Why aren’t strengths-based approaches working?

I ask that as someone who has spent quite a lot of the last twenty years advocating for them. At their heart, public services are relationships between people who seek support and people offering support. These relationships are only useful when they are relational and strengths-based: relational because we need to build a good understanding of each other if we are to work on the right things in the right way, and strengths-based because the help we all sometimes need to live well must be led by us, and build our own capabilities as much as possible.

That sounds obvious, particularly to people who don’t work in public services, but it’s not a given. Our public services are scarce, expensive and often free of charge, so we only offer them to people who need them. The decision about whether or not we need a particular service is the starting point for the system focusing on our needs, and can lead to it ignoring our strengths, which quickly becomes disempowering and restrictive.

Strengths-based practice is needed, and the shift towards it has been significant: there can’t be many councils or social care provider organisations that don’t at least claim their approach is strengths-based. But that shift hasn’t resulted in social care systems which are consistently enabling greater independence and becoming more sustainable. In many areas, reliance on the most restrictive forms of social care for working age adults is increasing, including for young people where care packages involving very high staff ratios are becoming more rather than less common. All of this is contributing to social care systems becoming less sustainable.

So… are strengths-based approaches just another sector fad that doesn’t work?

I think we can identify three reasons why strengths-based approaches do not always deliver the results we are looking for. More importantly, we can use these to identify what does work:

1. Practitioners recognise people’s current strengths but don’t always identify opportunities to support people to develop the new skills and relationships needed for future independence.
2. Systems are not consistently aligned around independence – from first contact, through to assessments and support plans.
3. There is a disconnect between councils, provider organisations, the voluntary sector and people themselves. Council teams are not always aware of what is out there and may feel under too much time pressure to get creative.

What is needed is a shift towards what I would describe not as strengths-based practice, but an independence-focused system: one that builds and maintains capacity, confidence and connections, enabling people to maintain or even increase their independence. Whole system alignment is often missing when the focus is just on strengths-based practice. Here are three linked ways we and the councils we work with have been making that shift.

1. Looking beyond current strengths. Practitioners need to identify which skills and relationships people could build or maintain, and how. Our Valuing Good Lives approach, built around 12 domains of wellbeing, encourages practitioners to identify opportunities to build on strengths, not just meet need.
2. Shift from practice to system focus. Practice change can’t just sit within a council’s social work team. It needs to be a system change which establishes a shared ambition for maximising independence from first contact through to support plans, incentivising the right behaviours from providers. This is hard to do when teams are under huge and increasing time pressure, so system alignment is crucial.
3. Enable time for creativity. We need to move from a focus on getting through as many assessments or reviews as possible, towards being able to invest time in creating and realising opportunities for change. Co-producing creative approaches to living well, which may not rely on traditional support provision, takes time but it’s worth it – both for people to live fuller lives, and to deliver more sustainable support systems.