The View from Here project was designed to understand the experiences, attitudes and outlook of the social services workforce in Scotland.
There has been a lot of emphasis on understanding the perspectives of practitioners in social services; however, much of this research has tended to focus on separate sub-sectors (i.e. some focus on statutory social workers, others on workers in the voluntary sector etc.). This project centred on supporting greater understanding of all types of people in all types of roles in order to enable comparison and to understand the current reality of the workforce. To do this, we created a survey in partnership with The Guardian Social Care Network, which generated responses from 2167 people.
We were also aware that much research on the social services workforce often fails to reach those who work most closely with those supported by services, and we were very keen to ensure the views of this vital group were included. We took an in-depth creative and qualitative approach with 74 staff to develop a greater understanding of their day-to-day experiences of supporting people and their views on a variety of topics.
Thanks and Acknowledgements
This work wouldnโt have been possible without the project team at Iriss, our partners at the Guardian who supported the national workforce element of the project, and partners from CCPS, Scottish Care, University of Strathclyde and a group of illustrators who supported the qualitative data analysis and visualisation elements of the work.
Most of all, we have been privileged to hear the experiences and to learn from many people from a range of different backgrounds and perspectives working in social services. Our sincerest gratitude goes to all of those practitioners who gave their time and shared their stories and perspectives. Their work continues to be a source of inspiration to us all and we have been very privileged to catch a glimpse of the work that they do.
Artists
Read artist reflections about their work on this project.
- Chelsea Frew – illustrator View Chelsea’s images
- Hannah Nixon – illustrator View Hannah’s images
- Jessica Taylor – illustrator View Jessica’s images
- Sam Walker – illustrator View Sam’s images