The curse of the generic

I became an (unqualified) social worker in the early 1970s, just after the creation of social services departments in England. These merged three former organisations, each of which comprised professionals skilled and experienced in work with distinct groups of people: children’s departments employed children’s officers who dealt with child protection and adoption and fostering; welfare departments employed welfare officers who maintained long-term contact with disabled people; and mental health sections of local health departments had their mental welfare officers who supported people with a mental illness living outside hospital.

The decision to merge these departments followed the ‘Seebohm Report’, which correctly noted that some families were involved with two or three of these agencies, and incorrectly proposed that it would be more efficient to have a single generic ‘family’ service. The resulting merged social services departments were large and had management hierarchies rather than being led by a senior professional. The commitment to ‘generic’ social work, in which each member of staff dealt with the full range of clients, became departmental orthodoxy. Both these trends led to a rapid exit of the most skilled and senior staff. They were replaced during my first year as a social worker by people like me: well-meaning, untrained and incompetent.

The results across the country were a radical decline in the quality of child protection, and support for disabled and mentally-ill people. The first indicator of this was the avoidable death of the child Maria Caldwell. The subsequent official enquiry identified that a major cause of institutional failure was the confusion among social workers about whether their primary responsibility was to the child or to the ‘family’ (ie her parents). This was the first of many such enquiries, which led to a succession of management ‘solutions’, from inter-agency committees, registers of children at risk, centrally-imposed targets, inspections, child databases, and repeated re-organisations. No-one in power paid much attention to enhancing the professional skills of social workers involved with children, enabling them to develop specialist skills, or setting up the kind of small specialised and professionally-run departments that had been a success in the past. When specialism did arrive, it was implemented as part of a bizarre governmental reform which merged local authority child protection services with local education departments.

Why this resistance to specialism? I think it is a product of the managerial control that arises with the creation of large public organisations. In small organisations, staff are known as individuals, and there is an awareness of their different strengths. Staff can be assigned to different work informally, and their supervisors can generally assess their performance by observation and informal meetings. Large organisations see staff as a block of people to be matched with some quantitative indicator of workload. It is easier to move people around if they are supposed to have generic responsibilities rather than diverse specialist skills.

The drive to generic work and consequent de-professionalisation arises in many large public organisations. This can occur even in organisations in which specialist professional skills are regarded by almost everyone as being essential. The National Health Service has attempted to grade all its diverse professions on a single ‘knowledge and skills framework’ - a spectacular example of the kind of ‘blue skies’ (crackpot) thinking that occurs in very large organisations. At the same time, the government has attempted to reduce the time spent in specialist medical training. There are similar trends in universities. These value their most highly skilled staff, at least as long as they attract large research grants, but post-doctoral researchers and academic staff who specialise in teaching are sometimes treated as classes of helots, interchangeable and disposable.

The curse of the generic partly explains an apparent paradox: as public organisations get larger and employ more managers, the less competent they are in delivering effective public services. There are other explanations for this paradox: the conversion of previously-autonomous professionals into highly-regulated functionaries produces the alienation familiar in industrial process work. Also, long management hierarchies move decision-making further from the organisations’ customers, who usually encounter junior members of staff with limited authority to adapt procedures to meet individual needs.

We therefore need revolutionary change - towards small-scale public services, with a re-assertion of professional specialism and autonomy. We need to down-size schools with thousands of pupils, so-called ‘local’ authorities which cover wide areas of the country and multiple and formerly self-governing towns, and large welfare departments which fail to protect children at risk or adequately support the disabled. Of course, some public agencies will always need to be large: big cities need governments, and the large numbers of students in higher education will probably require large universities. However, authority can be devolved within cities to community councils (as in Scotland and Wales), while universities can operate more on the Oxbridge model, with academic staff working in semi-autonomous colleges. After all, Oxford and Cambridge Universities have hardly been failures despite lacking the benefits of centralised management.