Time to Change Our Social Work Model

Let's take the focus away from child abuse. It's an industry that sucks all the money away from the services that children and families really need.

Let's concentrate instead on:

1. Providing a really highly trained professional workforce, qualified not by means of some generic social work degree, but by means of a specifically child and family orientated training, such as a BSc in Family Support, a BSc in Learning Disability Support, a BSc in Physical Disability Support, a BSc in child or family therapy, etc.

2. Ensuring that each social work team within a local authority has all of the above on their team as well as easy access to a qualified benefits advisor and an educational psychlogist.

3. Pressing for s.17 of the Children Act 1989 to be amended so that local authorities must (rather than 'can') support a child and/or their family, through whatever means are suitable, if they are 'in need'. It is wrong to focus solely on the child, if we really want to enable children to live within their families and communities.

4. Paying all mothers of children aged 5 and under a 'basic income'. Children are any nation's most valuable resource. It is wrong that mothers should be forced out to work. Look at the animal kingdom. The young need nurturing.

5. Campaigning to end domestic violence, to increase refuge provision, and to end the use of sole tenancies, thus giving women and children a right to stay in the home and ensure that all tenancy agreements contain a clause to the effect that any proven allegation of domestic violence represents a breach of the agreement by the perpetrator, who can thereby be evicted.

Let's work together for change. You know that current service provision is woefully inadequate, that there are children languishing in care and others facing a bleak future. We need change.