Gloriously Ordinary Sundays - 6th October 2024

I’ve spent quite a lot of time over the past month sharing Gloriously Ordinary Lives with different groups of social workers and I’ve got a niggle.

100% of the time, people tell me they love the principle of Gloriously Ordinary Lives, of mundane and heart sing and how useful the Five Tests are. I’ve had some lovely quotes:

‘I sit with my colleague as we write quality assurance documents and ask myself, ‘Is that kitchen table language?’

‘This is just so sensible – anyone can use it’

‘I’m asking all my team to use the photo test, which we incorporate in supervision sessions. It’s helping us remember what is important.’

Then, as we explore how they might embrace Gloriously Ordinary Lives in their practice there are always some ‘yes buts’. Not people being, ‘Oh that’s all very well but you’ve got to understand…’ I can deal with those as they’re rarely true once you dig a little. This is thoughtful, committed, beautifully human people struggling with the context of how they support people, and of things that feel true to them.

They come in various guises but can be summed up by, ‘How can I embrace Gloriously Ordinary Lives and satisfy the need to work quickly and get waiting lists down?’

And I don’t have an immediate answer, because it comes from a place where people are commodities, lives are tasks and success is measured in throughput… and I KNOW that’s not what anyone who works in social care thinks or wants. Yet it’s how it clearly feels to many good people who work in social care.

It comes from a very real place of challenging budgets, bits of the system that we have created and built up that don’t work, lots of which we are getting into at Social Care Future in our Plumbing and wiring work.

But it also comes from a place of perceived realities and a skewed sense of what social care is about (if you agree with the Social Care Future vision and the concept of Gloriously Ordinary Lives).

I’ve heard people tell me that they hate it, but they have to use the language of ‘placement’ and ‘case’ as it’s in the law. I’ve been told that regulatory processes mean that they must focus on numbers and processes.

On more than one occasion in the last week, I’ve had a conversation with a director-level worker in social care, firmly committed to the Social Care Future and principles of Gloriously Ordinary Lives and then later in that same day had a conversation with a social worker from that same local authority feeling the pressure of ‘throughput’. I’ve circled the conversation back and both people feel frustrated.

I’m going to be really irritating as I don’t have a simple answer. The only thing I have is my, ‘What would it take?’ question. I have personal experience that it can be different, so maybe I’ll unpick that a bit next week. Meanwhile, if you’re part of the local authority social care machine, can you try asking, ‘What would it take?’ a few times this week?

PS. Did you see? The Gloriously Ordinary Sundays Podcast episode 7 is here. I chat with ⁠Gary Bourlet⁠, founder of the People First Movement in England and co-founder of ⁠Learning Disability England⁠. Gary tells us all about the ⁠Good Lives⁠ framework and we discuss the links between Good Lives and ⁠Gloriously Ordinary Lives⁠.