Brian Parrott reflects on the uncertain place of ‘community’ within the social work profession. (711 words)

In the 1968 Seebohm Report-influenced years for social work, the word ‘community’ was widely used, whether ‘community development’, ‘community work’, ‘patch working’, ‘community social work’ or other.

The common essence was something about the interrelationship of an individual or family’s circumstances with the place in which they live – its features, its wellbeing and the social forces and policies which impact on them.

During the first half of the 1980s, what came to be called ‘community social work’ in local authority social services departments or in projects supported by them, was described, promoted, supported and criticised. It has lived on ‘below the surface’ as other events in children’s services, adult social care, political favour, or public funding have dictated the nature and focus of social work.

For many of us, this has meant that something was ‘lost’ that might merit revisiting, particularly now in the contexts of greater focus on user-led services, collaborative working and ‘co-production’.

Back in the early 1980s, I and others were involved with the then National Institute for Social Work’s Practice and Development Exchange in trying to assemble learning from examples of local social services teams engaging more directly in their local areas – whether encouraging volunteer projects supporting young families or easing social isolation of older people, welfare benefits advocacy, or facilitating campaigns of various type which would improve lives. Some of it was certainly time expensive or brought unwanted challenge to employers.

In Community Social Work: A Paradigm for Change (1988), Gerry Smale and others set out the nine key features deduced from these examples:

• Services were accessible by location and in style
• No label of ‘client’ was required to get a service
• All people were potential supports
• Professionals were there to link up resources not
• necessarily provide them
• Service users were involved in decision making
• Teamwork extended across agencies
• Focus was on understanding and changing relationships
• Connections were identified
• Working in partnership and power sharing with relevant agencies was emphasised

Looking back to this work today, Social Work History Network (SWHN) member Barbara Hearn said: “To put community into social work means seeing people as assets, not problems, as people in social support systems which have fractured or needed bolstering; creating a model of social work which holds the legal duties alongside the capacity to play a part in social change. Community focused social work is not solely about service delivery or about pathologising individuals working from stereotypes, whether in children’s services or adult social care.”

Importantly, though, what was viewed as progressive then and may offer seemingly renewed possibilities now, might, as SWHN member Peter Beresford warns, fall into the neoliberal ideological trap of ‘looking after yourself ’ and ‘standing on your own two feet’. It may appear to somehow enhance freedom and choice in relation to public services, when the outcome will be the opposite.

Today, there are new ways of thinking about engagement and meaningful participation with people who use services and with carers – as individuals, networks or advocating organisations. The messages of #socialcarefuture – ‘nothing about us without us’ and ‘we all want to live in a place we call home’ – are core.

At a SWHN session earlier this year I wrestled with the question of what the focus on ‘community’ in social work has achieved over the decades, or failed to achieve. I’ve always regretted that social work has so often suffered from alternative forms of practice and organisation being seen as incompatible, or at worst directly opposed. Too often over-emphasis on specific models has been at the expense of more crucially important debate about the underlying attitudes and objectives of social work which, quite simply, are about:

• Attitudes of respect, equality and serious importance to the voice of people wanting or needing services and for the communities in which they are living
• Objectives of change at the personal, community and political level

Surely there might be some learning from the past in relation to community social work which can add to debate about where social work is going in the 2020s?

Brian Parrott is a former social worker and director of social services. He is currently a steering group member of the Social Work History Network. The meeting mentioned in this piece took place at King’s College London on 8 March 2023.

This post was first published as an article in Professional Social Work magazine (November / December 2023) and is reproduced with its permission.