Exclusive Interview with Zoë van Zwanenberg
Zoë van Zwanenberg is the author of Leadership in Social Care, published by Jessica Kingsley Publishers. She is also Director of Zwan Consulting and Project Coordinator for the Centre for Confidence and Well-Being. She has held several management positions, specialising in human resources and people development.
How did you first become involved in Social Care?
I first became involved through my work with the NHS, where I was head of organisational development and I was involved in developing partnership working at a strategic level. When I then moved on to become Chief Executive of the Scottish Leadership Foundation I was asked to undertake a study into leadership and management challenges in social care and support the development of a national approach to leadership development for the sector in Scotland.
What do you think are the main challenges currently facing Social Care practitioners and managers?
The current financial situation is going to give double pressures to both practictioners and managers, demand for services is likely to increase as demographics increase the elderly population, and unemployment and debt add problems for children and families. At the same time budgets for service provision are going to be squeezed - practitioners and managers are going to have be to be very focused about foucsing provision without loss of quality and relationships with partner agencies are going to become even more important.
These are leadership and management challenges for practitioners and managers. Clarity of purpose, clear direction, standards and focus on outcomes will have to drive work, with relationships as the key ingredient.
Why are leadership and place-based development so important in social care?
If we see leadership as being about clarity of purpose/outcome and the ability to align different individuals to a shared vision of what that should be this is clearly core to the work of social care staff, as they work with individuals and families to enable them to achieve the best that is possible. Place is, in my view, critical as the particular circumstances and context for each family and individiual are an essential element of understanding their issues and their ambitions. Work with individuals and famillies is never context free, and ensuring that we have a clear focus on place and on ensuring that work is specific in that way, we are more likely to be able to set realistic amibitons and align services to meet those desires. The issues are different if you are working with a family in an inner city sink estate to if you are working with a family on a remote island, and these two extremes are just the outer ends of the spectrum. We need to work at all points along the spectrum and to understand what the impact of the differences are on both what we do and how we do it.
Could you tell us about the Centre for Confidence and Well-Being?
The Centre for Confidence and Well-Being was established in December 2004. Originally set up as a company limited by guarantee it was later granted charitable status on educational grounds.
The Centre’s mission is to help bring about a transformation in Scottish culture so that it supports more:
• Optimism (for self, others and Scotland).
• Self-belief (an important ingredient in ‘can-do’ attitudes).
• A ‘growth mindset’ (essential for people to realise their potential).
• Resilience ( required in helping people keep going when life is difficult).
• Positive energy (essential for relationships, team working and collaboration).
• Sense of purpose/meaning (important for motivation and well-being).
• Giving (an anti-dote to a ‘me’ centred world and a source of personal energy and inspiration).
• Wisdom (important for leadership, good decision-making and for advancing the confidence agenda).
The Centre’s work is guided by the following principles:
• Creative and entrepreneurial.
• Positive and optimistic.
• Rigorous in our approach.
• Values led/committed.
• Guided by common sense.
The Centre has a history of providing the following:
• Robust research.
• Reports and documents that can influence policy and policy makers.
• Reports, documents and books that are user focused and accessible to the general public.
• Seminars and conferences that bring together leading edge research with issues of practical application.
• Management and delivery of multiple projects.
The Centre works with a small core group of professional staff supported by a range of specialist associates. The Centre has well developed web resources to support its work and a dedicated secretariat team.
What do you enjoy doing in your spare-time?
I am Chair of Scottish Ballet and the arts are my real love, so I spend much of my time listening to music, reading, going to ballet, opera, concerts and theatre and art galleries. with what time is left I work in the garden, sew and spend time with friends travelling, mainly in europe.
Copyright © Jessica Kingsley Publishers 2009
Leadership in Social Care
is released this month and is now available for purchase. See the below link for more details.
More details of the book
JKP News
JKP author Amanda Elliott's Challenge Me! (TM):
Speech and Communication Cards have been shortlisted for the Inclusive Primary Classroom Resource NASEN book award 2009.
Living with Dementia magazine have featured an article by JKP author Lucy Whitman. Read it here.
Social work in the news - some of the articles in the media this month
Community Care have featured an article on charities calling for Every Child Matters-style framework for older people's policies.
The Guardian has featured a piece on the adverts to fight stigma of social work after Baby P case.
The Independent has published a news story about Birmingham social services.
Children and Young People Now have published a story on how a billion pound housing scheme is suffering from poor safeguarding.
We are pleased to announce that you can now follow us on Twitter and find us on Facebook!
This month's author feature:
Youth Offending and Youth Justice
by JKP authors Fergus McNeill and Monica Barry
 
Though young people’s behaviour has been a perennial preoccupation of their elders, an exceptional amount has been said and written about youth offending and youth justice since the election of New Labour in 1997. Of course, these topics have not been the sole preserve of political speech writers or media commentators; academic researchers and youth justice practitioners have sometimes risen to the challenge of trying to engage critically both with political and media discussions of youth crime. That said, it would be hard to argue that research evidence and practice experience have been the basis for youth justice policy, far less for public debate. Policy makers may increasingly insist on ‘evidence-based practice’, but can it really be said that youth justice policy has been interested in any evidence beyond that offered by focus groups, opinion polls and ballot boxes?
These are some of the issues and questions that a new collection in the Research Highlights series entitled ‘Youth Offending and Youth Justice’ set out to address. The contributors include leading academics from around the UK and overseas, some of whom have been actively engaged not just with academic research but also with policy and practice development. The book is in two halves. The first engages with the evidence about the evolution of youthful offending and with public and political reactions to it. The second engages with key aspects of youth justice practice in courts, in the community, in custodial institutions and in its multi-professional organisational settings. The four inter-related themes that emerge from the nine substantive chapters make for sobering reading.
Criminalisation and Stigmatisation
Young people are being criminalised at an earlier age and for a wider range of behaviours than ever before; their parents are also increasingly the target of criminalising practices. With this criminalisation comes new forms of stigmatisation enacted not just through familiar labelling processes but also through the more subtle effects of risk assessment procedures which stigmatise not only on the basis of what has been done by young people but on the basis of sometimes dubious judgments about what they may do. Other means of stigmatisation and criminalisation come in the form of so-called ‘summary justice’, which Rod Morgan, former Chair of the Youth Justice Board for England and Wales, describes as ‘punishment without prosecution’.
Punitiveness
Criminalisation usually comes hand in hand with punishment. For those brought before the court, where too many now arrive not for criminal offences but for breaching summary justice requirements, an increasing number are being detained in custody for longer periods and for less serious offences, despite an overall drop in youth crime in recent years. Too often, detention equates with mere containment – not only of the individual but of the wider problem of youth crime. Whether it is found in public opinion, in the intent of interventions or in young people’s experiences of them, the rise of punitiveness is particularly worrying because it is not accompanied by any reassertion of a rights-based approach to youth justice. Quite the contrary -- the usual due process checks and balances that are in place where a justice model is pursued are being eroded.
Responsibilization
For politicians it seems to make sense to assert that young people choose to commit crimes for purely personal reasons; sometimes policy makers and practitioners have responded with the pragmatic but naïve suggestion that (only) by cognitive behavioural training will young people learn that crime does not necessarily pay. This focus on the individualization of the problem and the responsibilization of young people feeds with earlier criminalization, increased punishment, more intrusive interventions, a greater use of imprisonment for young people and a policy rationale which denies the need for broader structural change. The responsibilization of the ‘deviant youth’ represents an exoneration of the rest of ‘us’ and of the state itself; as such, it is a dagger in the heart not only of collective social responsibility but also of social and community cohesion.
Policies and Practices that Make Matters Worse?
It seems that too often policies are built on political expedience and perceptions of the public mood, rather than on sound evidence. But there is evidence that less help and more punishment, from the young person’s point of view, may lead to more offending and less concern for the consequences. Too often marginalised young people have no stake in the future to protect through conforming and see no feasible means of acquiring one.
The contributions in this volume spell out the same message about youth justice time and again: namely that the preoccupation with ‘youth’ is at the expense of ‘justice’. Too readily such systems exist or at least function so as to punish and to challenge individual young people rather than to question the extent to which the wider society is as much, if not more, to blame for the disadvantages they face. Yet too many of the real drivers of youth crime - those drivers that reside in the fabric of our late-modern societies and the inequalities that they perpetuate - are beyond its reach. But herein lies both the paradox and the ultimate solution; youth justice is the answer to youth crime – but only in the sense that were we ever to arrive at a society that did justice to and by its children and young people, that really acted as if Every Child Mattered, that genuinely ordered its affairs so as to secure children and young people’s health, safety, achievement, positive involvement and economic wellbeing, then we would find ourselves in a society much less troubled by youth crime.
Copyright © Jessica Kingsley Publishers 2009
Fergus McNeill and Monica Barry are the authors of Youth Offending and Youth Justice
®. See the below link for more details.
More details of the book
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Content links
JKP Social Work books
Leadership in Social Care
Edited by Zoë van Zwanenberg
Click for more details
The Child's World
The Comprehensive Guide to Assessing Children in Need
2nd edition
Jan Horwath
Click for more details
Young People in Love and in Hate
Nick Luxmoore
Click for more details
Learning Through Child Observation
2nd edition
Mary Fawcett
Click for more details
Just Care
Restorative Justice Approaches to Working with Children in Public Care
Belinda Hopkins
Click for more details
A Short Introduction to Attachment and Attachment Disorder
Colby Pearce
Click for more details
Creative Coping Skills for Children
Emotional Support through Arts and Crafts Activities
Bonnie Thomas
Click for more details
Quality Matters in Children's Services
Messages from Research
Mike Stein
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Safeguarding Children in Primary Health Care
Edited by Julie Taylor and Markus Themessl-Huber
Click for more details
Safeguarding Children Living with Trauma and Family Violence
Evidence-Based Assessment, Analysis and Planning Interventions
Arnon Bentovim, Antony Cox, Liza Bingley Miller and Stephen Pizzey
Click for more details
Fostering a Child's Recovery
Family Placement for Traumatized Children
Mike Thomas and
Terry Philpot
Foreword by Mary Walsh
Click for more details
Telling Tales About Dementia
Experiences of Caring
Edited by Lucy Whitman
Click for more details
Enriched Care Planning for People with Dementia
A Good Practice Guide to Delivering Person-Centred Care
Hazel May, Paul Edwards and Dawn Brooker
Click for more details
Authentic Dialogue with Persons who are Developmentally Disabled
Sad Without Tears
Jennifer Hill
Click for more details
Activities for Adults with Learning Disabilities
Having Fun, Meeting Needs
Helen Sonnet and Ann Taylor
Click for more details
Health and Safety:
A Workbook for Social Care Workers
Suzan Collins
Click for more details
Youth Offending and Youth Justice
Edited by Monica Barry and Fergus McNeill
Click for more details
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