“The bits that appeal to me are the things I can directly relate to practice …” The context and impact of austerity across the public sector, on all levels of staff is also a factor. As Wilson notes, however, creating a distinction between ‘creative practitioners’ and ‘cold-hearted bureaucrats’ is not necessarily helpful and curiosity should be applied to how financial, bureaucratic or policy constraints hinder effective practice for all. Treating only one part of the system and expecting a whole system change seems to be a fundamental misunderstanding of Munro’s recommendation. More specifically, they did not want the organisation to move on from these investments to ‘the next thing’ without giving changes time to embed. They therefore wanted to see the same investment from the organisation. Learning systemic ideas is a commitment on the part of social workers, involves significant time and intellectual effort and affects their professional identity. Some participants expressed concern that they were being trained to do something and then ‘forgotten’ about, or were expected to be able to practise differently in an organisation that had largely remained the same.
If it’s just another … thing that we do, it’s just going to end up being another tick box exercise.” “We’re trying to use systemic ideas so that we can have positive outcomes for the families. Munro did not directly recommend training social workers in systemic practice she focused on the organisation evaluating its activities and services systemically. The Munro review’s focus on systemic organisational leadership was intended to facilitate better practice on the ground - for social workers to have their time freed from bureaucratic tasks to spend more time thinking relationally and with families. Participants commented that having a stable organisational leadership team, and one that could be clear about the purpose and goal for implementing systemic ideas, was vital. “…the thing is, somebody else might come in and say ‘I want us to …’ do you understand? Someone else can come in and think ‘we should go this way’ and then we need to change again.” “The organisation has to be systemic in order for practitioners to be systemic for clients … it’s exhausting to be the only one saying ‘no let’s look at this differently’.” (all quotes are taken from the interviews) 1. However their responses scored highly for validity and a number of main themes emerged clearly across the interviews.īased on their current perspective, three key aspects of their experiences of putting their systemic training into practice appeared to be particularly prevalent:
The practitioners were from one London borough’s children’s services department the sample size was small, and therefore not widely generalisable. However, there are broader and narrower definitions of ‘systemic’, and this range of definitions is itself important some social workers highlighted that they struggled to locate their practice within a definition.įor a recent research project, I interviewed child protection social workers who had been trained in systemic therapy about their experiences of applying it to their own practice. For this project, it was defined as the idea that individuals exist within (and are to be understood within) various systems, which includes the family system, as well as work, cultural and social systems ( Vetere and Dallos, 2003).