Defective social arrangements are why I am a social worker

Two words, both wrong

My colleagues have two words for me. One is robot. The other is wunderkind. Both are meant kindly, and both describe the output rather than the reason; that is how I ended up writing this.

I am a social worker. Not as a first training I later grew out of, but as the first principle, with everything else downstream of it. People who meet the evaluation work or the data work first tend to file me somewhere near analytics, and then seem surprised that I care what a finding does to the person it describes. The order matters. The social work is not a softer layer laid over the technical work; it is what the technical work is for.

A place for the umbrella

There is a place for a social worker to hold an umbrella over someone on a rainy day. I love being that person, and I don't intend to stop.

I grew up in the Nova Scotia child welfare system as a permanent ward; the system I now evaluate is the one that raised me. I am not telling you that so you will read the rest of this differently. I am telling you because it is the part of my training nobody assessed, and because a claim about how a system treats people is worth more when the person making it has been on both ends of it.

What has changed across fifteen years is not the wish. It is that I can now also see where the rain comes from, and I have the training to demonstrate it rather than assert it. Those are two different jobs and I am unwilling to give up either.

One sentence, never improved on

Structural social work handed me a sentence I have never improved on.

People receive, through no fault of their own, the results of defective social arrangements.

That is Robert Mullaly's formulation of an approach Maurice Moreau developed into its Canadian form at Carleton, which is where it reached me.

Look at what the sentence does. It moves the defect off the person and into the arrangement, and an arrangement is a thing you can go and inspect. A person is not a problem to be solved; an eligibility rule is. That single relocation is most of my practice, and it has the considerable advantage of being testable. You can read the rule. You can find out when it was written, and what it assumed about the life of the person it would land on.

My honours paper was about young people ageing out of the Nova Scotia child welfare system. The finding that stayed with me was not about them at all. It was that the province mandated exactly one aftercare service, an educational bursary, and that qualifying for it required a full course load, an eighty percent pass rate and an annual cash contribution from people who had recently been informed they were on their own. The rule was the defect; nothing about the young people required explaining.

The purpose of the training

Evaluation, implementation science, change adoption, statistics, data architecture. These get read as a second career sitting oddly beside the first. They are not a second anything; they are four ways of inspecting an arrangement.

• Evaluation asks whether a thing does what it claims.
• Implementation science asks whether it survives contact with a real team on a Tuesday, which is a different question and usually the harder one.
• Change adoption asks whether the team could carry it at all. I work from ADKAR, and I take the awareness and desire stages as seriously as the training plan, because a service that nobody wanted has already failed and the launch date won't rescue it.
• The data work asks whether the arrangement is visible at all.

That fourth one is the newest, and it comes straight out of that same 2017 paper. I went looking for what happened to young people after they left care in Nova Scotia and could not find it, because it is not collected. What I wrote then was that a programme with no publicly accessible information is almost as though it does not exist. I still think that; I now think the claim generalises, because what a system declines to publish is a fair description of what it has decided not to be accountable for.

One practice, not three parts

This is the part people ask about, and it usually comes out as surprise that a social work degree led here. It is the wrong surprise. The degree was never only the room with the two chairs in it; a great deal of social work happens behind the service rather than at the front of it. Designing the programme. Writing the policy and the procedure that decide who is eligible and on what evidence. Building the indicators. Running the analysis, and being the person in the room who can say what the analysis is not entitled to claim. That is the work the training prepared me for, and a data warehouse is one of its tools rather than a departure from it.

Because the argument doesn't work without it. If you claim a gap belongs to a system rather than to a population, sooner or later somebody reasonable will ask you to prove it, and you need a denominator you did not author. Determinants of health give me one. So does a policy manual, and so does a published eligibility rule. The measurement is not a departure from the dignity-first position; it is the only thing that keeps that position from being an opinion.

And it runs the other way too. Statistics without the social work produces the tidy, confident report that describes a population by everything it lacks, hands a decision-maker a number, and quietly makes things worse for the people counted. I have read many of those; I have probably written one. The training that stops me is not statistical.

The defect was never the person.

The umbrella, still

I want to be clear about what I am not saying. I am not saying I graduated from the umbrella into something more important. Holding it is not a junior version of this work; on a bad day it is the whole of it, and I would take that shift tomorrow.

What I have found is that my particular mix lets me do both. I can sit with one person on the worst afternoon of their year, and I can also go and read the rule that made the afternoon likely, and build the evidence that gets the rule changed for the next several thousand people who will never know my name. Most days I would rather be trusted with the first; the second is what I can offer that is rarer.

Neither of those is a robot. Both of them are a social worker.