Recording the work

It was an essential part of duty to write up case notes on the computer. The quality of case notes or “case events” on the IT system were variable particularly with cases where families had been referred repeatedly and dealt with by several different workers. A good deal of the literature analysing child deaths emphasises the importance of chronologies, of linking together separate events which taken alone may not raise concerns but which taken together can show significant patterns (Reder et al., 1993; Brandon et al., 2008). I observed some DSWs spending time writing up case events in a way that enabled future readers to make links between separate events. This required time and thought and in some cases reordering/rewriting previous notes. I observed one DSW take 20 minutes carefully going through the entries on one case for a social worker from another agency and linking them together – creating a coherent narrative out of a series of disparate events. She then wrote her discussion with the other worker up in a couple of sentences. It was a routine task, apparently barely worth recording. Yet this creation – verbally or in writing – of narratives gives meaning to information and turns it into knowledge (Aas, 2004; Parton, 2008): a crucial requisite for analysing and assessing information.

On the other hand several workers said that they tended to abbreviate when writing up case events, entering just the bare bones.

SW4 talks about the difficulty of trying to type up what someone has told her – it’s often a long story which can’t be typed up in its entirety and has to be abbreviated so you have to choose what to leave out and what to write so it makes sense. I noted earlier that half the keys on SW4’s keyboard don’t have letters on them and some keys don’t work! (field note: observing SW4 on duty)

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One duty worker said to me that, when seeking information from previous case events, these entries gave limited information compared to the case events you wrote up yourself because, although these might be similarly abbreviated, you could recall all the thoughts, hunches, feelings that you had had but had omitted from the case record. The case event records are not “thick descriptions” (Geertz, 1973). If the case event had been written up by someone else in the team and they were still working there you could consult them to round out the case event and provide more detail and background, make it into a richer, more detailed story. This lack of detail meant that processes of the worker’s thinking were not available for subsequent discussion in supervision where such thinking could have been analysed for error or bias. It also meant there was no evidence of how the situation seemed at the time rather than in hindsight – a key issue in reviews and inquiries into child deaths (E. Munro, 2005).

Some of these issues are discussed in more detail later. 6.2.9 Summary

The day-to-day nature of the work of the social workers has been explored using data drawn from interviews and observations. The focus has been on how the social workers processed initial referrals through the duty system and how they worked with families through home visits. Both duty and home visits are very important sites of day-to-day decision making. Duty was seen as stressful and unpredictable. Little was known about many of the referrals due to incomplete or inaccurate information but important decisions needed to be made about them: not just what service should be offered but whether there should be a service at all. Cases had to be prioritised and as social work resources were limited there was a significant element of gatekeeping. A number of factors came into play in making these decisions. A variety of ways were used to avoid taking cases by passing them on to other agencies or taking no further action. Sometimes this was because of pressure of work, high thresholds and expectations that work would be cleared rapidly but also because of an awareness of social work as a “dirty”, morally dubious enterprise that could stigmatise both workers and families. Other less stigmatising, less “dirty”, agencies might provide better solutions or at least not make difficult situations worse and in some cases families would be better off employing their own resources. These strategies were usually used with cases at the lower end of perceived seriousness but such was the ambiguous and incomplete nature of many cases that this perceived seriousness might not be accurate. There was a tendency for

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thresholds for providing services to rise which was partly counteracted by the duty manager being available and aware of the work.

A number of previous studies have found that social workers use simplified and informal processes for screening out cases (Buckley, 2003; Platt, 2006) as they seek to make sense of complex and ambiguous referrals. There is clearly a possibility of error. As Brandon et al. suggest “child protection (does) not come ‘labelled as such’” (Brandon et al., 2008a, p.319) : in their analysis of Serious Case Reviews where children have died or been seriously injured 45% were seen upon referral as below the threshold for protective intervention.

A significant element of the work with families took place in their own homes. This could be challenging for the workers, as entering families’ homes often meant entering a complex, chaotic, intimate and even frightening environment, but also provided unique opportunities to engage with the intimate aspects of families’ lives. It was also an arena where they were required to make vital decisions.

The social workers often summarised their actions very briefly in the computerised case files, giving little or no detail of their thinking. Studying these case files, which represented the official record of their work, provided little evidence of the ways in which the workers thought about cases, prioritised them or made decisions about them. Instead much of their thinking lay in unofficial, informal, even private, processes quite separate from the formal world of official procedures.

Pithouse (1998) characterised social work as an “invisible trade” because so much of the activity takes place in private, and is therefore literally invisible to outsiders, and because so many of its processes are unofficial and based on taken-for-granted assumptions. The thinness of the case notes may contribute to this invisibility, rendering much of the workers’ decision making activity and reasoning unavailable to others.