Sowing Seeds

Mark Smith

This editorial comes at a point when I am winding down from my full-time academic position after almost 25 years. It feels weird to say this as it seems like only yesterday that I took up my first academic post to develop the Masters in Residential Child Care at the University of Strathclyde. A couple of years into this post, I received an email from one Thom Garfat asking if I would do some writing for CYC-Online, which got me involved with the CYC community. Ironically, I anticipate more time to do such writing when I am no longer in thrall to what I recall Leon Fulcher calling the administrivia of academic life. In my earlier years as an academic, I didn’t quite appreciate just what he meant by this – I do now! As if to make my point, my inbox has started pinging with requests to action contract extensions for staff I don’t even know …

I could get angry at the banality of this proliferation of administrative demands, but I am determined not to. As a former residential care worker, I remember kids who had never really been any trouble during their placements becoming difficult as it approached time for them to leave. We understood it as a sort of separation anxiety. But I’m not entirely separating … I will continue working for a couple of days a week for the time being. So, no separation anxiety for me.

Moreover, at the back of my mind, I have Reinhold Niebuhr’s prayer:

God, grant me the serenity to accept the things I cannot change,
the courage to change the things I can,
and the wisdom to know the difference.

So, with this guidance in mind, I’ll take this opportunity to reflect back on a few things. When I moved from practice to academia, I thought I could bring about change, Naively, I thought this would happen through reasoned argument and the force of my writing. What a forlorn hope that was.

I also thought, equally naively, that we were on the brink of a vibrant ‘new beginning’ for residential child care (for that was my own background and that is where the roots of CYC lie). In Scotland, twenty-five years ago, there was considerable investment in the training of residential care workers, of which my post was but one strand. I expected new ideas, conceptualisation, debates … If truth be told, we struggled to move beyond the tired old ideas and some of the new ones were just plain dumb. The attention given to residential child care and the attendant hopes for an enhanced status for residential care workers came to little and has now all but petered out.

Internationally, the agendas of global NGOs, no doubt staffed by bright young things eager to position themselves on the ‘right side of history’, plug dogmas of de-institutionalisation, not even considering that this might be neither possible nor desirable across much of the world, a point made powerfully in Tuhin Islam and Leon Fulcher’s series of books (Residential Child and Youth Care in a Developing World) published by The CYC-Net Press.

Looking beyond CYC, university departments of social work, in which I have plied my trade are in a similarly bad way. We are struggling to recruit students to a profession that is haemorrhaging its existing workforce. We have gone beyond the point where as educators, we can do much to influence things. The current situation is the result of political and economic decisions and directions that do not value public services and particularly don’t value people services, where practice can be messy and outcomes uncertain.

There is also a broader cultural backdrop to this situation. I was speaking to a group of Catholic priests yesterday about my (relatively) recent book about the stories of boys brought up in a school I worked in run by a religious order of Brothers. The priests, I guess, had signed up at a time when they believed they would make the world a better place. Yet, their vision of community and of social justice has been sapped, submerged beneath demands to attend to health and safety and a host of other administrative requirements, which deflect from their mission to create a better world.

Twenty-five years ago, I realised that it was time for me to leave direct practice when the local authority I worked for began to insist that I and my colleagues needed to undertake food hygiene training in order to make kids a sandwich. And now, having managed to avoid stepping under a ladder, electrocuting myself or setting different buildings on fire over a period of 25 years, I now find myself trying to escape university life before they catch up with me on my failure to do health and safety training. In a similar vein, one of my sons has done a lot of social care work. The only training he has ever had is on safeguarding – nothing about how to best care for someone, certainly nothing on any ideas around care or the kind of values that might underpin it. Just, repeatedly, safeguarding. None of these developments are about making life better for employees or for those they work with but with pandering to the demands of insurers. The consequence of this is that we privilege organisational concerns about risk over the kind of values that, I hope, brought us into CYC and ought to guide what we do in it.

But I’ve promised I’m not going to go out bitter. Having already quoted one prayer, another comes to mind (I only know a couple and do not go about quoting them – funny how they came to mind). The poem was used at a homily for the martyred Bishop of San Salvador, Oscar Romero. It goes thus:

We plant the seeds that one day will grow. We water the seeds already planted, knowing that they hold future promise. We lay foundations that will need further development. We provide yeast that produces effects far beyond our capabilities.

We cannot do everything and there is a sense of liberation in realizing that. This enables us to do something and to do it well. It may be incomplete, but it is a beginning, a step along the way, an opportunity for the Lord’s grace to enter and do the rest. We may never see the end results, but that is the difference between the master builder and the worker.

We are workers, not master builders; ministers, not messiahs.
We are prophets of a future not our own.

My hope is that I may have planted a few seeds from time to time. And I’ll keep plugging away doing bits of doctoral supervision, doing some (probably more) writing in the hope that I might plant a few more, realising that I will likely need to accept that I will not necessarily see them grow.

To finish on a serene note, I count myself to have been incredibly privileged to have had two (linked) careers in practice and academia that I have thoroughly enjoyed. I have met some great, inspiring people along the way and am reassured that we still have access to resources such as CYC-net and the community that it serves.