Do social workers need more training?

How many times have we read of social workers incompetence?. How many children have died because they haven't done their job properly?


And how long is the saying going to last....."typical social worker"!


I think they need to be trained more to know when a child is in danger. I remember once reading about a child who was being underfed. The social workers went in, examined the child, said they would keep checking and then went back to their offices and reported the couple to the RSPCA because they had a pet that looked neglected


Typical social worker.

Do social workers need more training?
I've read many stories where children die because they didn't do their jobs. Then I've known several people who were IMO very good parents who have their kids taken away, and shouldn't have. I think it depends on the person. And yes, the ALL need more training. More training for anyone is always a good thing





My ex sister-n-law's 3 year old son got out of her apartment one time and was found standing in the middle of a VERY busy highway - by a social worker! The worker knocked on doors til someone told her who he belonged to. My sister-n-law was clearly on drugs and the worker gave her the boy and never filed a report. MADE ME SICK. She has now had both her children taken away - 3 YEARS LATER!!!! She had 4 reports filed on her and the only reason they took him away was because she abandoned him. She left him with his grandmother for 3 months and never came back or called to check on him.





Now if you take someone like me that does EVERYTHING for their children, if I had ONE FALSE report filed on me, they would probably instantly take mine away.





The system is broken where I live - BIG TIME
Reply:Social Workers these days do not get a chance to do their job properly they are bogged down in paperwork all due to Local Authority cuts. Maybe thats who we should be pointing the finger at and getting to the root of the problem.
Reply:I think they need to be abolished, just a load of loonies and a total waste of money and space.
Reply:Every profession has people that are excellent at their job or lousy or somewhere in between. I have recently been in hospital and have along with most people heard about overworked nursing staff. What a laugh, most of the time they where stood around the nursing station gossiping about what they did the night before, did not see anyone of them break into a sweat. how many patients have died needlessly? Typical NHS?


Like I said, I'm sure there are nurses etc who are exceptional at their job and the same goes for social workers - don't tar everyone with the same brush.
Reply:What do you expect when they have the likes of Sprocket working for them, have you seen how opinionated and self involved the woman can be??? most social workers are more involved with their own concept of self importance, than they are actually doing their job.
Reply:When I did my bachelor's degree, many years ago, I shared some modules with the sociology students - several of whom professed a determination to become "Social Workers". Their general attitude really scared me. Without exception, ALL were over-opinionated, bombastic, narrow in outlook - which was defined by the far left political dictats of the day and downright rude if crossed.





I personally think that all potential "Social Workers" should be psychologically profiled before being allowed on the basic degree course. Their motives for taking up the profession gives me, in many cases, very grave doubts.
Reply:Hello Elsie,





I think that the problem is that it can be incredibly hard for a social worker to prove that a child is being neglected and then even harder for them to have the child removed from the home. I am sure these people are seeing signs of distress, malnutrition etc etc, but then in order to have the child moved they have to provide enough evidence - not easy when you are working in very strict time frames.





Social services asks its workers to follow its procedures and even though they might know a child is being mistreated, the family may tick all the boxes and not warrent further investigation.





I think these problems can be solved by emplolying more social workers to deal with an ever-increasing case load, providing training and refreshers, and reviewing the legal obligations and rights that these social workers have.
Reply:maybe we just need more social workers who can see a case through





i know of a family who seem to have a new social worker every six to nine months, so someone new is always playing 'catch up' with their case





these social workers also seem to have too big a workload....
Reply:I doubt that there is such a thing as a "typical social worker"


and I imagine that they are subject to a lot more constraints than we the public realise.








More training is to be welcomed in any profession.
Reply:There may well be problems and I'm sure there are good and bad social workers. You couldn't pay me enough to do that job.


Just imagine the kind of crap that you have to put up with on a daily basis, getting abused while you try to do your job.
Reply:Social workers cant have enough training. And it should be on going. Incompetence aside, its just because they are dealing with such sensitive issues that training needs to be a priority.
Reply:My family has opened our home to foster children for the past decade. I have to say that it is not so much the lack of training, but the type of training and the number of cases social workers have. First off, in most training social workers are trained to reunite families at all cost, which means instead of paying attention to the facts that a child is scared or has said that they don't want to go home they see that the parents have done a "majority" of what the court told them to do to get the kids back and they might as well send them back home.


Second, cases workers have far too many cases, there isn't any way that these case workers can get to know these children, to understand what they want and what they need, no matter how much they want to. Case workers should have a maximum of maybe 5 or 6 cases at a time in my opinion, but in reality they have sometimes up to 20 or 24, that is a typical social worker.
Reply:yes they do and probably need to be older as well.


As a society why do we still need social workers. Not a very good reflection on our society is it?
Reply:A lousy job becasue you cannot do right for doing wrong.


A lousy job because you are trained by ideologues (like teachers in teacher training college) whose aim is to undermine the middle class and to see no wrong in the working and professionally non-working classes.


A lousy job because many of your superiors were appointed on PC criteria and not on ability.


A lousy job because you get precious little co-operation from police and health visitors.


A lousy job because you are told that there are so many witches' covens and Satanic rings out there .


A lousy job because your given sociological and political goals are inimical to common sense, which is not a job requirement.


A lousy job because some of your colleagues revere the criminal classes (listen to and read the sociological guru Lawrie Taylor) and no one else appreciates their inherent altruism


A lousy job because your 'degree' is an oxymoron.





The tragedy is that so many social workers have genuinely high ideals but are let down at every turn.
Reply:Do you know I believe some of them are OVER trained! I know several people who are social workers - before they trained they had every aspect to their character that you would have wanted for their profession, and all had an over-riding amount of common sense. All three of them changed with their training, losing all common sense, quoting Acts, rights, and if anything becoming less confident people. I believe social workers are like politicians - they are good candidates and go into it for the right reasons - then get swamped with bureaucracy and too nervous of repercussions and constraints to use common sense!
Reply:Social work is the least demanding of all of the academic courses. Those who aren't even intelligent enough to do a degree in clinical psychology do degrees in social work.





The best of them start out as well-intentioned, if not extremely intelligent youngsters possessed of the great analytical acumen that being a good social worker would demand.





The worst of them parlay their profession into serving the most nefarious designs of their governments: destroying the family base, thus weakening people generally; spreading terror which not only keeps people terrified of the government, it encourages substance abuse, which is very lucrative; collecting information on the classes most likely to revolt.





They are a unlovely lot.
Reply:i agree with you
Reply:the social worker is trained to make the out come of any problem as cheap as possible...ie, no matter how abused the child is. its more importent to keep the family unit together. because its cheaper for the government. couple this with the fact that if you kill a child nowadays you serve (in reality ) less than 6 years.'if that'....there is no real punishment. that poor little girl who had been tortured to the point where her poor little body just gave up....the parents will be out in 4 years..the sentancing is bullshit. no way will they do any real time. and who protected that little kid...no one, even though social workers were told about it. think about it. a little 4 year old tortured to death!!! real sentence....death penalty for both parents. for the social workers who knew but didnt do their job!... 5 years imprisonment, and banned from social work for life. how many MORE children is society going to abandon like this? its immoral to sit back and do nothing to bring about real protection fopr children. BUT what do we get from the labour party. make it illegal to pay for sex. and now its illegal to use a hands free phone?? in fact any petty law that will bring in revenue....but nothing to protect the public. we need to get this government out.
Reply:What they really need is more funding, more resources and many many more staff. The reason some social workers make errors of judgement is because they have horrendous workloads to deal with.





I don't think it's the social workers at fault or even the training. A lot of it has to do with policies made at the top. I can't understand the reasoning that it is better to keep a child with its natural parents no matter how bad those parents are.
Reply:Social workers often have their hands tied by a lot of red tape when they are checking on children. The measure to remove children from their parents is the last one in a long line. Yes it is easier to have a pet that is badly treated from a home.





What you never hear about in the press is the amount of times that social workers have prevented a child in danger from being left in that position. You only hear the bad cases.





Edit: And in a lot of cases it is the system that lets people down not the actual social workers