The conference I attended on 3 June focused in the main on what isn’t working about social work. It is lovely to see when it works well – it really can be transformative (sorry, I hate that word too).

This blog post on the ADCS website by Rachel Wardell : Relationships, Relationships, Relationships is one such reminder of the power of social work – and of the importance of relationships (clue in title). The little things really do matter – when we lawyers are at court whinging about communication breakdown and asking if our clients could *please* be kept in the loop a bit more about medicals, knocks and bumps, cancelled contact or events at school – it really does matter. Parents can very easily be made to feel undervalued, excluded and criticised, when what they need (and are entitled to expect) is to be included, respected and to be made to feel that they remain an important part of the decision making process for their child even if they cannot care for them at present.

It’s no good whinging about how crap social workers are unless we try equally hard to show a way to improve things and acknowledge that there is some good work going on (probably a lot more than I see, because I see only the litigated stuff where the parties have been unable to avoid coming to court). Although there are many pressures on social work and some structural problems that they can’t fix themselves, there are lots of little things they can do that have the potential to make a big difference.

The blog post probably contains some lessons for lawyers like me too – although we have a responsibility to raise issues and challenges in the interests of our clients, we too can contribute to poor relationships by the little things we do to – I fully understand why social workers sometimes become defensive, although it is part of their responsibility to try and be self aware and to avoid it. I will remind myself (again) in light of this post to try harder to ask nicely and to make constructive suggestions rather than criticism (subject of course to the ice wall going up, which it sadly so often does).

This is good stuff and I’m keen to share the good stuff as well as the desperately awful stuff which is so often in our feeds.