Equality?

by Jenny Galuschka

The County Council had decided in its wisdom that each of its social services local offices should employ a voluntary work officer to recruit volunteers and work with the voluntary sector. North Dorset resisted as long as it could, but in vain. The Thatcher government had convinced itself that volunteers and voluntary organisations were an inexhaustible free resource and deepest blue Dorset was unlikely to see things otherwise.

Now here I was, on this late July morning in 1983, arriving to begin my tenure. As I walked through the heavy outer doors, one of the social workers was strolling down the stairs, obviously an emissary from his peers.

“You know, we don’t want you here,” was his greeting.

“Yes, I was told,” I briefly replied, and turned away from him to ring the bell for the receptionist. I think he slunk back upstairs.

This little episode says everything about why I never wanted to be a social worker. The interventions at their disposal focus on the individual rather than the institution, system or culture and they almost never have the resources to achieve all that they would like to do.

After a brief chat with the area director, I found myself allocated to one of the two teams, and in my first team meeting. At this time, my ignorance about what social services departments did, and why and how, was profound to say the least. Team meetings didn’t help a lot, because at that time they consisted mostly of a description of new referrals and their allocation to the different professionals in the team.

As well as social workers, there were occupational therapists, assistant occupational therapists and one officer who specialised in working with people with sensory impairments. The occupational therapy staff and the sensory loss officer could offer items of equipment to aid mobility and activities of daily living, as well as access to other agencies’ services, such as home adaptations and guide dogs. What others had to offer was, to me, more nebulous. Social work was apparently judged by whether the client had “moved”, although how that was judged or measured was far from clear. (We say “service users” nowadays, because the word “client” had acquired such stigma.)

In public, we talked about promoting independence and enabling people to live in their own homes but it didn’t take an awful lot of intelligence to work out that this was a politically correct way of saying that we wanted to spend as little as possible on residential and other support services. This is not to say that individual workers were less than caring. Their requests for volunteer support showed that they thought with compassion and imagination about their clients’ needs. I was gradually being accepted as having something to offer.

In the autumn of 1984, I began the final half-credit course of my honours degree, “The handicapped person in the community”.This, together with the huge effort to implement the Mental Health Act, 1983, brought into sharp focus the fact that everything a social services department did was either required or permitted by an Act of Parliament. Anything else was “ultra vires” (beyond our powers) and hence illegal.

The exercise of our powers, however, was capricious. The attitude to inspecting a playgroup was laughably lackadaisical and beyond counting toilets never extended to suggesting that they could offer more or better activities. The registration of childminders was reactive, and child care for working mothers was virtually unobtainable in rural areas.

The same attitude applied to the registration of disabled people, the publication of information for disabled people and the duty to provide accessible premises for disabled people. When I pointed out that a disabled person would not be able to get through the front doors of the area office, the admin manager told me “Oh, we don’t get many disabled people here.”

The result of this laid-back attitude was that there was no strategic plan to identify and meet needs – this was before Community Care Plans became mandatory – and families were often in crisis before another agency triggered a referral.

The perspective of my colleagues was, “You can’t change society, so you have to change the individual to fit into society.” (The 1970 Chronically Sick and Disabled Persons Act clearly meant to change society!)

This meant that they really didn’t like my hero, Vic Finkelstein, then a tutor in disability studies at the Open University, who even then was saying things like his 2001 statement that “society is disabling us and therefore it is society that has to change”.

His argument was that a medical model of disability located the problem in the individual and caused it to be seen as a personal tragedy. This model failed to take account of the fact that changes in attitudes and/or environement and resources could remove any barriers to an impaired person having a full and useful life. In a 2001 lecture he pointed to the examples of Admiral Lord Nelson and President Franklin D Roosevelt. Neither is ever referred to as a disabled, even though the first was a partially sighted amputee and the second unable to walk. (He suffered a paralytic illness at the age of 39.)

People with impairments, according to Finkelstein, become disabled because society oppresses them, This was a very challenging message for professionals with only a narrow range of interventions at their disposal, and neither the skill nor the inclination to engage with other agencies that should be helping, but weren’t.

At the level of community development, where I was able to carve out a professional space, promoting the well-being and independence of disabled people was also challenging; the younger adults (as opposed to older people) were all so different in their needs and aspirations, and the children and teenagers, despite the 1981 Education Act, were often away at residential schools during term time, or so severely disabled as to need very skilled medical and nursing care.

It wasn’t until I moved to a job at County Hall that I discovered that the County Council did have a service that addressed inequalities of opportunity in employment. This brought together both local and central government support. The local input was from employers who were willing to give disabled people a chance, and Dorset County Council staff who liaised with them. The central government support came from the Disability Living Allowance (DLA) which helped people feel less worried about giving up the long-term rate of Incapacity Benefit, and so being worse off if their bid for independence failed. DLA was not means tested and was not affected by employment.

There was also an employment support allowance, paid to the employer, which could be tailed off as the disabled person’s productivity increased.

The numbers placed each year were consistent, but seemed to me disappointingly small. Then there was a huge breakthrough for a group of mostly men, who learned IT skills at their day centre in Weymouth, and went on to get jobs and in some cases set up their own companies. I never did learn the full details of how they broke through the anxiety-and-discrimination barrier because the centre manager was very bitter about having “worked himself out of a job”, and so not available for interview. The men themselves may have been exceptional – I rather think they were – but unfortunately their example surely acted as a deterrent to other managers who might have enabled  other groups of people to acquire marketable skills, rather than serving as an example of good practice.

It did however give me an idea. It occurred to me that, contrary to the current views of the British Association for Supported Employment, it must be exceptionally difficult for some disabled people to move directly from never having worked to full time employment. I thought we could help by breaking this down into smaller steps which could include any mixture of training, work experience, voluntary work, job coaching and mentoring. With support from the European Social Fund, the council’s Community Employment Service, led by Mike Powley, (later made an MBE for his work in this field) set up a scheme called “Stepping Stones”.

This was both successful and popular, even with people who did not progress all the way to full time employment. For some, voluntary or charitable work represented an improvement in social opportunities and quality of life. And of course, we celebrated those who went all the way. Mike was made an MBE in 2003.

To return to Finkelstein’s social model of disability, this had become widely accepted and taught by the time of his death in 2011, and could hardly be contested in austerity Britain, But even when this horrible era of cuts and anti-disabled propaganda ends, equality will not just automatically come. We will have to work at it. To fail to plan for that is to plan to fail.