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There were two keynote papers at the "Connections in Practice" Conference (in March 2000). One was Nick Child's The Potential of Systemic Practice. The conference was especially designed for sharing Family Therapy and Social Work ideas and practice. So the other plenary was from Bernadette Docherty, Senior Depute Director of Social Work, East Ayrshire Council, and Vice Convenor of the Child and Family Standing Committee of the Association of Directors of Social Work in Scotland. Bernadette worked for a decade in the then Motherwell-Clydesdale District for a decade. So she and Nick had had previous experience of teamwork across their respective agencies.

Holding the Line - Social Work Now

By Bernadette Dochery

This Conference is concerned with applying systemic ideas to every day practice. I want to consider first what we mean by systemic practice, look then at Social Work tasks and processes and how we use systemic practice and then consider this application in the wider context - for me a local authority, but equally applicable in an NHS Trust, Voluntary Organisation etc. So firstly:

I started my professional life as a Trainee Social Worker in 1975 and went to Glasgow University to do my Diploma in Social Work (the old one!) in 1976. There I learned the Pincus and Minahan approach to Social Work which specifically applied systems ideas. Simply put, people depended on systems in their immediate social environment for a satisfactory life so Social Work must focus on such systems. Pincus and Minahan argued that there were three kinds of systems which may help people:

• Informal or natural systems such as family, friends, the postman or fellow workers.
• Formal systems, such as community groups or trade unions.
• Societal systems, such as schools, hospitals.

It was argued that people with problems may not be able to use helping systems because:

• Such systems may not exist in their lives .
• People may not know about or wish to use them: for example, a child being abused by parents may not know where to go for help or be afraid.
• The system's policies may create new problems for users for example, dependency or conflicting interests
• Systems may conflict with one another.

Social Work it was argued, tries to see where elements in the interaction between clients and their environment are causing problems. Some of this made sense to me, particularly as someone who at 20 years of age as a Trainee Social Worker, working in Priesthill and Pollok, had already learned that many of my clients problems were caused by poverty and appalling housing.

But Pincus and Minahan went on to talk about change agent systems, client systems, target systems and action systems and it was at this point that I began to seriously lose the plot. I can remember the horror of trying to write an assignment where I was required to apply these terms to the people I was working with and the tasks I was undertaking. Somehow I managed to pass the assignment, heaved a huge sigh of relief and put systems theory thankfully to the very bottom of my Social Work toolkit.

But this was to do systemic thinking a serious dis-service because it missed the obvious advantages to us of thinking in this way. Key to systemic thinking is the fact that neither the client nor the environment is necessarily seen as having the problem, but it is the interaction between them which is difficult. The aim is to help people perform life tasks, alleviate their distress and achieve aims and value positions which are important to them. As Social Workers, we are involved in helping people to use and improve their own capacities to solve problems and help them build new connections with parts of the system which will help and support them to do so. This may involve helping them modify their interaction between other people and resource systems or giving them practical help to assist them to do so.

So what do we mean by thinking systemically. I found the material by Chris Payne in "Practising Social Work" by Christopher Hemvey and Terry Philpott, from 1994 very helpful. He argued that "thinking systemically" means that many influences that are not obviously included in an assessment of "problem" will be so. We need to be open to considering a range of influences in any situation - how the variables come together, what are the interconnections between the various "sub systems" for example, how does an individual's power or gender affect something, what helping systems are available - these may be different for different people within the system and harnessing them efficiently may be the key to progress with a particular problem. The key issue is that behaviour, events and social processes can't be understood fully in isolation but only in relation to one another. Systemic influences can be both direct and indirect. Connections may not be immediately apparent. Many influences on people's lives are hidden but can be identified when analysed systemically and their contribution properly assessed. Importantly, I think the idea that the sum total is greater than the individual parts helps us move away from pathological or individual theories of behaviour to multicausal explanations.

How does systemic thinking help us in our core tasks of assessment and intervention?

If we start with assessment - we need to begin by reaching an agreed understanding with the family or individual as to why we are involved. This usually involves us in gathering information about the family and their circumstances and some kind of understanding about the nature of the problem. We need to be able to identify and define the relevant social system, their boundaries and how well they're functioning.

• Looking at the individual, their self image, attitudes, values, beliefs about themselves and their world.
• Looking at the family, how it's functioning, what it contributes to the individual.
• Social networks, which define relationships with others, which support and assist or which deter and limit.
• Environmental systems, schools, community groups, peer groups at work.

Having gathered information, and this can be a complex process that takes time, we can begin to reach an early formulation of what the problem may be and seek to rehearse that with the family or individual and see if it begins to make sense and can be used as a basis for understanding the reason for intervention and seek people's agreement to participate.

Thereafter, work is done to further develop this understanding. Theories are developed and tested out, questions used to help formulate or change the hypothesis about what may be wrong. Time taken to clarify that all possible parts of the system which may be contributing to the issue have been analysed. Then we require to agree the aims and objectives of intervention, the nature of the problems already identified and an initial agreement reached on what should be done about them. There can be no assumption that the system which brings the problem to the worker is to be the major target for intervention, nor should there be any assumption about what action is the most appropriate to deal with the problem presented by the client. The appropriate action can be identified only after the target and goals for change have been identified.

If we apply this, for example, to the supervision of a child at home. We may need to think about effective measures for the care, protection, support, guidance, treatment or control of children living at home with their families dependent on the issues which have been identified as requiring remedial action. We have to help families identify these issues and then act possibly on a variety of fronts - to reduce offending behaviour, to address school related issues, to help integrate the child better into their community of to provide protective measures for the child if they are at risk of harm from their parents. This is a complex process that requires rigour in the assessment process and in the intervention phase.

One of the dangers of not thinking systemically is that we can miss very serious influences in people's lives and therefore fail to help achieve the change in their circumstances which may well be within their grasp. I can think of many examples from practice with which I have been involved.

• Very focused work on a school's contribution to a child's difficulties with a failure to also recognise the impact of his father's terminal illness.
• Work focused on a child's blindness, trying to improve resources and facilities available to help at a practical level but a failure to pick up a parent's abusive behaviour.
• Workers struggling to understand why Grandpa refused adamantly to move from deplorable family circumstances to a lovely residential unit - failing to see his role in protecting his grandson from abuse by a stepfather.

Thinking systemically and recognising the contribution of social systems and environments to people's circumstances, feels particularly important to me, as I believe Social Work has moved in a particular direction, primarily through the 80's and early 90's. Ideological pressure from the right has seen much more emphasis on individual responsibility for circumstances. There was a refusal during the years of the last Government to acknowledge the contribution of poverty to ill-health or the importance of housing conditions and poverty in children's attainment. There has been a reduction in a welfare approach to people's difficulties, towards a more managerial and procedural approach. A move away from the welfare needs of the individual towards a social policing role. Mainstream Social Work has been in danger of becoming conservative, procedural and managerial, helping individuals survive rather than society to change. However, we do live in changing times. This government has stated that its key priority is Social Inclusion. The Prime Minister gave us his definition of Social Inclusion as "a shorthand label for what can happen when individuals or areas suffer from a combination of linked problems such as unemployment, poor skills, low incomes, poor housing, high crime environments, bad health and family breakdowns."

In many ways for those of us in Social Work, this equates with our value position in seeking equal opportunities, anti-oppressive and anti-discriminatory practice. I think a systems approach helps us by offering a way of analysing and thinking through these issues and identifying strategies for action. As Social Workers we know the children who are born to be socially excluded, we know the difficulties for people affected by disability and denied full participation in our society because of the impact that a range of different systems issues have in their lives.

This work is very complex, we need time to reflect on people's circumstances, we need to be alert to a range of different possible contributions to their lives, we need time to help them think through this, these are complex ideas, we are dealing with complex situations. Workers need the opportunity to reflect on and understand what's happening in people's lives. To assist in this process, they need a high standard of professional supervision and consultation. This also needs to operate across professional boundaries. Lord Clyde recognised the importance of this in the Orkney Report, workers need assistance to identify the range of factors at play in someone's life, need assistance to analyse the contribution of each and assistance to remain objective in analysing the information available. We need to keep all parts of the system under review constantly because it is when we fail to do that that things go wrong.

I think these are very important messages for Social Work just now.

• Resource shortfall is resulting in workers having less time to be reflective practitioners and less time for Team Leaders to be offering constructive, challenging, professional supervision and consultation. Why is it that the supervision session is always the first thing to get cancelled when life becomes too pressurised - it's exactly at that time that it's needed most. We know this in Social Work, yet sometimes we don't manage to hold on to these self evident truths.
• We need to create professional support systems around us which allow us to be thoughtful and reflective. This actually is an efficient, not luxurious, use of time as it ensures we full understand a situation early on in our work and plan our intervention accordingly, in a systematic, well ordered way. This is clearly preferable to the "headless chicken" scenarios we are all too familiar with.
• Staff need to work within a management environment that supports this way of working.

Another important concept to emerge from systemic thinking is the professional as a change agent working within a change agent system. We are not, most of us, detached professionals, we work ourselves within a system which influences our efforts for good or ill. Resources available or policies we're expected to pursue all may become factors in our being able to positively assist achieve change. I think this emphasises our duty to influence our organisations. We have personal responsibility and we also have personal power through our knowledge and experience. We have to take seriously our responsibilities to develop our organisations in a positive way, no matter where we are located within the organisation. As a senior manager, I need to know and understand the impact that certain decisions or policies may be having down the line. If I don't know I can't take amending action. Equally at a senior management level, I am also using systemic thinking to affect the organisation of the Council at a macro and strategic level and rely on frontline operational information to assist me to do that:

• Are the alternatives to exclusion practices of the Council working?
• What is the impact of Council policy in relation to the eviction of drug offenders on children and social workers working with them?
• I need to work with senior officials of other departments and agencies to help them understand how actions they take in one part of the system has a knock-on effect elsewhere and assist the Council develop policies and practice which are fully informed by careful analysis.

Systematic thinking in my everyday practice should assist in doing this.

The purpose of this conference is to consider systemic approaches within mainstream settings. The emphasis of my input to the day is that thinking systemically is what social work brings to virtually all those situations with which we deal. We consistently see the whole child, not just the truanting or offending. We see the whole adult, not just the disability. The fact that we have been trained to think in this way and to be alert to what we bring as individuals to the situations - our values, prejudices, hopes and fears - is what makes social workers unique - certainly within local government public services and probably beyond. Local government social work services are the front line service for most disadvantaged people who need assistance to effect change in their lives. We should value that unique contribution and the assistance we are able to offer vulnerable people. We should ensure that we take seriously responsibilities to ourselves as human beings, as professional workers and to our organisations.

nick.child@virgin.net