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Plowden (1967) Notes on the text Volume 1 (page numbers in brackets) Preliminary pages (i-xxii)
Part 1 Introduction
Part 2 The growth of the child
Part 3 The home, school and neighbourhood
Part 4 The structure of primary education
Part 5 The children in the schools: curriculum and internal organisation
Part 6 The adults in the schools
Part 7 Independent schools
Part 8 Primary school buildings and equipment; status; and research
Part 9 Conclusions and recommendations
Notes (486-495)
Research and Surveys about Plowden |
The Plowden Report (1967)
A Report of the Central Advisory Council for Education (England) London: Her Majesty's Stationery Office 1967
[page 75] 200. The scale and character of the work done for families by the social services vary widely. Virtually all families with school children use the services of doctors, dentists and the schools; the great majority attend welfare clinics and are called upon by health visitors. Fewer have contact with educational welfare officers or have to rely at some time on the National Assistance Board. Even fewer seek the help of Children's Departments and Child Guidance Clinics (1). Social work and psychological services are of great importance to the small minorities with whom they deal but also have considerable general influence. 201. *This chapter deals with these social services and with the links between these services and the schools. A large part of this field is now being studied by a Committee (appointed jointly, on 20 December 1965, by the Home Secretary, the Secretary of State for Education and Science, the Minister of Housing and Local Government and the Minister of Health) 'to review the organisation and responsibilities of the local authority personal social services in England and Wales, and to consider what changes are desirable to secure an effective family service'. This Committee is making a more extensive study of the personal social services than we have attempted but we hope our own analysis, conducted from the standpoint of those concerned with the primary schools, will prove helpful to it. Much of what we have to say here concerns only the minority of children in need of special help. The Health of the School Child 202. The improvement in the health of young children during the last thirty-five years has been tremendous. They are on the average taller. Routine medical examinations in 1965 showed that the general physical condition of more than ninety nine per cent of those examined was satisfactory. Their teeth are beginning to be better cared for; and the incidence of skin diseases has been greatly reduced. The number of children treated for scabies, ringworm or impetigo fell from some 115,000 in 1947 to about 12,000 in 1963. Despite an increase in the school population of nearly two million the number *The main sources of our evidence are listed at the end of this chapter. But we must here acknowledge our debts to a series of government committees - particularly to the Younghusband (2), Ingleby (3) and Kilbrandon (4) Committees - to various professional, interprofessional and administrative bodies (5, 6, 7, 8) which presented evidence to us, to the Home Office, and to the County Borough of Preston - whose staff prepared evidence (9) for us and invited us to attend discussions with head teachers and social workers. We are especially indebted, however, to research workers from three universities who agreed at short notice to make special studies in three local areas, and to the chief education officers, teachers and social service staff whose help made the research possible. A summary of the three studies appears as Appendix 8 of our Report. We also had access to an earlier study, dealing with similar questions in a fourth area, made by Mrs Margot Jeffreys and since published under the title 'An Anatomy of Social Welfare Services'. The health services are dealt with at greater length in Appendix 2. [page 76] of deaths of school children between the ages of 5 and 14 fell from 11,813 in 1931 to 2,437 in 1963 (see Table 3). The reduction in the number of deaths from diphtheria, tuberculosis and poliomyelitis has been especially marked - 1,744 children died from tuberculosis and 1,344 from diptheria in 1931; the corresponding figures for 1963 were ten and nil. Measles is now the only serious infectious disease which attacks young children on a large scale. In 1963, for instance, 200,705 school children caught the infection of whom 29 died. Otherwise, the infections from which school children suffer are now chiefly respiratory or gastro-intestinal and the great majority of the other ailments which come to light in routine medical inspections in schools are developmental. The School Health and Dental Service and the Health Visitors 203. Close attention is generally given to mothers and their babies during the weeks immediately before and after childbirth. Until children enter school or nursery, the initiative for further contacts with the health services is taken either by parents or by health visitors who select for special attention those few families who need it. All children are medically examined when they enter school, and further examinations generally take place at the end of both primary and secondary education. Most mothers attend their child's medical examinations. Children are also examined and treated by the school dental service. Table 3 Main Causes and Numbers of Deaths in Children Under 15 (with percentages of total deaths in brackets) 1931 and 1963
[page 77] 204. In 1963 there were over 7,400 school nurses (equivalent to 2,667 full-timers) of whom nearly 6,000 held health visitors' certificates (10). Health visitors are state registered nurses with obstetrical experience who take an additional year of study leading to the Certificate of the Council for the Training of Health Visitors. Their training emphasises the social environment of the individual, his mental and physical development at all ages, and the wide range of advice the health visitor can offer (11). Many health visitors are not school nurses, but the majority of school nurses are health visitors. This combination of functions helps them to fulfil the intentions of a Ministry of Health Circular which urged that the 'sphere of work of the health visitor should be broadly based and should extend to the whole family. They will be in touch with most families where there are children'. In many areas they provide a unified service for people of all ages, although most of their work is with children under five. Some local health authorities are introducing schemes whereby health visitors are attached to general practice. The health visitors carry out their usual duties but with the families on the general practitioner's list instead of those in a limited geographical area. 205. In 1963 there were 2,521 doctors employed in the school health service (a full-time equivalent of 982) of whom 623 (103 full-time equivalent) were also general practitioners or married women employed part-time. Of the 1,900 employed by local authorities, 1,700 work both in the school health and in the public health services (12). The schools can seek the advice of medical officers and nurses about behaviour problems as well as more strictly medical problems, and children may then be referred to other social services. 206. The improvement in the health of school children is not wholly attributable to the better care provided by the health services, important though that is. Much is due to general advances in medicine, to a more rigorous practice of immunisation and to the improvements in diet and hygiene which have resulted from a general rise in the standard of living. Nevertheless, the continued existence of malnutrition, and the fact that more than 300,000 children are still given free meals, show that much poverty still persists. It seems from our surveys that the schools themselves consider the School Health Service to be highly successful. Its job is widely understood and accepted. Its staff is highly trained, even though some, like the school doctors, have no special preparation for work with school children. Its responsibility, much more advisory then therapeutic, is to ensure that children function normally and live and grow in harmony with their environment. It is primarily a preventive service, and it does not compete with the general practitioners or hospital services. In its early years the service was preoccupied with arranging treatment that could be found nowhere else. Since the war, however, general improvements in the health of school children and the development of the National Health Service have enabled the School Health Service to give more of its attention to normal and handicapped children and less to the treatment of the diseases of childhood. Yet it must evolve more effective means for identifying early and helping the handicapped and those subject to special risks. 207. The School Health Service is now establishing closer links with other branches of the health services. There is an almost complete integration between the local public health and school health service in all but two local authorities. The combination of the functions of school nurses and health [page 78] visitors, the attachment of health visitors to general practice, and the employment of general practitioners as part-time school medical officers, are all developments which are being encouraged. Although slow progress is being made in forging links between the School Health Service and the hospital paediatrics services, much remains to be done in this direction. Links with non-medical services are likewise a cause of concern. The members of a group practice who serve part-time in the School Medical Service and have a health visitor and, as in a few experimental cases, a social worker attached to them, are in a good position to know which families are likely to need help for their children and to keep in touch with the teachers and social workers who may be dealing with them. But such arrangements are exceedingly rare. Medical Examinations 208. To enable school doctors to give the best service they can, the system of routine medical inspections must be further modified. Thirty years ago doctors began to question whether a superficial inspection of large numbers of normal healthy children made the best use of their skill. After the issue of the 1953 School Health Service and Handicapped Pupils Regulations more thorough examinations of selected children in some areas has taken the place of medical inspections of children of 10 to 12. By 1964 more than a third of the education authorities had adopted systems of this kind. A variety of selection methods have been used, including questionnaires completed by parents and teachers, special requests by teachers and health visitors for examination of children known to be causing concern at home or in school, and scrutiny of attendance registers. Where these methods have been introduced carefully and with conviction, parents, teachers and doctors have welcomed them. Often they have meant that school doctors visit schools more frequently and communication between teachers and doctors has improved. The implications are wide, for they illustrate how one service can be improved by closer collaboration and a freer interchange of information with other services, and how scarce professional staff may be more efficiently used. 209. Further points call for attention. Information collected by health visitors, clinics and the School Health Service could be used to warn other medical and social workers of families in danger arising from social circumstances. The information should be treated as confidential and be given only to those who are likely to deal directly with a family. Facts disclosed by parents ought not to be passed on to other social departments without parental consent except in special circumstances and then only after discussion with a parent. These families could be helped, and in time. Records should contain perinatal information, evidence from medical development tests of potential disorders, and information furnished by other social services. This information should go forward with the child, forming the basis of later developmental and selective medical examinations, and prove useful if social work or other help is called for. All children should, if possible, be examined before they start school: legislation may be needed for this. The first examination should be concentrated on the assessment of development as well as of other medical conditions, and it should take place a few months before entry to school so that decisions about part-time or delayed entry can be taken in [page 79] appropriate cases. Later examinations can then be limited to children shown to need them by 'screening' procedures. 210. Too many children still arrive at school in need of treatment. There are areas in which this is true of 14 per cent of the children. Of this number, between 20 and 50 per cent have not been treated (13). It is upon these children and those whose family and social circumstances give cause for concern that attention should be concentrated. If our proposals for nursery education are accepted, the school health service will have access to many more children between the ages of three and five. Our concern, however, is not simply to provide more medical inspections but to make better use of the resources available, and to ensure that more selective information is secured and more effectively used by all those who can help children and their families. Meanwhile it must be remembered that serious gaps remain to be filled in the more specialised branches of the health services. More dentists have been recruited in recent years and some school dental services are now fully manned, but others, in the North, Midland and Eastern regions, are still seriously under- staffed (14). Child Guidance, School Psychological, and Speech Therapy Services 211. The child guidance clinics and the school psychological service, which are at present the subject of enquiry by a departmental committee, are of fairly recent origin. Their growth has been hampered by an acute shortage of staff. They are more fully developed in the south and south-east than in the north. The Underwood Committee, reporting in 1955, recommended a growth in child guidance services which would by 1965 have called for a full-time equivalent of 140 psychiatrists, 280 educational psychologists and 420 psychiatric social workers. These were regarded as realistic interim objectives. By 1965 the child guidance services of local education authorities were still manned by a full-time equivalent of only 101 psychiatrists, 151 educational psychologists (the full-time equivalent of a further 172 were working in the school psychological service) and 140 psychiatric social workers - less than half the total recommended strength overall - and only a third of the required psychiatric social workers. 212. The school psychological service has a variety of functions. The educational psychologist may be asked to advise on the way in which children should be allocated at the age of 11 to the various types of secondary school. It is common for teachers to seek his advice if they are concerned about the academic progress of an individual child, and he may help them in remedial work with slow learning children in ordinary schools. He is frequently called upon to identify and assess those children who may need special educational treatment. He can also give parents and teachers a fuller understanding of the needs of children and an appreciation of the range of behaviour that may properly be regarded as normal, so that they can distinguish between minor difficulties which are incidental to growth and those for which outside help may be needed. He can often help the teacher to deal with the puzzling behaviour of emotionally disturbed children. In many areas the educational psychologist is also a member of the child guidance team. Joint appointment to those two services forms a valuable link between the schools and the child guidance clinic. [page 80] 213. It is rare, however, for child guidance clinics to be able to spend time on the problems of very backward children. The reason lies in their long waiting lists. There is a disturbing amount of maladjustment and unsettled behaviour among the very backward, who may not be given sufficient support and positive guidance, even when placed in special schools. Fortunately many primary schools are able to help children who are slightly maladjusted. They need not, therefore, be removed from their normal environment. 214. Speech therapists provide another relatively small, but vital, service that cannot be adequately developed owing to staff shortages. Some studies have suggested that there should be one therapist for every 10,000-12,000 children in the population. This would give a city the size of Birmingham an establishment of 18; but the approved establishment in that city is now 13 and owing to staff shortages and high turnover the number actually in post early in 1966 fell to two. The speech therapists' professional association carried out a survey during the previous year from which they concluded that about 37 per cent of the established posts were unfilled. Recommendations 215. We now sum up our main recommendations about the school health services and their connections with other branches of the social services. (i) All children should be examined before entry to school for the purpose of assessing their developmental and medical needs.The Education Welfare Officers 216. The number of education welfare officers, and their distribution between different authorities are not known with certainty, but in 1964 there were about 2,000 in England, distributed unevenly amongst 129 local education authorities. A survey of 55 County Boroughs made in that year by the National Association of Chief Education Welfare Officers showed that the average number of pupils to each officer was about 3,000, but it ranged from [page 81] 2,000 pupils in one authority to over 6,000 in another (15). In 16 counties the average number of pupils to each officer was larger, about 4,000, and the range wider from just over 2,000 an officer to 7,500. The service is staffed almost entirely by men. Many of them are in their forties or fifties, and they have a lower rate of turnover than most groups of social workers. 217. The role of the education welfare officers is described in the evidence presented by their own Association as follows: 218. The greater part of their time is spent on school attendance work and routine enquiries, although in one of the local authorities studied the officers thought that absence or truancy was the main problem in slightly less than half their cases. The rest of their work with primary school children is mainly concerned with free meals and clothing, keeping track of changes in the child population of their areas and following up children with verminous conditions. While most authorities employ an all-purpose body of education welfare officers, some still divide this work between attendance officers and a smaller group of welfare officers concerned with special types of case. 219. Most of the education welfare officers' work is concentrated on children of compulsory school age, and particularly on those in secondary schools where most attendance problems are found. In some areas they deal with children below school age, assisting with welfare work, or even with the identification of children requiring medical examination. But the responsibility of the local authorities for children under the age of five rests mainly with the health visitors. 220. A new Certificate in Education Welfare has recently been established to be awarded after examination by the Local Government Examinations Board. Those who possess this certificate will be accepted for salary purposes as falling within the administrative, professional and technical divisions of local government service instead of the miscellaneous category. In 1964 (16) the great majority of education welfare officers held no formal qualifications, though 30 of the membership of 1,200 held a university certificate, diploma or degree in the social sciences and over 300 had begun studying for the Certificate in Education Welfare, an impressive response to the introduction of the new certificate. The fact that this is largely a correspondence course inevitably limits its value for so personal a service as welfare work; but there can be no doubt of the demand for training. The Child Care and Probation Services 221. The children's departments of the local authorities were set up in 1948 to care for children deprived of a normal home life. But in the course of time they have been drawn increasingly into helping families whose children are [page 82] living at home. This development has been encouraged by recent legislation - particularly the Children and Young Persons Act of 1963. The Ingleby Report (17), calling for more effective 'prevention of suffering of children through neglect in their own homes', the recent White Paper on 'The Child, the Family and the Young Offender' (18), which proposes for discussion the establishment of Family Councils in which social workers of the children's service and other persons would play a central part, and the enquiry now being carried out by the Seebohm Committee may all foreshadow further developments that may eventually lead to the creation of a more comprehensive social work service. Its relation to the schools will be important. The children's departments and their responsibilities are now in a state of rapid but uneven development. In some more than half the children currently being helped are living in their own homes and are not technically 'in care' of the authority. The great majority of the children in their care may be living in foster homes or in small family group homes, attending the local schools. Some juvenile courts are making less use of approved schools and commit children instead to the care of the children's authority which is entitled to arrange any appropriate form of supervised care. But in other places the work of these departments still does not extend far beyond caring for deprived children for whom no other arrangement can be made. 222. The probation service has always devoted much of its efforts to the welfare of children appearing before the courts, and to families who seek its help without coming through the courts. But probation officers are more often concerned with secondary school children, amongst whom delinquency and school attendance problems are more common, than with younger children. Their new obligations for aftercare of discharged prisoners may further increase the proportion of their work with adults, but their concern for the family situation of those whom they help will always bring them into contact with children of primary school age. 223. The demands on the child care and probation services have been continuously growing in recent years and, although many more training courses, including in-service training courses, have been introduced with support from the Home Office, many of their staff do not have a recognised professional training. Nearly a third of the 2,150 child care officers and two-thirds of the 2,319 probation officers in post in 1965 had completed professional courses of various kinds. Over a fifth of the probation officers have gained a professional qualification after taking a university course in the social sciences. Others, about 28 per cent of child care officers and four per cent of probation officers. have university qualifications in the social sciences which provide some preparation for their work without amounting to a professional qualification. Voluntary Services 224. Voluntary organisations dealing with primary school children provide services of many kinds and much of this work is exceedingly valuable, as is shown by the studies described in Appendix 8. In some cases these organisations have been employed by the local authorities on an agency basis. Social Work and Related Services 225. There is no agreed or simple definition of the human needs to be met by the social work services. Schools in two of our local studies (see Appendix [page 83] 8) produced 'welfare sub samples' of seven per cent and three per cent of all children. In the third study, two areas of one large city (both mainly working class in composition, though one was in a suburban district and the other an old and cramped central area) produced 'welfare samples' respectively of eight per cent and 21 per cent of all children. These wide divergences are not wholly explained by variations in types of area or by differences in the definition of 'welfare cases'. They result partly from variations in the demands made upon the services, in the connections formed between different services and in the generosity of provision. 226. We believe the demands made upon the services will increase during the next decade. They will certainly change. There will be more children. More children needing the help of social workers now remain in the ordinary schools, living in their own homes or in foster homes. More and more families move house as fathers go to new jobs and as towns are expanding and partly as, at last, the slums are being pulled down. Some move because they want to; some are forced to go. Most will benefit, but sometimes there will be serious problems for families who will lack the support of relatives and old friends in times of difficulty. There are many immigrant families fresh to this country. Many of them have special problems. Meanwhile, public understanding of the social services and public sensitivity to the needs they meet are likely to increase, bringing more insistent demands for service. 227. The most striking shortages in the services we have examined are probably to be found in the child guidance service. In one of our local studies it was found that the work of the child guidance clinic was hamstrung for lack of a consultant psychiatrist. The service, which had only been established a few years earlier, was concentrating mainly on the primary schools (19). In another of the areas studied, the psychiatric time available was thought by one of the consultant psychiatrists to be one third of that required for the number of children sent to the clinic. Things are now slightly better, but the less serious cases still have to wait up to ten months for an appointment (20). Because the clinic's work was concentrated on a few difficult cases the expert knowledge of its staff was not generally available to other social workers in the district. We also think that clinics sometimes concentrate their efforts on the families from whom most co-operation can be expected since co-operation is essential for successful treatment. They are not necessarily those whose need is greatest, and it may be that the children of unskilled workers, for instance, get less help than they should. In BP Davies's study of county boroughs (Appendix 14) the ratio of Child Guidance staff to pupils tended to be slightly lower in authorities where families were large and houses more crowded. Organisation and Deployment of Services 228. We were unable to make a detailed study of the deployment of trained manpower within the social services, but it is clear that not all is well. Since they are likely to be short of staff for many years to come, the few trained workers must be efficiently used. This is difficult to secure as long as the social services dealing with the family remain separate and independent of one another. Trained workers cannot be deployed or re-deployed to meet [page 84] changing needs. Staff difficulties are made worse by the inadequacy of office facilities and clerical assistance - a point made in the Younghusband Report (21) and by the education welfare officers in their evidence to us (22). The efficiency of some services is hampered by a lack of agreement about their functions. There are signs that the education welfare officers suffer in this way. Census work must be kept up to date by the education department, but it is not a task for which a social work training is required. The welfare officers, for example, now have to do a great deal of routine work, of which some is unnecessary and some should be regarded as purely clerical. School attendance work is bound to take time, although more of it might be done from school or education office by correspondence and, eventually, by telephone. The investigation of children's absences from school is an importance matter; but most primary school children who are not at school are in fact ill. In one area the welfare officers found that this was the explanation in three quarters of the cases they investigated. Many of these visits were clearly a waste of time. Welfare officers should be enabled to concentrate on the real problem cases and have time to give them the benefit of general case work. If some of the welfare officers are to carry increasing responsibilities for social work, and we think they should after training, a distinction must be made between their welfare duties and the administrative work which ought to be done by others. 229. We have been told of the skill of psychiatric social workers, the combination of disciplines brought together in the clinics where they work, and the devotion and enthusiasm of these teams. But while the child guidance clinic was a natural base for these workers between the wars, when this branch of the profession was new and not widely understood, the current demand for their services may not justify their concentration in these clinics. Concentration need not mean isolation but it sometimes does. Increasingly psychiatric social workers are able to carry their influence outside the clinics to other social workers, to health visitors and to teachers. And, of course, many are now employed altogether outside the clinics and outside the educational service too. It may well be that some should work more in direct connection with the schools rather than in child guidance clinics. Co-ordination 230. Many problems affecting families with young children, though infinitely varied in detail, are fundamentally similar and call for similar qualities among those helping the families. Where, when and from whom the help comes often depends on the relative strengths of local services, their relations with one another and with the public, and on pure chance. For example, a disturbed and difficult child may be referred to the Child Guidance Clinic, especially if his parents can travel there regularly, and keep and effectively use the clinic's appointments. Alternatively his poor attendance at school may bring in the education welfare officer as the principal worker involved. But if the child appears in court, the probation officer may become responsible or the child may be placed under the supervision of a child care officer. Later he may be committed to an approved school or to the care of the children's department. But the right solution might have been to diagnose maladjustment or subnormality, to provide special educational treatment and so to avoid the sequence of failures. It is possible, too, that none of these services would have [page 85] been involved if a teacher had noticed that the child had special problems and gone out of his way to help at a sufficiently early stage. 231. Co-ordination is not simply an administrative or procedural problem. It demands a reappraisal of family needs and of the skills required to help those in difficulty. It requires a greater measure of training common to all the services. We should above all be suspicious of any tendency to set up yet further services which will complicate the issue, create more joints in the communication system through which leakages can occur and generally dissipate energy and effort. 232. While the education welfare officers say in their evidence to us that they work closely with other agencies, they also complain (23) that others neglect them, and that teachers and education officers sometimes fail to understand their role. Health visitors (24) give evidence of the need for improved connections between the social services affecting the primary schools, and one of our own studies (25) strongly implies that health visitors themselves are sometimes unwilling to make contact with social workers. The Younghusband Report, whilst concluding that a 'multiplicity of visitors' was not a serious problem, recognised that social service staff often fail to understand each other's functions. The Ingleby Report (26) made much the same point. 233. Co-ordination can take place at two levels. Meetings of heads of departments or their senior staff can deal with the general development of services and policies. Meetings of field workers can deal with the needs of individual families, avoid overlapping or conflicting activities, clarify their joint aims and exchange information. Their meetings should be regarded as 'case conferences' rather than 'co-ordinating committee's'. Most authorities have both kinds of procedure. In the three authorities we studied there were committees which were concerned with individual problems and difficult cases rather than with the general co-ordination of departmental policies. Such conferences can only deal with a small minority of cases. If too much reliance is placed on them, poor team work affecting a much larger number of cases may be concealed or perpetuated. Often one person should have primary responsibility for each child or family needing help, and it should be his duty to see that other agencies and workers are called in when required. A major reappraisal of personal services dealing with families made in one of the areas we studied has shown that the present structure of the social services cannot be radically changed without legislation. The education committee, the health committee, the children's committee, the probation service and other bodies cannot shed or share their legal responsibilities. Thus although co-ordination can and should be improved it cannot provide a complete solution to the problems we have discussed. Training and Recruitment 234. The social services will be short of staff for a long time to come, but they could do more to help themselves. The new Council for Training in Social Work, the colleges working with it, and the National Institute for Social Work Training have already gained valuable experience in organising new forms of training. The Central Training Council in Child Care sponsors a wide variety of training courses aimed at encouraging every type of recruitment into the children's service. They, and the health and welfare departments [page 86] of the local authorities, have found that the provision of courses and the requirement of qualifications do not deter recruits but encourage them. The education welfare officers are a natural source of recruits for some forms of social work training and, once trained, they are unlikely to leave social work. Other sources of recruitment might also be found if the social services generally were as energetic as some education authorities have been. Late entrants to the profession must be encouraged. Married women, both trained and in need of training, are available and should be offered suitable working hours. The Schools and the Social Services 235. Relations between the schools and the social services should be improved. First, there is the problem of the teachers' own knowledge - their capacity to identify social problems and to be aware of the services available to help children. Secondly, there are problems of communication between the schools and other services - the ability and willingness to keep each other adequately informed. Thirdly, there is the broader problem of the schools' contacts with their pupils' homes - a question of the teachers' understanding of what goes on at home which we have discussed in Chapter 4. 236. Nearly half the teachers in two of the three areas studied said either that they could not remember receiving any systematic instruction about the social services during their training or that they would have liked more. Head teachers in the third area said it was difficult to pick up this kind of knowledge on the job. It was when they became heads that many of them realised how much they had to learn about the social services. Social workers probably get equally little instruction about the part played by the school in the life and development of children. 237. 'Welfare cases' are generally handled by the head teacher. Class teachers have little contact with social workers and depend on the head for information about pupils who are being helped by outside agencies. But the head teacher himself is not always kept informed. Of 39 children in one of our samples (27) who were being helped by child care officers, only ten were discussed with teachers by the officers concerned. Sometimes there is no need for such discussion, but where social workers have assumed a large part of the responsibility normally borne by parents we would expect them to see the child's teachers from time to time. 238. Although a teacher may be the first person outside the child's home and immediate neighbourhood to know of difficulties he is experiencing, we do not believe this occurs very often when the difficulties are severe. We found in our own studies that other agencies were already in touch with the majority of children for whom the schools sought outside help - particularly where children's problems were serious. But teachers can often help others who are working with their pupils, and can learn a great deal about the children and their needs in return. There is, of course, a limit to the time and energy teachers can devote to these contacts but especially, although not only, in the deprived areas they should be helped to learn more about the home background of their pupils and to make closer contacts with parents. The fact that teachers and social workers have a different outlook on the problems of the children they are both helping can itself be an advantage. What the schools [page 87] need is a readily available social worker whom they know and trust, and who can act quickly. Through day to day contact, the most can be made of teachers' understanding of children. Teachers can become more perceptive and knowledgeable and the right action is more likely to be taken promptly by all concerned. Social workers collaborating closely with the schools will not restrict the teachers' responsibilities but enable them more effectively to do their own work which includes some welfare work of a less general kind. 239. There has, to date, been no official report covering all the services we have discussed. But the Younghusband (28), Ingleby (29) and Kilbrandon (30) Committees - although starting from different, and restricted, terms of reference - reached similar general conclusions about the need for an integration of the social services. What are the implications of this for the schools? Many American school districts employ school social workers with a general training in social work and a minimum of specialisation. They work in a group of schools and are responsible to the principal, and ultimately to the Superintendent of Schools, but they can call on the help of specialist social workers in other fields. Most of our evidence (31, 32) however, has led in a different direction, making a strong case for a broader integration of the personal social services. 240. We think the following arguments carry great weight: (a) workers in a variety of services are increasingly finding they are concerned with similar families having similar needs; (b) the atomisation of social services leads to contradictory policies and to situations in which 'everybody's business becomes nobody's business'; (c) continuity of care is difficult under present arrangements; (d) a more unified structure would provide better opportunities for appraising needs and planning how to meet them; (e) it would also accord with the present tendency of social work to treat people as members of families and local groups rather than to deal with specific individuals or separate needs isolated from their social context; (f) it would make it possible to create viable teams to operate in areas of special need. Although such teams should cover carefully selected areas they could be physically located in many different places, for instance in clinics, in the local offices of welfare and children's departments, or medical group practices. Since all children spend several hours a day in school for most of the year, and since it is relatively easy for parents to visit schools, there is much to be said for choosing the schools as a base for social work units responsible for helping families facing many kinds of difficulties. For social work units that were also concerned with old people, single people or the mentally disordered, other bases would be necessary. 241. Other models are suggested by schemes operating in Glasgow and in London. The Glasgow scheme, which is based on secondary schools and makes some provision for associated primary schools, is similar in many respects to the American schemes mentioned in paragraph 239. The principal strengths of the scheme are that the school has access to a readily available known person who is treated as a colleague by teachers and who can act quickly. The Glasgow social workers all have some training. But these workers are based in secondary schools; and, although they have some responsibilities for the primary schools in their areas, they do not have time to give them the same attention. Primary schools are too small and too numerous to place a social worker in each of them, even if such a scheme [page 88] were restricted to educational priority areas. The special characteristic of the London scheme (33), based on the Care Committees, is the use made of some 2,500 volunteers who are guided by 80 full-time paid organisers. But it is not easy to recruit sufficient voluntary workers in all parts of the country, particularly in the areas in which they are most needed. Moreover, scarce trained staff may become so burdened with the supervision of voluntary workers, for whom few training opportunities exist, that their skills are not most efficiently used in helping children and families. In many parts of Hertfordshire, we understand, a large part of the welfare work that elsewhere falls within the sphere of the education welfare service is carried out by the children's department, operating as the agent of the education committee. The arrangement arose from historical circumstances peculiar to this authority but it appears to work well. We have borne all these possibilities in mind when formulating our own proposals. Conclusions 242. Our conclusions are deliberately tentative, stressing needs and opportunities rather than formulating detailed schemes. More specific proposals are to be expected from the Seebohm Committee. 243. The schools' interest in social work arises from their need to identify and help families with difficulties that lead to poor performance and behaviour of their children in school. Construed narrowly, these responsibilities mean that an education authority must prevent unnecessary absence from school and deal with problems that obviously prevent attendance, for example, inadequate clothing. Construed more positively, they call for social work amounting to general family case work, supported by specialist services equipped to deal with the more serious physical, environmental and psychological problems. Teachers are responsible for establishing a good understanding between the school and parents. There will, however, be difficult cases beyond the competence, time or training of the head or class teacher. These should be the responsibility of trained social workers, collaborating closely with the schools, readily available to teachers, and capable of securing help quickly from more specialised social services. The school social worker can also encourage the more reluctant parents to visit their children's schools and talk with teachers. The help and advice he offers to families in difficulties can provide a practical demonstration of the school's concern, not only for children but for the welfare of the whole family. Within the school, he can help teachers understand some of the difficulties their pupils contend with at home, alert them to problems they would not otherwise be aware of, and thus put teachers in a position to do their own job more effectively. 244. The principal need is for an organisation, which need not be an additional organisation but could be a grouping of existing organisations, and which will enable these functions to be fulfilled. The 'school social worker', or a social worker collaborating closely with the school, needs to be clear about his powers to act on truancy, about the additional forms of guidance, supervision and help he may be asked to provide, and about his right and need to call upon other services when required. He must be known to teachers in the schools he serves and be accepted by them as a colleague. The size of his caseload should be strictly controlled. These conclusions will remain [page 89] valid whether or not present services are unified within one local social work department. 245. If some or all of this work is to be carried out by the present education welfare officers, they would have to shed duties which could be carried out more effectively by staff without responsibilities for social work, who would remain based on the local education office rather than the schools. Routine investigations of attendance could often be carried out more selectively and with less waste of time; they should probably be associated with social work (since serious attendance problems often prove very complex) although different grades of worker including that of welfare assistants may be required for different types of case. It is not satisfactory that the service mainly responsible for welfare work in connection with the schools should be largely untrained. 246. The work and aspirations of the education welfare officers are developing in a way that encourages us to believe that some of them are capable of filling the places left open by the shortage of trained social workers. Selected education welfare officers might be given an intensive one year course, provided this were regarded as a temporary arrangement and not as a precedent for the establishment of a general level of training inferior to that now being offered to social workers elsewhere. In time a two year training similar to that required for the Certificate in Social Work or the Letter of Recognition awarded by the Central Training Council in Child Care would be needed. 247. The experience of existing councils for training in social work and child care will provide guidance about the type of course required. We hope that room might be found for this training within the courses the councils are now developing. There are, we believe, many potential social workers, with adequate academic qualifications, who would enter these courses, given appropriate career opportunities and salary structure. More resources, too, will have to be made available for training if there is to be any expansion. The principal shortage is of field work supervisors. 248. Anxious though we are that there should be rapid improvement in the services directly concerned with the schools, it is obvious that plans for reorganisation and training must be related to the whole social work field, and we hope that a comprehensive plan of action will be prepared without delay. A clear and generally applicable plan for social work in schools has not yet been devised. In carefully selected and different areas, where such help is most urgently needed, experimental teams should therefore be established which would include workers from many of the relevant fields together with social workers largely responsible for school social work. The school social workers should also have ready access, through their fellow team members when appropriate, to the help of the school medical and psychological services and other more specialised staff. In some places the school workers may have to spend so much of their time in the schools that they become, in effect, members of the schools' staff. While school social workers should always operate with the consent of the head teacher and be immediately responsible to him for their work within and on behalf of the school, their administrative responsibility should normally be to a team leader in a service with broader functions through whom a large range of specialist resources would be available to them. Experiments on these lines should be started as [page 90] soon as possible and linked with research designed to test their value. A start should be made in the areas of greatest need, particularly some of those selected to become educational priority areas of the kind described in Chapter 5. 249. We note that in Glasgow the staff of school welfare officers (working alongside a larger number of attendance officers) have all taken a two year university course in the social sciences, or the two year CSW course. The city has now seconded on full salary their first worker for professional training at university level. The English education welfare service should enable some of its staff to have this kind of professional training. But it is clear that different grades of work will remain to be done for the schools. Much of it will be routine work. Social workers attached to schools should therefore be assisted by 'welfare assistants' with less training, as again is done in Glasgow. We recommend that consideration be given to the creation of a grade of welfare assistant in this field. 250. It may be possible that volunteers or part-time workers could play a useful part in social work teams after a short period of training and work under the supervision of professionally qualified staff. 251. Whether teams are established or not, we believe that greater care is needed in deciding on the number of social workers required in an area. This is plain from the varying burdens carried by social workers in the three areas we have studied in detail. 252. Finally, we return to the teachers. Too many do not know enough about the social work being undertaken on behalf of their pupils. Medical and social workers should inform the schools of action being taken in respect of their pupils whenever this would help teachers in their work with children. Parental permission must be sought for this step and it will normally be forthcoming. Teachers, we are sure, will welcome information that may explain a pupil's behaviour and performance in school, and they will treat it as confidential. It is essential that teachers should accept social workers as colleagues with whom there can be informal and frequent communication, but this will not happen of itself. It needs planning. 253. A teacher who has to consult with a social worker about a pupil is likely to learn quickly something of the organisation with which he is dealing. But this kind of localised knowledge is not enough. The initial training of teachers ought to take more account of the social factors that affect school performance and of the functions and working of the social services. Short conferences and other forms of in-service training are clearly called for, especially for head teachers and deputies. Similarly, social workers need to be better informed about the educational system. We recommend that there should be experimental schemes for the joint training of social workers and teachers (such as started in Scotland in 1966) and that social work courses should contain adequate instruction about the role of the school in the community and in the development of children and about welfare work in and around the schools. 254. Social workers will never be concerned with more than a small minority of school children. It must always be remembered, therefore, that the main responsibility for developing good relations with parents rests with teachers. [page 91] Summary 255. This chapter reaches conclusions which are necessarily tentative. We have summarised the main points on the health of the school child in paragraph 215. The rest of our conclusions are as follows: Social Welfare Work in the Schools: Structure (i) There is a need for adequately trained social workers who would collaborate closely with schools, would be readily available to teachers, capable of assuming responsibility for cases beyond the competence, time or training of the head or class teacher, and capable of securing help quickly from more specialised social services. The principal need is for a grouping of existing organisations within a comprehensive plan of action which will enable these functions to be fulfilled.Training (vi) Education welfare officers could be trained to carry out wider social work functions. The present shortage of social workers might be partly met by selecting some education welfare officers for intensive one year courses. A two year training similar to that required for the Certificate in Social Work or the Letter of Recognition of the Central Training Council in Child Care should be established for selected education welfare officers. These Councils might include such training within the courses they are now developing. [page 92]
1. Political and Economic Planning. Family Needs and the Social Services. Allen and Unwin, 1961.
[page 93] [page 94] Dear Mr and Mrs ....................... We thought you would like to know how Tony has developed during his first term at school. He made a confident start as he had been well prepared by you and his sister. I know you were disappointed that he was reluctant to come to school on some mornings later in the term, when his first enthusiasm had waned. This is not unusual, however, and may have been caused by his not being quite well at the time, some upset with one of his friends or by a very natural desire to stay at home sometimes! We think he would profit by a further period of attending in the mornings only as he does get tired in the afternoons. Perhaps you could call to see us about this. He loves stories and books especially about animals. Perhaps you or his father could spare time to read to him. I think you will find him beginning to pick out words to recognise. He can already read the names of most of the children in his class. He can count correctly up to five and is beginning to want to paint and write. He is more independent in putting on his clothes etc. though he still needs a good deal of help in this. He is a sensitive boy who is often thoughtful for other people. Yours sincerely
Dear Mr and Mrs ....................... We thought you would like to know how Diane is getting in her first term in the junior school. She began very timidly. She is small for her age and perhaps feared the larger children but she is now a happy member of the group. She is greatly respected by the other children because she is so agile and fearless in physical activity and this has helped her to gain confidence. Her reading is satisfactory, though slow. Could you spare time to take her to the Children's Library in ....................... St? She would be quite able to choose suitable books for herself and would improve her reading speed by reading a greater number of fairly easy books. She is coming rather slowly to an understanding of number. We feel it is important that she should not be hurried in this, because that would add to her confusion. It would be helpful if you could entrust her with small sums of money for shopping and help her to count the change. She does not like to take part in acting but is most ingenious in preparing costumes for other children. Her painting is really lovely. We hope you will find time to look in some morning next term to see it and to see the children at work. Yours sincerely 
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