Face the Facts - Jobcentre Plus - Not Working Link: Jobcentre Plus
John Waite
At a time of record unemployment, more and more people are visiting the Jobcentre Plus. There are now over one and a half million people claiming Jobseekers Allowance, and nearly twice as many people sign on at one of 747 jobcentres across the UK than since the start of the recession.
This where the new jobless meet their Personal Advisor, who is there to help them find a job and assess whether or not they are entitled to benefits. It is a key service in helping tackle unemployment. But there is concern that advisors are not able to deliver the personalised and professional service promised by the government because they are so badly stretched.John Waite asks whether the tough targets imposed on Personal Advisors mean they don't have time to help jobseekers look for work, only administer benefits. This is despite assurances from the Jobcentre Plus that there are jobs out there - it boasts that an average of 10,000 new vacancies are advertised in its offices every day.
John examines claims that Personal Advisors are under-resourced, under-trained, under pressure and unprepared for the demands of this growing unemployment crisis, and asks how they can provide the personal and professional service that is promised, and so desperately needed, during the recession.
- Broadcast on:
- BBC Radio 4, 9:00pm Sunday 16th August 2009
- Duration:
- 26 minutes
- Available until:
- 12:00am Thursday 1st January 2099
- Categories:
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BBC Radio 4 Broadcast; 16th August 2009The above broadcast illustrates the same kind of challenges that most social care, health care, housing, policing and other community and social services, increasingly have to face, even before this big crisis hit us.
In fact, these bigger crises are the consequence of the same illustrated, institutionalised incompetence. Inadequately skilled providers and managers, implementing otherwise competent and good intentioned, enabling services.
More are going to surface soon - watch this space.
These are the same underlying inadequacies that are always there, but become magnified in a time of severe crisis. There is no 'margins of error', or 'built in redundancy', to ensure the systems are maintained during a crisis.
The 'pig flu' debacle is another example of this institution speak.
The same overburdening, overwhelming, inadequate resourced, contradictory requirements, dishonest prioritisations and ineffective and dishonest rationales, stop us looking at the more fundamental problems, which then repeatedly generate one avoidable crisis after another.
These mistaken initiative then keep repeating and feeding off themselves, in an institutionalizing, dependency creating, downward spiral. What we get is a caricature of the original service; one that is defensive & self interested, ineffectual, disabling and increasingly criticised.
The effects are actually quite traumatic, for many individuals involved in providing services and in the communities that they serve. Those that do survive the abusive conditions are often hardened, desensitised and defensive as a result.
These resultant 'defensive' systems then loose their original intention and just become another expensive inhibition to real progress, rather than the intended constructive enabling service they were nominally designed to be.
Creativity, professional discretion and adaptability go out the window and the 'system' looses critical reflectivity, becomes increasing inflexible and fearful of 'being found out to be lacking' (a fact often already obvious to those outside).
In this program you will hear recounted the dictate of Doug Watkins – HR Director for Jobcentre Plus, who is clearly advocating 'gagging' all who may have a critical insight. The intention here is not to simply maintain reasonable professional 'discretion' (a tolerable restriction).
The wording and general style is typical of such institutionalized services. The purpose is to hide the negligent incompetence of themselves, or those who employ them (and may therefore sack them for alleged incompetence). See Disciplinary Threats
The trick here is to put everyone in the same 'target frame' for potential disciplinary action, or for accusation of incompetence. Fear is once more used to stifle all critical analysis and self reflection; Nothing learned, nothing gained. See: Chicken Pecking Order
Expressing any honest opinion, or reflection upon their own roles, or the purpose and objectives of the institution is thereby disabled. The system becomes less transparent, less self correcting and contradicts the original, constructive purpose.
This is a classic example of the destructive use of psychological techniques and dishonest representations of social theory. It involves a fundamental distortion of 'the science' and even a misrepresentation of Law and principles of good Social Order.
The arguments in this Service Managers edict are actually 'Unlawful', 'Dishonest' and certainly not in the public interest. The edict, in appearing to advocate using discretion, actually contradicts all 'public' professional obligations for openness and transparency.
Further more, this is a 'multiple' contradiction of basic human rights, human dignity (people are forced to lie to self & others), professional ethics, basic health & safety regulations and the professional obligations to 'self', 'customers' and 'stakeholders'.
Review:
Well done John Waite - Keep up the good work. There are substantially more institutions you could valuably investigate. Increasing numbers of vocally competent and confident people are having to use these various community services.
Their complaints are more difficult to 'put down' as the grumblings of the 'great unwashed' and 'inadequate people in social housing'. They are all vulnerable to the same types of incompetent support though.
If the necessary revisions to these institutions are delayed, valuable, insightful, professional and community skills and insights will be lost. We will then return to another episode of de-humanising and disabling practices, which will be difficult to undo.
Mind Changers - Series 4 - 4. Arden House Link: Arden House
Claudia Hammond
"And Experiment in Learned Helplessness"
Claudia Hammond presents a series looking at the development of the science of psychology during the 20th century.
She re-visits Ellen Langer and Judith Rodin's 1976 study, conducted in a New England nursing home, Arden House.
When the two psychologists set up the experiment so that residents on two floors of the 360-bed home for the elderly would experience some changes in their everyday life, they had no idea that they were introducing factors which could prolong life.
While residents on both floors were given plants and film shows, only those on the fourth floor had the opportunity to control these events: choosing the plant and looking after it themselves, and choosing which night of the week to view the film.
Eighteen months later, when Langer and Rodin returned to the home, they were astonished to discover that twice as many of the elderly residents in this 'choices' group were alive, compared with the control group on the second floor, who had been given plants that the staff tended, and were told which was their film night. It appeared that taking control made you live longer.
These findings fit in well with the work on learned helplessness in dogs which Martin Seligman had done in the late 1960s, and on Langer and Rodin's own studies on the perception of control.
Claudia Hammond meets Ellen Langer, now Professor of Psychology at Harvard, and hears about Arden House and the work she has gone on to do on what she calls 'mindfulness'. She visits Arden House, which is still a nursing home, and is shown around by current administrator Joanne Scafati.
Dr Zelda Di Blasi, who lectures in psychology at University College, Cork, sets the study in context, and Rosalie Kane, Professor of Public Health at the University of Minnesota, and Howard Kaplan, CEO of City Club Living accommodation for the elderly, discuss the impact of Langer/Rodin on care of the elderly.
- Broadcast on:
- BBC Radio 4, 11:00am Monday 17th August 2009
- Duration:
- 30 minutes
- Available until:
- 12:00am Thursday 1st January 2099
- Categories:
©
BBC Radio 4 Broadcast;17th August 2009
