Steve_Bamlett_blog

During my working life which started in the late 1970s, work changed its nature, the largest symptom of which was the growth of public service managerialism. In the name of efficiency and resource economics, work changed to match business models. It followed that  objectives like increased well-being and secure attachment in relationship-based work were turned into measurable commodities that were supposed to be their equivalent. And ‘service’ replaced the relationships to which the jobs I learned from were once the key and were given a duration and mode of quantitative evaluation determined by management objectives alone.

The three jobs I loved in which I observed this happen and the fate of which jobs I mourn were teaching, social work and mental health support work. I could NOT go back into work into them now as none of these under their present definition, imposed as it is top- down from systems alien to their original values. Their current alienation from those values is to some extent even matched by changes in the knowledge and skills they once marshalled in the service of human well-being and relationships that were defined by human and ethical value systems rather than current process models and simple business standards that lack flexible nuance.

Teaching

My teaching experience was all in further and higher education, starting in the Roehampton Institute then teaching joint degrees validated by the University of London. I then taught English Literature. There was no training for this then and, probably as a result of that fact, I remember some mistakes I made as a teacher with shame; mistakes related to failures to know my audience and to respond to them appropriately, too eager to pursue my own passion for literature and what was then for me a need for literary interpretation mainly, based in the evidence not only of content but form and technique. What got me through in the end was developing a kind of charismatic self-presentation both in an actorly manner, and by using self-conscious roleplay, veering into sometimes dramatic self-revelation when I felt this was demanded.

Eventually I learned how to develop this into the facilitation of learner roleplay as a means of breaking down barriers of disabling self-consciousness. I found that worked even in my latest teaching, where now I was teaching learners of psychology, foundation neurobiology and social work. The issue I suppose is the means by which learners feel their participation is engaged and maximised.

By then of course I had supplemented my degree in English Literature with a conversion MA in Social and Applied Social Science for Social Workers, degrees in Psychology and professional training in mental health primary care interventions. But roleplay was still central both in facilitating knowledge, skills and values in working with people and, in this role, literature still played its part. Not only because people who used services like Lemn Sissay and Jenni Fagan were unable to set out their experiences except in this form publicly, though both became primarily artists both skilled and popular as poets, novelists, dramatists and memoirists.

And though I also trained as a teacher within all this both in professional social work practice teaching and in Secondary & FE education teaching, I wonder how much this helped. Without doy though, a deep trawl through developmental theory starting with Piaget, Vygotsky and Erikson certainly did help, if only in reaction against the last of these thinkers. What was beginning to creep into such training was an obsession with inflexible dogmatic standards and process models. The word process was the bugbear of my career, a kind of red rag to some considerable bull for the processes taught failed to ever inculcate values beyond the self-protection of professional,, their attention to participatory and facilitative work both minimal and, shock to say, taught in entirely non-participatory ways, a trait I found particularly in The Open University.

The last teaching I did is instanced in a blog at this link: https://livesteven.com/2023/01/10/a-blog-on-my-second-lecture-to-a-human-growth-and-development-course-in-social-work-sample-lecture-2-attachment-theory-understanding-how-humans-develop-grow-relationships-over-the-lif/. This was untried and needed more rescheduling of its over heavily informed and closely written slides, but it is how I start with content.

What is certain is that training does not ensure engagement of others nor does the possession of skills and knowledge without values sufficiently open to merit the word, which is my beef with the Open University and it’s largely closed and secretive modes of arranging things. I am not sure institutions ever get this right, so focused are they on their own survival and the fear of critique this entails upon them in their own self-assessment. Feedback is policed for positivity and censored or worse if it is not ‘positive’. What they fail to realise is that people understand they are being treated in this way and stop any meaningful communication with the institution and its spokespersons.

Social Work

The issues merge with those above, for some related to my role as a social work educator. My starting point for training again was not in education and training but practice as an Assistant Social Worker in Older People’s Services in Durham, following my own first acknowledged mental health crisis. I learned most, I think from workers who took risks, and were I suppose somewhat maverick with process but always in the interests of people using services. These workers took risks even with their own safety, when this was absolutely necessary to deliver a valid service.

Now much as I believe in protocols that safeguard workers, I have too often seen them used to further endanger, disempower and invalidate service users. As with all human services, value driven nuance in safeguarding is abandoned in social services now as it has long been in the NHS. I used to teach safeguarding to NHS workers. One successfully complained about me to her managers because I insisted that the existence of a policy safeguarded nobody without intelligent ethical individual decision making by a worker empowered to act. This member worked on a TEWV ward in a new mental health hospital now closed for failing to safeguard patients. I don’t even want to say I told you so. Instead I cry at the memory..

Listening to the patient is a phrase you often hear. You see or experience the reality much less. Talk to Peter Beresford, a teacher, practitioner and survivor of services or follow him on Twitter (X if you must). Read about the work he and Suzy Croft have done to build co-production that works and is sustained by values (for most institutional examples are not). Only in those circumstances would I want to work in the sector again.

Even in Learning Disabilities social work, where co-production, the building of circles of support networks and the idea of personal budgets was born, there has been such sad deterioration that great reformers in that arena must be weeping nightly. Likewise, in the kind of dementia services led by the University of Bradford – radical under the great Tom Kitwood who trained me (and my husband who taught Person-Centred Dementia Care in Teesside) in Dementia-Care Mapping ( a means of involving people with severe dementia in their own personal care by instituting systematic observation routines) is now not what it was without his personal leadership and political commitment.

Primary Care Mental Health

I trained as a Graduate Mental Health Worker in the first tranche of recruits following Labour’s NHS Plan of the year 2000. 1000 people were recruited nationwide as employees of Primary Care Trusts (now axed like most of the excellent work in health of that government) and simultaneously trained in CBT and life work therapies, though the latter got neglected in favour of the more process-led versions of both CBT & behavioural therapies.

Again learning was at a premium on the job, at a GP clinic in Burnopfield, County Durham and later in South Tyneside. For learning therapy happens when therapists listen and respond. Of course skilled use of tools can help but not if misapplied or imposed against informed consent. It is easy by the way to get patient consent but it is much harder if you ensure that informing the person having therapy is a rigorous process in which the person understands both the benefits and challenges of any approach. This goes by the board too often. It does so because practitioners think of practice processes in this work as linear and progressive not as involving regressive as well as progressive loops.

Truly like a spiral, recovery only works when it recovers ground it thought already covered, for it is in this spirit that it understands the endlessly interesting means in which the therapeutic is resisted and change turned into reactivity in the status quo. High standards. Yes. But we have no choice. Without them there is no work done in actuality or none that is secure and enduring, especially in work with alcohol, the most knotty of issues for personal interactions.

Conclusion

We get fulfilment that is genuine and that is not a reflex of our own narcissistic self-serving needs only when we are convinced that another is fulfilled by the work we do with them. It involves gains in the domains above of true learning, empowerment and self-regulated planning for future well-being respectively. In none of these area is a satisfactory criterion just happiness or contentedness. Most of us are happy and content with secure stasis but the aim of teaching, social work and good therapy is change not stasis. And we all resist change. That is why we are all so f…d up. In that I truly believe.

All my love

Steve