Introduction

Big claims have sometimes been made for social work. For example, leading up to the creation of large local authority social services departments in the UK in the early 1970s, it was suggested that it could have a major impact on poverty (Seebohm 1968). In the event, instead of the community-based, family social work that was hoped for, these hierarchical departments marked the beginning of the large-scale bureaucratisation of local state social work which has accelerated under the political New Right and neoliberal politics that have dominated in the intervening years. In England and Wales, we now have state social work that is tightly regulated and shaped by central government, where, as numerous reports have testified, the day to day social work task is dictated more by ‘the bottom line’ and the managerialist surveillance of social workers than by any independent social work values, ethics or discretion (Social Work Task Force 2009).

During this period social work has essentially been a marginalised and residual service, working primarily and often only with people seen as the most disadvantaged and marginalised. In their efforts to demonstrate the specific and unique role and tasks of social work, unintentionally or otherwise, policy makers and formal social work leaders have tended to emphasise its specific and control functions (Beresford 2007). While many of social work's formal leaders seem to have both advanced and supported this view of the profession, the aim of this discussion is to look more carefully at the assumptions that this is based upon and to critique how helpful they may be to social work, service users and the rest of us for the future.

In some ways my focus here is a simple, straightforward one, reflected in the title of this chapter: ‘Social Work by and for All’. Starting with this premise, the importance of an inclusive, mainstream social work, I want to identify some of the principles which I believe underpin all that is best about social work and which offer us a helpful route map for the future, as well as looking at more problematic principles that have long troubled social work. But first, back to what I called my simple focus.