Gloriously Ordinary Sundays - 9th February 2025

Independence ….in the eye of the beholder?

I might regret this, but this week, I have a need to tackle the idea of independence.

Independence comes under the heading of words that Bryony Shannon and I call ‘deceptive’ words. It’s not a ‘bad’ word in itself, but in our world of social care, we can use it in ways that perhaps aren’t altogether human or honest.

In our work with people who are part of our Gloriously Ordinary Language programme, we have been asking people to look at their organisation’s websites. We’ve found that you’ll be hard-pressed to find one that doesn’t talk about supporting people to…

…maintain their independence

…or regain their independence

…or to be as independent as possible.

To me, all of this smacks of an undercurrent of "We’d really like you to be able to do as much for yourself as possible so that you might cost us less." I might be being cynical.

It’s a tricky one. I know that people who love me would describe me as fiercely independent and what they mean is that I’m a control freak. I like things done the way I like them done. I’m not very good at people telling me I should do things in a certain way, and it is all about control (actually, some of those same people would say I’m a control freak!).

As our kids grow up, one of our jobs as parents is to help them learn to do things for themselves - tie their shoelaces, tell the time, make their beds, clean their rooms, make their own packed lunches (am I delving into the ridiculous now?). I’m mindful as I parented two disabled children that my role was absolutely about enabling them to do the things for themselves that they could and wanted to do, but also to help them find ways around those things they might practically never be able to do ‘independently’ for themselves so that they could stay in control and live their lives the way they want.

I remember the wonderful Hilary at Skills for People many years ago telling me,

“When I was at school, they tried to teach me to tie my shoelaces, then I went to college, and they tried to teach me to tie my shoelaces. Then I went to the Day Centre, and they tried to teach me to tie my shoelaces. When I was forty, I asked them if they could just f**king tie my shoelaces for me and take me to the pub.”

Good point well made.

Sally French wrote a fabulous piece that I have spent all week trying (and failing) to find to reference properly, so I will tell it as I remember it with apologies for the bits I’ve got wrong (Sally co-edited Disabling Barriers – Enabling Environments which is well worth a read).

As a researcher and writer, Sally talks about spending lots of time in libraries researching (I’m talking 1980s and 1990s here) and describes the wonderful librarian who supported her work. As a visually impaired woman, unable to use the microfiche (if you’re under 35 you’re probably going to have to look that up) Sally would ask her to find documents and articles and she always did it really efficiently. One day, the librarian told her excitedly that they had a new bit of kit for the microfiche that could magnify it and enable Sally to use it independently. She then describes spending a whole morning doing something that would have taken the librarian 10 minutes… but hey, she was independent!

I think there are some things in life we relish being able to do for ourselves and we rarely want anybody to do them for us. I’m a bossy cook. I prefer to cook in my kitchen with nobody else there. I take pride in being able to put up a shelf or build a tricky piece of flat pack. I’m working hard to learn to speak Greek, so I don’t have to rely on my Greek and English friends to translate when I’m in Kefalonia. There are also things that I can’t do for myself. I’ve just spent a ridiculous amount of money having my 21-year-old car serviced and fixed - I can almost hear my dad’s disappointment that I wasn’t able to do most of it myself (if you own something you should be able to fix it). I proudly don’t know my way around an Excel spreadsheet – it’s not how my brain works. I’ve had offers to be taught and I’m sure if I really put my mind to it, I probably could learn, but do you know what, I don’t want to. So, am I therefore not independent in car maintenance or spreadsheet writing?

The Independent Living Movement fiercely upholds the idea of independent living as the concept of having the same freedoms and choices as non-disabled people, and there’s loads of great writing that unpicks what it means.

So, what’s my point? Simply that, as we think about what we mean by social care and embrace the Social Care Future vision of we all want to live in a place we call home, can we just take a moment to think about the message we are giving people when we encourage independence - and appreciate that sometimes, it might just be a situation where someone needs their shoes put on so they can get to the pub?

PS. Have you heard about the upcoming workshop for Social Work Week?

Creating Gloriously Ordinary Lives - workshop. Social Work Week is all about taking time to reflect on your role as a social worker. Join Tricia Nicoll to explore what Gloriously Ordinary Lives means for you as a social worker and to pause and think.

PPS. Did you see? The Gloriously Ordinary Sundays Podcast episode 10 is here. I chat with James Townsend, Co-Founder and CEO of ⁠Mobilise⁠. We reflect on the importance of shifting how local councils view families, focusing on supporting them to live gloriously ordinary lives. It's about having early conversations, rethinking relationships between people with a caring role and those they support, and opening up new ways of understanding those connections.