Relieving officers Care and control functions Personally liable Operated in the field as street level bureaucrat Supplemented, supplanted, by volunteer committees Brought into local authorities en masse in the 1930s

Almoners 1903 Almoners’ Committee 1907 Hospital Almoners’ Council* 1911 Hospital Almoners’ Committee 1920 Association of Hospital Almoners 1922 Institute of Hospital Almoners* 1927 Hospital Almoners Association

Psychiatric social workers Social work - déclassé: – Jesse Taft: “The deepest human misery, the inner problems, are common to rich and poor alike.” – Charlotte Towle: “Thus the relationship [between social worker and client] has been removed from a class or economic basis to an objective professional basis. This change would seem to facilitate identification on a more constructive level.”

Relieving officers (from 1930 Area Welfare Officers) Duly authorised officers (overseeing admission to psychiatric hospitals) Psychiatric social workers (in London after 1930) engaged in psychiatric units and f amily visiting after patient discharge Investigators of old age pension claims Probation Officers Central Association for Mental Welfare staff Psychiatric social workers in voluntary hospitals Charity Organisation Society officers Almoners in voluntary hospitals Organisers of Councils of Social Welfare Settlement workers Moral welfare workers with unmarried mothers Tuberculosis Care Committees Advisory Committee voluntary workers (with Employment exchanges helping people into work) Local War Pensions committees (up to 1918) helping to find work and organise war pensions Charity Organisation Society volunteers visiting older people, unemployed Settlement volunteers Moral welfare volunteers Social work services for adults on eve of the Second World War Public sectorVoluntary sector Paid Unpaid

Children’s welfare visitor Asst. relieving officers -overseeing boarding out Care committee organizers Probation Officers (under Home Office after 1926) School attendance officers (brought children in need of care before courts) NSPCC agents CAMW officers – learning disability COS District offi cers – family casework Settlement house workers Adoption society staff ‘Bible women’ Anglican temperance missionaries as probation officers ( ) PSWs in child guidance clinics Moral welfare agency staff Care committee volunteer visitors Infant Life Protection visitors Boarded out children’s visitors Children’s visiting societies’ volunteers to workhouse, child-minded, & boarded out children Adoption society visitors Moral welfare visitors with unmarried mothers (Anglican, Methodist, Catholic, Jewish) COS family visitors State organisations Voluntary organisations Pai d Unpaid Children’s social work services on eve of Second World War

Professionalisation Different strategies spontaneously arrived at: – Almoners/COS – PSWs – CAMW – NAPO – Relieving Officers Metropolitan Association

BFSW Conference of Children’s Care Committee Organisers Association of Children’s Moral Welfare Workers College of Nursing (Public Health Section) Association of Mental Health Workers Association of Metropolitan Relieving Officers Association of Psychiatric Social Workers NAPO Standing Conference of Metropolitan Boroughs’ Tuberculosis Care Comms Women’s Public Health Officers Association

The promising 50s and 60s Children Act 1948 – Association of Child Care Officers’ different approach to professionalisation Seebohm Implementation Action Group Case work dominant – linked now to a social democratic ethos

Formation of BASW Did it work? – undermined by external factors? – leadership? Tactics? – Trying to embrace the unembraceable? A counter-factual: what if BASW had not been formed?

A post social work world? YOTs – lost social context of working with young offenders New children’s agencies omits mention of sw Personalisation Care management – NPM: – practitioners ‘need controlling’ – Procedures, performance indicators, eligibility rules Disability advocates: social work should abandon role as definers of need and immerse themselves in disability politics Decline of public sector – so what??!

Daniel Walkowitz contrasting social workers of 1960s and 70s with 90s: “Social workers analysis of poverty has become more structural and less personal, whereas the methods they endorse have become more consensual and less radical. What had been a ‘dissenting profession’ has become a ‘consenting profession.’” – Working with class - social workers and the politics of middle class identity