www.safeguardinglab.co.uk/campfire-holding-page?signuplink=FL001 What do social workers think about the safer phones bill? What kinds of professional development do they enjoy the most? What organisational policies convince them to stay in a job long term? These are all interesting and important questions to which we do not know the answers. Social workers are the closest professionals to society's most vulnerable children, families, and adults.  We are inside their homes, talking with them about their lived experiences, thousands of times up and down the country every day. And yet our voices are largely absent from policy and also in wider society.  A lot of small-scale academic research is done into social work practice, but aside from annual workforce health checks with generic questions, social workers opinions, views and experiences are rarely collected and analysed on a large scale.   It is unhelpful for researchers and policy makers to not know the answer to these types of questions.  How can you design policies for a group of professionals when you do not know what their experience is in any detail? How can you decide on the most important research topic when you do not know what is most important to the people working in the profession you are researching?  But even more importantly, social worker's practical understanding of some of our deepest social problems does not get to be part of the national debate.  Social work is where complex social theory is humanised and applied to a real-world context.  It is where attachment theory comes to life, where systems theory sees the essence of human relationships, where trauma theory sees the importance of history, and so much more - society needs social work’s wisdom much more than social workers realise!   It's for reasons like this that I was inspired to create the social work campfire. For the small investment of answering 3 questions each day, social workers will be able to share and learn from each other’s views and experiences and have their knowledge and understanding collated and shared with the outside world.  This may seem like a small thing compared to the many challenges we face as a profession, but over time as the community grows the data will become increasingly representative of social workers.  In social work we know better than most, what gets measured gets attention, and we want to measure social worker sentiment on a large scale for the first time, to bring attention to the deep knowledge held in our profession, as well as to our needs and priorities as professionals.   Imagine a politician announcing, "Social workers are overwhelmed by adult asylum seekers pretending to be children."  We all know there is a hate-filled agenda behind statements like this, but we do not have the data to refute it, or the mechanism to share our more nuanced views.  With a fully established Social Work Campfire, we will be able to respond to statements like this within 24 hours with media statements representing the actual experience of thousands of social workers.  This will not only push back on hatred, but it will also open a dialogue where our views are respected and listened to in ways that they currently seldom are.   Alongside the serious questions, we want to make it fun to use - are teams that go to the 🍷 pub together better performing? Are managers who go to the 💪gym before work more likely to make you a cup of ☕tea (or less!)?  We want to make 2 minutes on the Social Work Campfire app an interesting and engaging part of your day by linking you with your identity as a social worker.  As we build, we will add 📰news, 🙋♂️professional development snippets, and 📑research findings to keep your finger on the pulse of our profession.  We will 🕹️gamify your daily dose with streaks and competitions, and we hope to partner with sponsors to offer great prizes for our most consistent users.  And… we will buy 🍕pizza for every social worker in the Local Authority with the highest use rate each year.   Sounds interesting? Click on the link at the top to go to our landing page and sign up for our waiting list.  When we get to 100 users we will start sending daily email questions, and start building our app which you will be able to download from the apple or android app stores. Want to be more involved? There is a contact form on our landing page, we are really keen to hear from potential research partners or PSWs who have ideas about developing or using the Campfire.  We would love to hear from sponsors or founding partners.  Most importantly we would love to hear from social workers who have questions they would like to ask their colleagues! 

Posted by Stephenrice at 2025-02-05 17:41:16 UTC