ABSTRACT
Someone to watch over, this is the opening of a television programme me broadcast on the BBC in December 2004. It was the last in a series of six programmes about social workers in Bristol in the UK during 2003. Each programme followed how two or three social workers managed their work with children and families, with clips from meetings with other professionals and parents, telephone conversations and shots to camera. Social workers are constantly balancing competing demands, risks and responses – children’s versus parents’ needs, caring versus confrontational stances, immediate versus measured reactions. For the social workers themselves their close involvement with children and families means they are intimately involved in successes and failures. When things go well with families able to care for their children without further concerns or children rescued from abusive homes, then the rewards are high, although rarely acknowledged.
