R EPRESENTING PRACTITIONER KNOWLEDGE

Inscription is used to translate the knowledge of Social Workers into a more explicit form, for the purposes of management, scrutiny and accessibility. This translation process presents difficulties for Social Workers, because of the nature of inscription, and also the specific demands of the inscribing devices themselves. One of the aims of the SAF is to produce a report which renders explicit the criteria drawn on in the Social Workers assessment of a case. This is partly to promote ‘evidence – based practice and also to create a contractual document which could be used to defend Social Work practice in the event of a challenge. It is an attempt to render visible the (often tacit) process of professional judgement. The attempt is to create a proxy object for the work done on a case that can stand alone in representing this work. The explicit and detailed representation of dimensions of the judgements made on a case is intended to support the capacity of the object of

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the report to speak on behalf of the case and on behalf of the Social Workers. However, Social Workers expressed doubts about the capacity of such documents to be entirely explicit. The challenge for Social Workers is in translating their deep knowledge of the case through this type of inscribing process.

Social Workers believe that the specific design of the form is ill-suited to the representation of knowledge about cases. Social Workers criticise the design of the form, its structure and subject headings. Workers explain that they often have difficulties in interpreting the prescribed categories in relation to the cases, or their own understanding of practice. They believe this limits the capacity of the form to stand alone as the representation of judgement on a case. The meaning of the information logged in the form was limited by the need for a professional understanding of the practice context of a case. This is significant in terms of conveying the important dimensions of a case to the lay members of a children’s panel for example, or the other professionals involved in a case conference.

Practitioner resistance to the use of a standard form emerges again in the criticism of the capacity of the SAF to adequately represent a case. The attempt to enforce a standardised representation of a case, through the use of a particular form is resisted by Social Workers on the grounds that Social Work cases cannot be subjected to standardisation without the loss of important dimensions of the case. There is a strong discourse of individuality amongst Social Workers which relates both to the specific and individual nature of each case and also the individual approach taken by individual Social Workers. Thus, the standardising effect of the SAF (which is intentional on the part of Social Work management) is resisted on the grounds that it is incompatible with front-line Social Work practice, and is deemed unhelpful to the work with families. Whilst reports on cases have always been part of Social Work practice, the SAF is more detailed and more prescriptive (in principle at least) and is experienced by Social Workers as an attempt to reduce their discretion in the way they report cases. This is seen as reducing their freedom to tailor inscribing practices to the needs of each case and their own particular practice approach. This is not criticised as a political strategy of management to

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bring Social Workers to heel, but rather is decried in terms of the, as social workers see it, the potentially effect on the case and on the children involved. For Social Workers, the attempt to create a standard representation of case is misguided, because of the individual complexity of casework. If standardisation is enforced through a format such as the SAF, it runs the risk of misrepresenting cases. Social Work is understood by practitioners (and to some extent, this extends from the front-line, right back up to the senior Social Work managers) as being too complex, too individual, too embedded in the dynamics of relationships to be successfully standardised. A standardising ‘form’ is seen as being inadequate to the task of creating a proxy object for a case, because a case is, as Social Workers describe it, not a collection of information, or a set of standard criteria, but a complex life’.

“But, you can’t always put a child in a box. That’s always one of my concerns. I always think the need to be that …. It’s such an individualised piece of work that we do. It has to be for that particular family. That sometimes that tick-boxing culture is really quite restricting in terms of the work.” (PT4/SW1)

Social Workers also resist the standardising effects of the SAF because it is seen to represent a desire by managers to standardise the way in which the CFSW service deals with families. The standardisation of representation is understood by Social Workers to be an attempt to standardise and impoverish the nature of practice. For them this constitutes as a lack of respect for individual clients, on behalf of whom Social Workers see themselves as acting. It reduces people to standardised objects, which is understood by Social Workers, not only as an impoverishment of Social Work practice, but as a lack of respect or sympathy with the people, particularly the children, who are the subjects of the case.

Social Workers expressed concerns that in using standard forms, they were required to mould the representation of the case to fit the form. There was the fear amongst practitioners, that the family would somehow be misrepresented or that the circumstances of their situation might be simplified, and that whatever did not fit into the standard form might ‘get lost’. This is significant because of the importance of the report as a proxy for the case; decisions are made about the family on the basis of the report.

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The fact that the SAF used more specific and detailed ‘headings’ than previous standard Social Worker reports generated anxiety amongst practitioners. Although the intention of the SAF was to ensure greater explicitness and more precision in the process of assessment by Social Workers, practitioners questioned the standardisation of such criteria. The lack of discretion in constructing the language and descriptive headings of the form was understood not only to dictate the way in which the case was represented in the form, but to dictate the criteria used to make the assessment of the case. In other words, that the form would dictate the legitimate grounds and evidence upon which decisions would be based. Again, this resistance is based on a practitioner concept of cases as being very individual. According to them, different cases might demand different assessment criteria. To limit the available criteria is to limit and impoverish expert practice. The criteria expressed in the SAF articulate a standardised object of ‘good parenting’ against which families are judged. Such criteria become reified through their incorporation into a standard model. However, whatever the discomfort of social workers, the criteria inscribed within the SAF have not been plucked from thin air or from a bureaucratic set of ‘tick boxes’. They reflect current practice thinking and have been designed in accordance with another standard model, the Department of Health Standard Assessment Framework, which Social Workers accept as a suitable expression of good practice. The DoH framework is drawn on explicitly by Social Workers, both in their training and in ongoing practice. For example, a Social Worker described how she kept the model pinned up on the wall to remind her of the important criteria to consider when assessing a case.

There seems to be a difference for workers in drawing on a standard model to make their assessment, and writing up the assessment within a standard form. The DoH standard assessment guidelines allow for individual discretion in the weighting and accommodation of factors in a particular family. There is still discretion in the construction of the object representing the family to decision-making forums and authorities. The framework is understood as supporting practice, by providing guidelines and benchmarks against which to make a judgement, without limiting judgement.

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“I know about, you know, looking for the guidelines and boundaries a parent sets, looking at how successful their parenting is. That’s to do with child development. So the course did equip me well with that. But now, that’s still not automatic, you know, in my head. Which is why the thing we got on our course, the triangle, I use that to remind me.” (PT5/SW2)

The drive for more detailed and explicit documentation of cases represented by the SAF is experienced by Social Workers as a loss of professional autonomy. This is expressed in terms of its effect, not on the political status of the Social Work profession, but in terms of a loss of autonomy in casework. The detrimental effects are expressed in terms of the effect on the children and families who are the subject of the cases. The managerial drive is towards greater visibility and greater explicitness to improve and defend assessment, by demonstrating the evidence for recommendations and interventions by Social Work. From the perspective of Social Workers, this increased visibility reduces their professional autonomy and their freedom to make choices about what they include in a report, thereby potentially undermining the rhetorical effectiveness of the report. Some Social Workers also complained that this focus on comprehensiveness and visibility may affect the welfare of the children and families they are working with. Social Workers experienced this drive to more comprehensive documentation as a reduction of their discretion. They cited examples where it might be more beneficial to the case to minimise or exclude information about certain dimensions of the case. For example, parents may wish to restrict the access their children have to information about their own family history, or history of drug or alcohol addiction, or criminal records. Or, a Social Worker may not wish family members to have access to information about the judgement being made by the worker, because this might disrupt the working relationship between parent and Social Worker. Social Workers also talked about the effect on family members of seeing their lives, their histories laid out ‘in black and white’. This might have diverse effects: one Social Worker explained how they had used this process to ‘shock’ parents into taking the process seriously and doing something to improve the circumstances of their children; in other circumstances, they explained that they might soft pedal in a report, because they felt that it would be counterproductive to increase the anxiety of the parents. This degree of discretion around reporting

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demands trust in the capacity of the Social Worker to make this kind of judgement. It also undermines the value of this kind of inscription as a comprehensive, archival record of work done.

The attempt by managers to use standard reporting formats to standardise the representation of cases is summed up by the term ’tick box’ Social Work. This draws on a generalised contempt for measures in Social Work which are perceived as being driven by organisational or bureaucratic concerns, rather than ‘practice’ concerns. This is also manifested in the differentiation between the terms ‘form’ and ‘tool’; the former is used to denote bureaucratically driven documentation and the latter to denote inscribing devices which are embedded in practice concerns. A form is the essence of ‘tick box Social Work’. It reduces professional judgement about what is relevant, and is understood as an inadequate representational medium for the case.

“Youth justice assessment is going down the adult justice route. What I would rather unkindly call ‘social work by numbers’. Now that is tick- boxy.” (PT4/PTM)

“If you look at the Standard Assessment Format, it is very boxy, very tick- listy. It’s not very user-friendly. It’s certainly very difficult for children and parents to access it.” (PT3/PTM)

“We’re not working in a ‘tick-box’ environment.” (PT4/SW1)

The ‘tick box’ approach is cited by practitioners as evidence that those ‘on high’ misunderstand the nature of Social Work on the front-line. Those ‘on high’ are ill- defined. It is a symbolic description of any measure enforced from ‘above’ – which can mean by more senior Social Workers outside the immediate practice team (i.e. PTMs are not designated as being ‘on high’, but are part of the front- line) or can mean the Scottish Executive. When pressed, front-line Social Workers and even Senior Social Workers (see below) are generally unable to identify the source of the initiatives they may dismiss as being bureaucratic.

“A lot of the time, a lot of the new stuff seems to come from ‘on high’. So often we get caught up in the everyday stuff, it’s hard to keep hold of where things do come from. Erm, is it the Scottish Executive, is it legislation, which may be one and the same? There’s an obligation to record

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information on children separately. I know the department is trying to do that. As to what’s actually behind that, is it policy, is it law? I don’t know …. To my knowledge, it wasn’t practice driven.” (PT5/SNR)

Narrative and analytical representation of cases

For Social Workers, the use of a form such as the SAF to represent cases means that some aspects of the cases are lost. The difficulty in representing the complexity of a Social Work case in any type of inscribing device is not to be underestimated. The interpersonal dynamics of a case, the historical development of events and the range of circumstances which could be considered as significant factors in assessing the level of risk to a child mean that the assessment, and representation of that assessment, demand sophisticated analysis and synthesis. However, there seemed to be a sense amongst Social Workers that in making the SAF on the face of it more extensive, something significant in conveying that complexity has been lost.

The tension seems to be between a format that is analytical in approach compared with a looser format which allowed a narrative representation of a case.In the same way that Zuboff (1988) contrasts ‘analytical’ reasoning with ‘analogical’ reasoning in her descriptions of the changes to practice brought about through the introduction of new technology , the difference between an analytical format (i.e. the SAF) and a narrative format, was experienced by practitioners as demanding a reconstitution of their working knowledge of a case. This means an additional process of articulation and translation is required , which Social Workers struggled with. Social Workers believe that in some way, the change from a narrative representation of case knowledge to a more analytical representation, caused the loss of important case knowledge. For Social Workers, the format of the SAF means that Social Workers lose the narrative ‘flow’ in representing a case. The separation of the information into categories and lists, precisely the techniques used to make the ‘facts’ about the case more accessible, had somehow undermined the overall sense of the case. There is a discrepancy between the analytical presentation of information, and the presentation of information through a narrative. The former is reductive; the latter holistic; the reductionism undermines the sense of the case that the narrative can somehow convey.

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“You put something in, and then you go further down and think, no, it should have been there. You’re trying to break it down too much. That’s half the problem. Look at this – ‘child’s interests, hobbies’, but then you’ve got ‘routine’. To me, that doesn’t belong there. There’s no structure there. It’s all very relevant to your report, but the way it’s structured. It makes no sense.” (PT4/SW1)

This is also perhaps another dimension of practitioner resistance to standardisation. The SAF demanded conformity in the presentation of the case, rather than telling your own story in your own way.

“The only thing I hate about the standard assessment is that it doesn’t flow. You’re writing the background, talking about the child, and if I was writing a report, you know how some reports just flow; you go in chronological order. That doesn’t. You’re always having to stop and start. There’s just no flowing in that report. I can’t put it in more technical words, but that’s just the way I feel.

Researcher: Does that disrupt your flow?

Yes, I find that it does. It’s more of a tick box – have I done that question, right, that’s ticked. You just don’t seem to get to the sense of your assessment. I can’t think of the word I’m looking for. But, you know, you may be missing a lot by having to be that standardised. You may be missing a lot in that report.”(PT4/SW1)

“It was before we had PCs, so basically you wrote it up [by hand]. You had headings and off you went. You had more text per page in those days.[…..] As a Social Worker, you had a set of things you were expected to cover, and that would have been in headings. You wrote a paragraph about each heading. Signed the bottom and it would go off. And that would be that.”

(PT5/SNR)

The disaggregated format of the SAF is designed to present more ‘information’, but for Social Workers, this loses the meaning conveyed in narrative representation. The form is designed to present ‘facts’, or ‘information’, which for Social Workers, is not the same of communicating the sense or the significance of the case. The sense of the case is communicated through story telling, which somehow preserves the overall meaning of the case, in a way that the disaggregated facts of the case do not. They believe that a narrative representation of a case presents a vivid picture of a case and is a means of conveying deep understanding.

“Sometimes I go along to a hearing to give support, if it’s particularly difficult. And I did this for this Social Worker, who will remain nameless. And I saw the report he was presenting, and I thought ‘Oh my God, he’s