better in how we support our workforce to do its job. Well, I mean, I think one of the things that has always been a bit of a fallacy around social work is that, and probably the same for youth work and things like that, oh, I can relate to these kids because I've done the same as them. Not, I can relate to these kids because, theoretically, I can base some way of working with them on a theory or on a programme that would meet their needs. And it's the same as social workers. Oh, I'd make a good social worker because I was abused. Well, unless you've sort of worked through that and you've healed yourself through that, then just by being abused doesn't make you a good social worker. You know, because you end up in a codependent relationship with possibly with the person that you're working with. And lived experience can be a great asset to have in terms of giving you some insights. But you have to have a layer of reflection in that to also say, but my experience might not be the same as your experience. How I felt about it or how it impacted me could be completely different to what you're going through. So while I might have some insights into what you're talking about because of my experience, mine is my own and yours is yours. Whereas I do hear a lot of people talking about, you know, basically saying, oh, I know exactly how they feel and I did that, they're all the same and da, da, da, or whatever. And it's like, well actually, you're now just imposing your experience onto their experience and that's not the same. So, you know, learning how to be a reflective practitioner in and of itself is not a natural state for a lot of people. You kind of have to learn how to be able to reflect and to be aware of what's yours, how it's influencing your engagement, your interactions. And I think sometimes that's difficult for social workers because to do reflection they might find out that they've done something that they're not comfortable with doing and then where do they take that to? Yeah. You know what I mean? I don't want to own up to the fact that I did that because, you know, somebody will think badly of me or whatever and yet, and I think some people hide away from reflection because of it. They're scared of what might come out of it. Absolutely. It takes vulnerability and it takes courage, for sure. I mean, none of us like to say, oh, I really messed that one up. You know, sometimes even we're saying, oh, we did this and it went really well and somebody might say, do you think it went well? And challenge my belief around something. You know, you have to create environments where you can have that robust conversation. I don't know how many environments exist that allow for that safe, robust conversation. Particularly, again, if you're having it with somebody who's a line manager as well as a supervisor. Yeah, that's right. Or even sort of the same person who's seeing every other person in your team. You know, you don't want your insecurities or your need to be exposed to the other people that you work with. So, you know, is anything in that space truly 100% confidential? You know, not always. No, it's interesting that kind of whole business around reflection and how you do that. And I mean, often it can be brought about by somebody asking questions which allows for the person to think about what's happened or what they've done or whatever. But often reflection occurs by yourself and that takes time too. But you might be driving home from work and thinking about and thinking, oh gosh, I could have actually done that a little bit differently. Or, I wonder how that family are feeling after my visit. Perhaps I need to check in with them. I might have done something that upset them. I think for some people though, even that is something that people almost learn how to do. Rather than shut the door, let's work, don't even think about it again. You know, what it's very like. I think for some people to ask themselves some probing questions to reflect on. It's not a natural state for everybody. No. No, but it worries me that we do have some social workers who, you know, shut down their computer and leave and it's over for the rest of the night. Because I don't know whether that's because they don't open themselves up to the reflection. Do they hear it in their head? I think it's self-preservation. I think it's a little bit what you just said around, actually, I don't want to go there because what do I do with it if something bothers me? Or, how do I, where do I take it? How do I unpack it? Where do I get support? You know, all of that sort of stuff. Actually, it's easier to just pack it away and not deal with it. It's interesting how many social workers come along and say, I don't do reflection. Well, where did we get to then? How do we sum up? How do we sum up that conversation? Actually, because it was quite a long and detailed conversation. I think, I think that in summary, we need to ensure that practice is set by practitioners. It's valued? It's valued. It's recognised as an ethical occupation, that people's views need to be valued, and their thoughts about things should not just be pushed aside as, oh, that's just the social worker talking. How do we uphold our practitioners because they are how we uphold our practice? I think that's a question that we should pose to people like ANZASW at the national level, too. How do you uphold your practice? How do you uphold your practitioners? What are you doing to support them? A lot of stuff is done from an organisational point of view or at a higher level. A lot of support may be given, you know, in terms of governance and management, but how are we protecting the practice which should be at the core of what we do? I think a couple of things. There should be recognition that external supervision is important. It doesn't have to totally take away from other supervisions and things like that. But having social workers have the opportunity to be able to really speak at a very safe place where nothing's going to be reported back to anybody else and that there's an understanding through agreement that if there is something that the supervisor feels is very unsafe, that there is an opportunity to talk that through and talk about why they might need to take that further or something like that. So have an understanding of those things. You know, I work in a very ethical way. I worry about my integrity and things like that. And I don't get that organisations have that same sort of worry, you know, that they will sell the soul of social work to the devil, you know, rather than admit any wrongdoing further up. So often it's the lowest common denominator that gets blamed for everything or anything that goes wrong. It just gets passed down the hill or, you know, the slope or whatever until it gets to the lowest point, which is your frontline practitioner. So that's a very robust conversation, which I've thoroughly enjoyed. Thank you so much for having this conversation. Pleasure. Happy to have any more. Well, I'll certainly invite you back again. This has been really, really great. We need to find some really good juicy topics to talk about. Absolutely. So if anyone listening has got any suggestions, we'd love to hear them. But there are a lot of really important issues that actually, I think even just talking about it, that we need to be talking more about social work, about who we are, about those sorts of things. But social workers also have the opportunity to have those conversations, though, too. Yeah. And often, you could set up an ANZASW meeting with all social workers in the Bay of Plenty, and very few would turn up because most of them don't have the ability to. So I think it's important to actually have a conversation about that. Yeah. And I think social workers have the ability to leave their work and come along and look into that, which is another thing that is really wrong. Again, absolutely. And that's the organizational support that's needed. The first thing to get cut, particularly when people are under pressure, cut their external supervision, cut their professional development, cut networking. And actually, you can't do social work without relationships. If you don't know your relationships, your people in your community, your networks, you can't really do quality social work. So I mean, on that, obviously, we're having a breakfast. So it'll be interesting to see who does make the effort to come along. But hopefully, if we keep putting out opportunities, keeping the conversation going, then maybe we'll get traction. But thank you so much for your time. We really appreciate it. Wonderful. Thank you. Thank you. Thank you. Thank you. Thank you. Thank you. Thank you. Thank you. Thank you. Thank you. Thank you. Thank you. Thank you. Thank you. Thank you. Thank you. Thank you. Thank you. Thank you. Thank you. Thank you. Thank you. Thank you. Thank you. Thank you. Thank you. Thank you. Thank you. Thank you.