What are the experiences of fulfilling Care Act 2014 duties for social workers in mental health settings?

: (Alternative Format Thesis)

Abstract

This thesis explores the experiences of social workers in English mental health settings in fulfilling duties given to them under the Care Act 2014. This Act is the primary social care legislation in England, placing duties on Local Authorities to assess and meet the social care needs of their populations, as well as the needs of carers. A decade on from its implementation, reviews of the Care Act 2014 have reported concerns regarding the abilities of Local Authorities to fulfil their statutory duties as well as significant challenges in the recruitment and retention of social workers in social care services. This indicates that mental health social workers operate within a problematic context. Despite these challenges, little is known about the experiences of mental health social workers who fulfil Care Act 2014 duties in Local Authority and NHS settings. This research gap is addressed in this thesis, which aims to develop understandings of how social workers in mental health settings fulfil Care Act 2014 duties and understand their professional identity.

Drawing on a critical framework informed by the work of Pierre Bourdieu, the concepts of habitus, field, and capital are utilised to explore how social workers navigate the organisational and statutory demands of English mental health social care practice. The thesis includes a scoping review chapter which, through an analysis of 35 papers, identifies key themes relating to mental health social work identity, notably that social workers view their profession as providing distinctive approaches to mental health, rooted in holistic, rights-based, and socially-oriented outlooks. Analysis of key policy contexts for social workers in mental health settings in England follows. This highlights challenges for the historic collectivist and welfarist dispositions of the profession, and the holistic character of social work practice identified in the scoping review, in the context of individualising policy reforms and personalisation agendas. This is positioned as forming a practice context of a fragmented utilisation of the social work habitus in English mental health social care settings, with an emphasis on connecting individuals with support and choice over holistic and structural engagement with social care needs. This forms the foundation for the data collection and analysis of the thesis.

Interviews with participants were predominantly completed online using a semi-structured interview approach. Twenty-six social workers were interviewed from across ten Local Authority and NHS mental health services. Interviews were transcribed and analysed through a thematic analysis, which is presented across three chapters. The first explores participant experiences of professional identity in English mental health social care settings. This finds that, despite offering holistic perspectives to mental health need, social workers recognise interprofessional hierarchies, and reduced status for the profession, in these settings. The second chapter explores social workers’ experiences of the Care Act 2014 in mental health settings. This finds that social workers in these settings hold status in relation to expertise of Care Act 2014 thresholds, although these legal frameworks risk placing overbearing demands on practice and limits the realisation of core dispositions of the profession. Moreover, the Care Act 2014 is viewed by some social workers as promoting a narrow practice focus, but others adopt creative and pragmatic strategies to meet both legal duties and a wider sense of a professional identity. The third chapter considers the experience of time and discretion by participants. This finds that control over the use of time in mental health social care practice is a key struggle for social workers, with organisational demands on time limiting professional judgements and discretion over practice.

Recommendations for policy and practice are identified in light of these findings. These include recommendations for professional associations and regulatory bodies to promote the professional discretion of social workers in how they assess and meet the social care needs of users of services. Opportunities for Local Authorities and NHS mental health services to better promote the skills and approaches of social work within mental health settings are also identified. An increased emphasis in social work education programmes on interprofessional working in mental health settings is also recommended to facilitate a prepared and resilient social work workforce. These findings also intervene on extant Bourdieu-informed critical perspectives in the social work literature, in which the role of social work in the ‘struggle’ of the field of practice is viewed as negotiating either an adaptation of the habitus to the demands of the field or ‘activist’ attempts to change the field to align with the habitus. This thesis finds that many participants navigate a middle ground of creative, flexible, and pragmatic engagement with the ‘rules’ of the field whilst seeking to fulfil the core dispositions of their professional identity.

Date of Award	18 Feb 2026
Original language	English
Awarding Institution	University of Bath
Supervisor	Megan Robb (Supervisor), Alinka Gearon (Supervisor), Jeremy Dixon (Supervisor), Judy Laing (Supervisor) & Louise Brown (Supervisor)