Listen to thisI’ve been meaning to write this piece for a while now. It was on my list of things to write when, a few months ago, I committed to return to writing a regular column for CYC-Online until work and life got in the way once again. But the fact that it is my turn to do the editorial this month gives me the chance to dust down my idea.
When I used to write a regular column and struggled with ideas for what to write about, I would sometimes fall back on something football (soccer for the uninitiated) related. And I do so again here. The exact focus became clearer during last year’s World Cup in Qatar but the idea had been germinating for a month or so previously from when Scotland introduced Video Assisted Referee (VAR) technology. It was first rolled out at a Hibs (my team) game on a Friday evening in October.
The background to the demands for VAR to be introduced in Scotland (it is already used in many countries) was fans’ claims of referees’ incompetence and even corruption. As someone who had spent a lot of time at university and subsequently when my own children were younger, refereeing football games, I never bought into this – I just didn’t believe there was time in the moment from seeing something happen on the field to blowing my whistle to think through what outcome I might want from a particular decision. The result was that I, and I suspect all referees, called things as we saw them, probably getting most but certainly not all of those calls right. Ironically, some of the wrong calls were what made football exciting and animating.
While I never believed that VAR would improve football, advocates felt it would bring objectivity, certainty and would open up the black box of decision making. I have to report that I was right. The experience is that VAR has just brought more chaos, as decisions that seemed perfectly sound and were undisputed on the field of play are being brought back for further analysis, and in many cases overturned. Fans can no longer experience the euphoria of goals scored in the moment, for there is always the prospect of them being rescinded on subsequent video analysis. The very essence of football as spontaneous and contested has been sanitised. Moreover, few of these decisions have brought the hoped for clarity – the contestation remains, it is just no longer spontaneous. Pundits and fans now argue over the rightness or wrongness of VAR decisions. The ire of the very same fans who once targeted the incompetence of referees on the field has transferred to referees officiating from behind TV screens.
What has this got to do with CYC, you might wonder. Well, for me, the arguments over VAR took me back to my days in practice, and particularly in management, when staff would tell me that we needed more and better rules. That way, staff and youth would benefit from that old shibboleth of residential care, ‘consistency’. Now I know my Henry Maier, and his sage advice that consistency is neither possible nor desirable. And I used, with varying degrees of success, to let staff know that. Yet still, every new generation of CYCs seems to want consistency. I have worked in places where the more precise this pursuit of consistency became, the more ridiculous and unworkable the outcomes.
The root problem in such situations, whether we focus on football or CYC practice, centres around the nature of knowledge. Now, I don’t believe, as much contemporary culture would have it, that there are no objective facts – just subjective experience. If a player is ten yards offside, then that’s generally a matter of fact rather than opinion. If a player is in line with a defender and it’s hard to determine whose body part is in front of another’s, that comes down to interpretation. The same in CYC. In some situations, what is good and bad or right or wrong, is clearcut. In many situations, though, we are again left to make a judgment between differing interpretations of the same event. And, as in football, it can depend on the lens you bring to a situation or the angle from which you are able to view it.
Nevertheless, some referees seem to get more decisions right than wrong, and some Child and Youth Care workers seem to come to better decisions than others, and do so more consistently. They demonstrate what might be thought of as practice wisdom – we know wise referees and practitioners when we see them – even if they don’t get everything right, we tend to be reassured by the fact that it is them caught up in a difficult situation, having to make decisions about it. How they handle such situations has little to do with rules but is far more about dispositional or character traits that seem to lead them to do the right thing more times than not. In fact, trying to apply rules and to be consistent in situations that are invariably unique can lead to disaster; we may need to bend rules to fit with the particular circumstances we face and we need to be comfortable in and to enjoy the strangeness that is CYC (and football).
Running alongside my angst over VAR, I have been involved in a few discussions, perhaps, I’ll admit, those of old men reminiscing over old professional glories, around how CYC as a field risks losing touch with knowledge of some of its founding figures and ideas. I find it interesting that in writing this piece, I, without thinking of theory, fall back on Henry Maier, whose writing I was introduced to by Leon Fulcher back at Stirling University in the 1980s, and subsequently by Thom Garfat when I started writing for CYC-Online. Henry’s (if I can be presumptuous enough to use his first name) messages are timeless. Remember this one – ‘consistency is neither possible nor desirable’.
