With the media spotlight often falling on social care in high-profile cases of child abuse or neglect, the huge spectrum of support that social workers provide for both children and adults – and its benefits for society as a whole – can be under-recognised.
But for Ifeanyi Nwokoro, it’s hard to imagine what life would be like without the input of social care professionals. In 2010, a car accident left him with a spinal cord injury that meant he was paralysed from the shoulders down; as he prepared to be discharged from hospital it was a social worker who helped him take the first moves towards getting back to university, got in touch with a care agency, and started the process of getting him into independent living. She even found some secondhand furniture for him, which her husband delivered.
Her impact, says Nwokoro, a member of Social Work England’s National Advisory Forum, was “massive”. “She designed the structure of what my life would look like,” he says. “Having a sudden spinal cord injury means everything you know about how the world works, all those rules, go out the window. For me, the social worker was a compass to point me in the right direction. [Her support] was like a toolkit to get my life back on track.”
Today, Nwokoro manages his own care, but social services are still there as a safety net – if he needs help with equipment from an occupational therapist, for instance, or the quality of his care needs reviewing.
In children’s social care, Sonia Brewster-Jones, a team manager in the children in care team at Essex county council, is all too conscious of a common perception that social workers are people who take children away from their families. In fact, she explains, their job is about doing all they can to keep families together – while still being able to judge when the risks of that are too high. That means always trying to work with parents – before and after children are taken into care – to help them make the changes necessary to keep their children, or be reunited with them.
“When people have turned their lives around, and families can come back together, that’s got to be the most rewarding part of it all,” Brewster-Jones says. “There’s nothing more joyous than that.”
When children cannot stay with their parents, though, social workers’ interventions, and ongoing work, are crucial. Tiegan Boyens, who was adopted at the age of four, describes the support family social workers gave her and her adoptive mothers over the years as a “guiding light”.
They helped her access the therapy she credits with enabling her to be where she is today, advocated for her when school staff failed to appreciate the impact of her background as an adoptee, and helped with contact with her birth siblings. “For me and my mums it was like a support rail that was always there,” Boyens says. “Sometimes you can walk without the rail, but other times you need to hold on to it. That was a really key thing.”
The family also had a social worker who arranged the exchange of letters with her birth grandparents over an incredible 13-year period – though they didn’t come face to face until Boyens was 16. “We could see from the beginning that she always went the extra mile,” Boyens, now 22, says. “Meeting her was a beautiful moment of realising how important this person had been in my life.”
Demand for social care is growing: in 2023 the number of children in care in England hit a record 83,840 – up 38% since 2009. In adult social care, the number of requests for support in England reached more than 2m for the first time ever last year.
It’s a trend Tammy Harbor, a social worker in the London borough of Bexley, has seen first-hand. It’s not just because people are living longer, she says, but also that more people with physical and mental health issues are coming into the adult social care system as they turn 18. She and her colleagues also see increasing numbers of people with complex needs who need support.
As part of the “front door” team that triages all referrals coming into adult social care, Harbor finds crisis intervention cases – emergencies that are most often the result of carers reaching breaking point – especially rewarding. Social workers must ensure the carers, as well as the person needing care, get swift support: “They’re the people who are crying out for help the most at that point,” Harbor says.
For Isaac Samuels, who has bipolar affective disorder, the kindness and compassion of the social worker who was present when they had to be sectioned was nothing short of life-saving. “Up until that point, I wasn’t going anywhere – you were going to have to take me in handcuffs,” they say.
“But in the worst circumstances – me being conveyed to hospital in a police car, in an ambulance, in the middle of night – this social worker was really clear and adamant that it was about getting the right support,” they say.
“They stayed with me and they just talked to me. And I felt like I had a chance of getting well. Without that, I wouldn’t be alive. I wouldn’t have my own home, I wouldn’t have a loving husband, I wouldn’t be able to work. I felt like they were a guardian angel.”
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