Introduction

Cuts to services across health, social care and education have embodied de-professionalisation in terms of reducing the number, type and range of professional staff employed: for example, fewer qualified teachers employed in free schools, more use made of teaching assistants; more health support workers as opposed to fully-trained nurses employed in both hospital and community settings (Siddique, 2015). The impact of service cuts has resulted in reduced professional influence, for example by curtailing local authority responsibilities in relation to child protection, children in need, care leavers and disabled children. Professional influence can be removed further following a children's social care policy objective that places greater reliance on the need to strengthen capacity for developing local authority adoption services and uses new and enhanced powers of an Ofsted inspection regime to regulate child and adult care homes. This model of working appears to value disproportionately the idea of having in post an effective manager over and above any results achieved from the one-to-one intervention of single professionals. There is ample evidence that service cuts have been shaped by an ideological adherence to managerialist methods (see, for example, Rogowski, 2016). De-professionalisation as a consequence of managerialism has become evident in the process of carrying out legal aid work, an activity protected not only for the highest priority cases and that increasingly uses para-legal staff rather than social welfare lawyers. A priority case is defined as ‘where there is a risk of serious physical harm or loss of home, or where children may be removed from a family’ (Howard, 2016: 20). Within local authority child protection services it is clear that, partly owing to the number of Sure Start children's centre closures, there has been a soaring number of children being removed from their families and placed in care.

Because of the dominant market ideology, National Health Service (NHS) services and assets, including blood supplies, nurses and other care professionals, scanning and diagnostic services, ambulances, care homes, hospital beds and buildings – which the British public own – are being handed over to British and foreign private companies. Privatised services cost the NHS and taxpayer far more than a publicly owned and publicly run NHS.