ABSTRACT
The single social service department came into being in April 1971 integrating what had previously been separate departmental silos. Social workers lost their specialisms and began to tackle a generic range of needs and problems. Following the death of Maria Colwell, age 7, a child under local authority supervision, in 1973 social work practice sought to respond to newly revealed levels of child abuse. The case for an overhaul of child law that balanced the welfare of children with parent responsibility built up slowly from the mid 1970s on, culminating in the Children Act 1989. By the 1980s social workers and their organizations began to look at society in a different way – taking the measure of socially constructed stereotypes that shaped the lives of users. Countering racism, deemed endemic in society, became a major focus for practice. Feminists opposing the oppression of women joined with advocates for disability rights and gay and lesbian practitioners to develop a broad anti-oppressive practice. With the passage of the Community Care and NHS Act 1990 – a new agent found its way into social services and into social work: the quasi-market – which would impose market discipline on providers of social services by splitting off providers of a service from those commissioners who would buy that service. Within a dozen years this mechanism would transform social services, and the values on which they were based.
