This has been pretty horrible week for anyone interested in children’s services and family justice, what with the closure of BAAF and the controversy around Kids Company. And yet more criticism of social workers…
Although I’m all for transparency, I’m not personally very keen on social workers being named in judgments so I don’t want to add to the negative publicity the ISW in Re A and K-F has received. However the judge has raised a really important point here. Until now, the ISW thought that was what the courts wanted to read in her reports. Suddenly, she is ‘named and shamed’ for her somewhat woolly language. There’s a good piece on it in Community Care, with some thoughtful comments below.
So, why do social workers, and others, develop this idea that this is the right style in which to write? And what can we do about it? Thoughts welcome.
(I did have to look up the spelling of opprobrium.)
I have read and re-read reports like this and opined that I didn’t understand a word of them. It is worrying. That said, I agree that whilst this needed to be said it is a broader issue than this poor social worker, who will not be alone in her reporting like this. I am not sure it necessarily follows that the language used in a report might be the same as that used in an assessment – the one I am thinking of was a PAMS assessment and I am pretty sure was done using appropriate language, but the parent will have had no hope of understanding the report if I didn’t – but it may be a danger in some cases. I always worry when reports say that a parent “thinks in very concrete terms” that what is really meant is that the person talking to them is unable to give real life examples or communicate intelligibly.
Incidentally, having read the comments about lawyers on the Community Care article – the best lawyers are the ones who can communicate forcefully in plain english. Sometimes legal terms and long words are necessary but there is no excuse for using them when they are not (we all do it sometimes but we need to keep reminding ourselves not to).
Come on….”somewhat woolly language”? Please, what I read of it (admittedly only a little), was wholly unintelligible.
Thanks Freda. I’d recommend reading the judgment itself, as this gives more context than the brief excerpts and headlines in the press. I’ve put a link to it in the main post.
I read the judgement and I didn’t understand what the SW said but I also didn’t like the judge calling the grandmother a “simple soul”; patronising. The SW used some words incorrectly and that always bugs me, I don’t know how ISW are supervised but someone should have read the report.
One of the interesting things about the Transparency Project was the way we use language and I’d like the outcome of that survey. Whilst I confidently wrote responses because I know exactly what I mean, it is interesting to know that amongst the professions who work most closely in alongside each other in child protection
I think Sarah said something about the way SW use the world disclosure and that they shouldn’t. It was a good example of our problem, I used it today because a child “disclosed” I knew what I meant and I knew it didn’t mean the same as if there was a disclosure in the legal sense.
It made me think though because I am very specific about language. I don’t use jargon to confuse, and I don’t think anyone needs to. We all do somethings, it exists in all professions, but we do need to catch ourselves sometimes. The most confident practitioners tend not to need to wrap their stuff up in a bow with clever words.
We do though all use an element of shorthand, we could spend a paragraph explaining what a healthy attachment would like like or we could use two words to say that it isn’t. Hopefully when I was talking to the parents/kinship carers I was assessing I used the paragraph and I used it in a way they understood and checked their understanding. That doesn’t mean I am going to write all of that in a report but it does make me think about our aim not to disempower.
SW go through assessments with families and carers, and I don’t think I have written a report that was unintelligible to anyone, but worth considering we are writing a document then that serves more than one purpose. It’s a bit like a CPR going to court and being something a child might read later or the psychologist might talk to the family and then give expert opinion which uses very specialist language.
Sorry that got so long I couldn’t see what I had written should have said “Whilst I confidently wrote responses because I know exactly what I mean, it is interesting to know that amongst the professions who work most closely in alongside each other in child protection use the same word very differently”.