‘I just want to do good social work again!’ This is a statement you will often hear social workers make these days. There is a yearning across adult social care to work in a more personalised way – to have time to get to know the people they support. Social workers who have been practising for a while connect with this straight away and say: ‘Great we are going back to our roots, this is community social work.’

After many years of austerity and change in social care, it seems that we may have drifted quite far from this model. We have developed instead, a ‘care management approach’, where time and resources are often focused on servicing processes and minimising risks, rather than on the people we support or the intervention we provide.