Andrew Cooper
Tavistock Centre and University of East London
The Centre for Social Work Practice
www.cfswp.org
Scratch the surface of (almost) any front line practitioner or
manager’s professional experience and…
A burden of worry and anxiety
A burden of ‘historic’ pain/self doubt
Stories of immense professional /intellectual complexity – no
certain/clear answers about the ‘right’ decisions
“…they were also emotionally affected by the cases of sexual
abuse they were managing and found high caseloads and
managerial pressures ate into their own time for selfsupport.” (CC 26.11.14)
Anxiety and worry (sleeplessness) interfere with the capacity
to ‘think’ and reason
Sound reasoning is emotionally as well as cognitively based
 Critical
Reflection (Fook & Gardner)
 Work Discussion (Tavistock)
 Relationship Based (Ruch)
 Systemic Models (Morning Lane/Frontline)
 Online Reflective Groups (Baikie)
(Jones 2014)
A family of models - Some more directly
experiential and ‘case’ or situation focussed,
some more socio-cultural. All engage the
practitioner or manager at the boundary
between themselves and their experience of
the work.
Rationing
Anxiety
Professional
Anxiety
Performance
and Audit
Anxiety
Partnership
Anxiety
Survival
anxiety
The task
Coal Face
The
organisation as
container of
anxiety
…Austerity
Senior
management
Burnout
Sickness and absence
Retention difficulties
In a context of…
Cultures of blame and shame competing with
‘learning cultures’
The performance agenda – pressure to act, react,
achieve, improve, but not to ‘stop and think’.
Emotionally healthy and unhealthy organisations
Potentially disabling anxiety affects all levels of
modern organisations – the sources and effects are
different, but they link up….
The task
The nature
of the work
The worker
‘Above
the
surface’
The emotional impact of the work
‘Below the
surface’
The task
The nature
of the work
The worker
Experiential learning and
reflection
‘Above the
‘Below the
surface’
surface’
The emotional impact of the work
and the challenge of good
assessment and decision making
Deeping
the
capacity
for
sound
thinking
A recent review of literature on reflective practice
groups identifies a real lack of good evaluations
(Jones 2014)
Warman and Jackson (2007) report on outcomes of
a project providing RPGs in schools and a
residential facility:
High response rate to evaluation
Significantly lower sickness absence rates over a 3
year period
Very high staff satisfaction with groups
97% of staff said they’d been helped to persevere
with challenging pupils when they’d previously felt
like giving up, and 83% said they felt less stressed
after talking about clients/students with whom
they’d been struggling
Do we move towards or away from one another
under conditions of tension, conflict and pressure?
Reflective practice spaces enable us to keep
moving towards one another – towards service
users, towards colleagues and peers, across
practitioner/ management lines, and across interagency boundaries.
But – it is not easy to ‘move towards the pain and
anxiety’. We would all rather steer clear of it…
Which is why reflective supervision and space
requires management authorisation and mandate.
Reflective practice spaces must be positioned as
part of a learning and development culture – their
boundaries need to be protected.
Agency and Management authorisation are needed
Good facilitation essential
Facilitators need experience of membership of
reflective practice groups– which is the only real
form of ‘training’.
Jones, J. (2014) A Report for the Centre for Social Work Practice on
Reflective Practice Group Models in Social Work, proposed
Evaluation and Recommendations
Ruch, G. (2007a) Reflective practice in contemporary child-care
social work: the role of containment, British Journal of Social Work,
37, 659-680.
Ruch, G. (2007b) ‘Thoughtful’ practice: child care social work and
the role of case discussion, Child and Family Social Work, 12, 370379.
Ruch, G. (2009) Identifying ‘the critical’ in a relationship-based
model of reflection, European Journal of Social Work, 12(3), 349362.
Warman, A. and Jackson, E. (2007) Recruiting and retaining children
and families’ social workers: the potential of work discussion
groups. Journal of Social Work Practice, 21(1), 35-48.