We have our efforts upside down
In a thought-provoking lecture, entitled ‘Social Services Are Broken. How Can We Fix Them?’, Hilary Cottam stated that around £250,000 is spent each year, on each of around 100,000 families within the UK. However, she highlighted that the £250,000 is not spent on the families themselves, but instead on the cost of running the support systems which have built-up around them.
Her analysis suggests that 86% of a social worker’s effort is spent feeding information to meet the needs of those support systems, leaving a maximum of 14% of the social worker’s time to gather information from the individual and to build a relationship with them.
In addition to that, social worker time is spent sifting through cases of those who may seek support, but who are more likely than not, unable to meet the eligibility criteria.
The costs and dynamics of this system are unsustainable. Its results are unacceptable in an increasingly digital age. The balance of effort spent feeding information into the system versus customer-facing and relationship building time must be reversed.