Personally I think there is room for celebrating. That doesn’t mean I accept the claims made for this award by the organisers. Social workers who see it as elitist are maybe overly critical but aren’t necessarily wrong. What were the social work values that sat easy with a private recruitment company luring permanent workers into agency work? What compromises made it easy to be a bedfellow with a company that sucked out enormous amounts of money from our services? It’s not cynical to highlight that, even Ray Jones has. For most of us BASW is an irrelevant body. I do not know one member in an office of 19 staff. Nothing wrong or rude about saying that either. So I want a celebration of what is best in social work and is excellent in a social worker. We can’t escape from elitism however much we pretend ours is an inclusive and egalitarian profession. It isn’t. So let’s have a celebration but on our terms not for publicity and headlines for BASW or the inevitable ‘inspirational’ speech by Leaders. So I think Elaine makes a valid point as do Tahin, Chris and Lynn. I’ve been to one of these and the catering is awful, perhaps we can all just agree on that.

I am a social worker into my 32 year post qualification. I stand by everything I say about organisations and tokenistic ‘valuing’ of social workers. By dint of it’s title this distinguishes between an arbitrarily determined excellence in an individual social worker and/or team and the rest of the plodders. That’s the point. If you are a better social worker than me, by whatever criteria we are not really told of that makes for excellence and are singled out be acclaimed publicly, that says I’m not good enough and remain a mediocrity. No social worker, no team achieves whatever is deemed to be over and above by their own brilliance. None of us can do our job without colleagues helping us. That’s the other point. There’s nothing rude about reflecting on and sharing views that do not conform to the orthodoxy that glosses over the real challenges we face. That’s not cynicism, that’s the reality of underfunded services, vacancies, unmanageable workloads. The cynicism is in trying to denigrate those of us who acknowledge those realities. My validation comes from the occasional thank you from a service user and the daily concern for my welfare from my colleagues. Nothing mean about saying that.

BASW, Sanctuary, Sugar Plum Fairy, Cheshire Cat, it really doesn’t matter who sponsors this. It’s a divisive, elitist endeavour. It tells us individuals matter more than systems, bad management, lack of resources, that the not nominated and the not anointed are mediocre for not having the abilities and skills to be special. In the most hypocritical self reverential social worker jargon infused language to boot. Time was we believed in solidarity and in our own ability as groups of social workers to validate ourselves, be self critical, be joyful, be conscious of who were the forces undermining our sense of shared values and commitment to do our best in the communities we worked in. No celebration from me, disgust and disappointment instead. Every year.

Thanks Christian. We don’t know as yet. Sanctuary is not on the board of trustees anymore so it will depend on whether it ends up being a sponsor, which we should know soon, I think.