SCOTLAND ZEN and the art of SOCIAL WORK

by J.A. Skinner

Still Monday 26th May

  ‘Hold all calls please Aileen, till after the office meeting,’ says Harry as we all wander into the conference room.

  ‘Yes Mr.Wang, except life or death, or your wife,’ Mrs. Wang being a tyrant that Harry has the greatest of respect for which can sometimes manifest like fear. She doesn’t like to be kept waiting and expects her husband with his zen like abilities to be able to deal with all the domestic crises from a distance. The meeting is a monthly event. It is supposed to be informative and supportive for the staff and is a chance to look at trends and statistics in the teams. Most of our team’s workers have a generic case load but the meeting is a good excuse to get together with the specialist teams. Already seated in the room are the team manager and three workers from the youth offending team. Marge Moss the manager is a large matronly lady. She has her grey hair in a tight bun at the top of her head, which doubles as a face lift, and sharp grey eyes. She might, in soft lighting, look like a kindly Granny, but in reality she runs a tight ship and has been known to give her workers a dressing down if they show any sign of flagging. She has the power of breaching probation orders and the clients, teenage offenders mostly, have no chance of appealing to her better nature, they wouldn’t be able to find it.

  Her three workers, Dotty, Steve and Patrick are, as usual dressed as street kids; jeans with raggedy hems, oversized sweatshirts and grubby trainers. They are outreach workers and spend a lot of time on the street and in youth clubs and very little time in the office, thus the dressing down. This is a pilot scheme, very trendy for Motherwell, and they deal mostly with young drug addicts and the crime that goes with their habits. The drugs here are very controlled. The main hard drug dealer lives in North Motherwell and refuses to sell to youngsters so they have to go further afield to buy. This has caused real gang strife in Hamilton and Wishaw as they don’t want Motherwell boys in their territory, akin to the tribal drug wars in South Africa and Columbia.

  The workers use words like score, smack, draw, blaw, and whatever the ‘in’ words are this week, all very strange to the rest of us.

  Fussing around the electric kettle is the homemaker team, one thing is certain, there will be a decent cup of tea now. This team consists of three women who deal directly with families who have serious debt problems. They act as go-betweens with Social Security, housing, gas boards and electricity. They have experience in negotiating reduced payments of debt and are experts at getting the electricity back on after it has been cut off. They also give good budgeting advice and run a credit union, they work hard, they work wonders. Our team is the largest with Harry, me, Malcy our secondment from sspca, and George, who does the bulk of the elderly referrals, mostly because he is getting a bit elderly himself and is completely burnt out after twenty two years doing child care. Martha and Clair are experienced social workers also on our team, who share the emergency stuff with me and we have a social work assistant Linda who transports adults and children to meetings, contact, foster homes and group work, much friendlier and cheaper than a taxi.

  The main item on the agenda is the increase in the number of warrant sales in the area due to people getting into bad debt. This is the end of the line for some families and is a brutal, medieval, antiquated, inhumane system of debt collection which publicly humiliates the debtor. This does not happen anywhere else in Britain, in fact it probably doesn’t happen anywhere else in the world. Creditors recover little or nothing from poindngs so there is really no point to the whole debacle.

  We have a noisy debate about how and when to contact the Sheriff Officers to make our feelings known and advocate for families. Most of us think that pressure for change should come from management direct to our members of parliament, because we would be breaking all kinds of laws if we protested on the street while the warrant was going down although I have been known to stand at the back of the crowd.

  Wang says, enigmatically, he will take it to the next level of management and gather no moss. We move on to a much cheerier subject. The children’s summer trip. This is due to take place a week next Wednesday and is mainly organised by the homemaker team. It’s a day trip to the coast, free to families with children who have had contact with social services during the current year. Volunteers are always needed to supervise the day out, as all kinds of things can go wrong and often do. We have had lost and injured children, drunk parents, and a few memorable arrests by the police in Ayrshire. I always volunteer. I wouldn’t miss it for the world. Something bad would need to happen for me not to go. There are usually three double-decker buses and not a spare seat. The homemaker team love me going, as it’s mostly women who help on the day but they often like a man to deal with the teenage boys, making sure they don’t get into trouble in a strange town.

  Tasks are delegated such as packed lunches for everyone to be bought, someone to watch the budget, check the booking of the buses, check the weather forecast, not that we can order up some sunshine, but contingency plans can be made to hit a cinema or museum, if it looks like torrential rain. The final numbers have to be in for Monday so we are all warned to contact our clients and confirm their attendance. Two announcements were read out by Marge, the young offenders team manager, one was regarding the impending release of a lifer from Barlinie who would need weekly supervision, and the other a request for a foster family for a high profile probation. Most people looked at their shoes or their watches and she glared round the room like a spotlight. The problem with life licence cases is that they are for life and therefore get passed along from one social worker to the next every six months or so, or anytime there is a shake up in distributing caseloads. A high proportion of the released lifers have found religion which is just not my cup of tea. The high profile probation is a new deal that places young offenders with foster families for close supervision. It is still a minefield of the criminal justice system and laws, and nobody wants to be the first to be involved in a possible cock up. The main purpose is to keep young offenders out of the ‘short sharp shock’ system which is rapidly losing popularity. Harry announces he will speak to his workers individually to see if we could help, but he asked Marge not to count her ducks in the meantime

  He has outdone himself in the semantics today.