Social Work and Disability, Peter Simcock and Rhoda Castle

As Simcock and Castle note, Mike Oliver came to the conclusion that ‘We can probably now announce the death of social work at least in relationship to its involvement in the lives of disabled people’ (cited at p. 140) thirty years after he developed the social model of disability in his ground-breaking book, Social Work with Disabled People (1983). At the time and as a newly appointed lecturer in disability studies teaching on qualifying social work programmes, this declaration of the demise of social work with disabled people was dispiriting. Perhaps more importantly, it felt incongruent with the lived experience of the many disabled people whose lives were significantly affected by social work interventions and the great passion of many practitioners and academics about the potential of social work to challenge disablism and work in alliance with disabled people. To be sure, as this timely and helpful contribution from Peter Simcock and Rhoda Castle acknowledges, social work has often failed disabled people. Too many disabled people are inappropriately living in institutions rather than their communities (James et al., 2016), experience poorer outcomes across the life course (DWP, 2015) and are disproportionally affected by austerity (Duffy, 2014). Moreover, social work, as a profession and discipline, has frequently failed to make a convincingly inspiring case for what social work can offer disabled people. This engaging practical text which is firmly grounded in disability studies seeks, with great success in my view, to address these failures.