A Study of a Social Work Agency: The Occupational Routines and Working Practices of the Education Social Work Service

Abstract

In this paper we will be examining the way in which the education social work service goes about its routine, everyday work with truants (which, for the purposes of this paper, will be seen as the service's major occupational task to resolve).¹ Such an analysis has, in our view, a twofold importance. Firstly, it adds to the extensive literature² on disaffection amongst school students; secondly, it contributes to juvenile justice studies³ which have highlighted the importance attached to truancy in the formal decision-making process; this in turn has led to the development of a range of administrative and judicial strategies to remedy the problem.⁴

In addition, it is our view that the truancy problem is likely to increase in the light of the growing certainty of unemployment on leaving school for large sections of the youth population, coupled with fiscal cuts in the education budget: we have been able to show in our Sheffield-based research (which confirms trends indicated in earlier studies undertaken in this same city⁵) that there has been a statistically significant increase in non-attendance amongst fifth formers between 1976 and 1982 in the local comprehensive schools.⁶ The truancy issue has been perceived as a serious social problem for a number of years now⁷ and, on the same basis, we can expect that this will continue – indeed, as something of the moral panic that exists in the related social sphere of youth unemployment.⁸ Perhaps this is one of the reasons for the reference to the role of the service in the 1983 Conservative party manifesto:⁹ ‘we shall switch the emphasis in the education welfare service back to school attendance so as to reduce truancy’.

Our findings are based on research undertaken in Sheffield on the administrative and legal decision-making processes in truancy cases, which involved six months' observation of the proceedings of courts and an I.e.a. pre-court attendance tribunal, known colloquially as the ‘Rota Committee’. We also undertook in-depth interviews in fifty-two non-attendance cases (sixteen randomly selected from education records where no formal action had yet been instigated; and, on the same basis, twenty which had been taken to the tribunal and sixteen which had been sent on to court). After selection of a case, the family was approached and the child and parent(s), if agreeable, were interviewed (independently of each other if possible). They were asked about their perceptions and attitudes to school, teachers, difficulties experienced, the formal intervention that had taken place, and the nature of the assistance they had received from the social work agencies involved. After this, we interviewed the interested social worker and education professionals; our interview schedule was much the same, except that here, we asked them for their perceptions of the family, their explanation of the truancy problem in the particular case and so on. Thus, for each case, we collected the account of the child and parent(s) and those of the relevant state professionals. We had forty-nine interviews with education social workers (E.S.W.s) which involved twenty-five out of the thirty-four fieldworkers in post during the period of our research (some of whom were involved in more than one case) and two out of ten teamleaders (some of whom still carry caseloads).¹⁰ By the nature of the cases which were selected, we anticipated that we would be able to examine the full range of resources available to the service and the deployment of its energies and manpower.