By Neil
Crowther for Social Care Future #socialcarefuture
Don’t we all aspire to live in the place we
call home, with the people and things that we love, doing what matters to us in
communities where we all look out for one another?
Isn’t that what great care and support helps us
to achieve? By combining greater investment with reforms to unlock the already abundant
resources and power to make change in communities across our country we can
look forward to this future.
That’s the vision our growing movement
aspires to, but it faces a major hurdle. In new research, to be published next
week, we find that our vision isn’t the story of social care presently being
told to, heard by and understood by the public.
Where we see care and support as offering a
springboard, the dominant narrative paints it as a safety net. While we seek to generate ecosystems of
reciprocal community support, care is talked about as a one-way street, with
‘vulnerable people’ ‘looked after’ by regulated personal care services. We have
great stories of how great support transforms people’s lives, but the story
told and heard is of a broken system in crisis, dangerous to those who use
it. We point to the huge value to
society of what comes of great support, yet the story out there is of a
spiralling financial burden that needs to be contained.
Why is framing important? As Professor
George Lakoff has explained: ‘Frames are mental structures that shape the way
we see the world. In politics our frames shape our social policies and the
institutions we form to carry out policies.
To change our frames is to change all of this. Framing is social change.’
Our new report is the first stage of a project
to reframe the narrative around great care and support. Next we will be commissioning more research to
understand the current landscape of discourse and opinion, to get into the
mindsets of target audiences and to work out the most persuasive ways to enlist
support for our goals.
To change social care we need to change the
story about social care.
Neil Tweets @neilmcrowther
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