We work in domiciliary care, supporting people in various ways in their own homes. The relationship between paid homecare workers and the people we support is often complex.

The intrinsically ‘social’ part of social care means we are encouraged to form genuine relationships with the people we visit. Companionship and emotional support are, therefore, a central component of our responsibilities. We get to know people’s likes and dislikes, and often assist with the most intimate of daily routines. This must all be done while maintaining strict professional and personal boundaries. Unsurprisingly, the lines sometimes become blurred.

Professional boundaries are the official rules and limits in place between a paid care worker and the person they support, as set by legal, ethical, and organisational frameworks. For example, we should not accept gifts from clients, overshare personal details about ourselves or exchange personal phone numbers.

Yet due to the social nature of our roles, it may feel natural for the people we support to want to treat us as a friend or extension to their family, which could mean offering gifts on occasions like our birthdays, or when we visit them on Christmas Day. To maintain strict professional boundaries in these circumstances can be awkward to say the least and, depending on the individual, cause real offence.

Continuity of care is hugely important to the wellbeing of the people we support. I (Hannah) remember an individual being upset because in one week she had seen ten different caregivers: some familiar, some not. Imagine ten people coming into your home at different times, seeing you at your most vulnerable? This can be very anxiety-inducing. Aside from a general sense of unease, there is also the frustration of having to explain specific preferences, routines, the places that things are kept and so on, to each new caregiver. Two people may get into a good routine and then all of a sudden somebody new takes the caregiver’s place and the process must begin again from scratch. Good continuity of care also allows us to pick up on small but sometimes important changes that an unfamiliar face is unlikely to notice. Whether that’s a change in behaviour, eating habits or general wellbeing. Our employers benefit from ensuring good continuity of care because it allows them to develop consistent runs, keeping both employees and clients happy.

With clear benefits to all involved, you would expect continuity of care to be a fine-tuned art. So how come so many people live with a ‘revolving door’ of different faces turning up at their home?

To an extent, change and unpredictability are inevitable features of adult social care, particularly in a domiciliary context, whereby the people we support often vary due to hospitalisation, relocation to care homes and lives coming to an end. This leads to regular rota changes, which can cause frequent disruption to an individual’s care package.

Of greater significance is the fact that employment in domiciliary care generally offers little to buffer these unpredictabilities. The most common scenario in which a paid care worker provides support to someone in their own home is when they are employed by a homecare agency, of which there were over 13,000 in England alone at Skills For Care’s last count. The individual in need of support buys the services of the agency. Homecare workers are often paid for contact time only, their pay relying on a patchwork of visits rather than consistent shifts. When the inevitable happens and a client goes into hospital or passes away, this is experienced by workers as an immediate loss of income until a new client can be found to fill the gaps. This unpredictability of income is why many homecare workers move to roles in residential care settings like care homes or nursing homes, where they will be paid for a full shift regardless of whether some of the beds are empty.

Most but not all homecare employers set their hourly rate of pay at least a couple of pounds higher than the National Minimum Wage in an effort to ensure workers are paid at least this amount once unpaid gaps between visits are taken into account (legally payable up to 60 minutes). Yet Homecare Voices’ true hourly pay calculator finds evidence of widespread underpayment of the National Minimum Wage in homecare as a result of these unpaid gaps. This is a known issue throughout the sector. Due to these realities of pay and working conditions in homecare, many of us do not stay in the role for long, with resounding implications for continuity of care.

For paid care workers, there is a drawback to forming strong relationships with the people we support. Doing so can put pressure on us to put up with poor pay and working conditions imposed on us by an employer, since we do not wish to let down the people we support. Unfortunately, a ‘labour of love, not money’ culture alongside a pressure to always be prepared to ‘take one for the team’ can be taken advantage of by those managing homecare agencies.

On the earlier point of professional boundaries, from a practical point of view, it can be difficult to maintain these since we are generally expected to use our personal phones for work purposes. Employers will often ask us to contact clients using these, for example, to let them know if we’re running late. Sometimes employers specifically request that we keep a line of communication open with certain clients or their family members, using our personal phones to do so. Since the majority of us are employed via zero-hours contracts or restrictive Certificates of Sponsorship, there is pressure to do as instructed by our employer in such scenarios.

Our priority as homecare workers is to ensure people can lead the life they wish to with our well-placed support. We will continue to establish good relationships where possible, doing our utmost to remain on the right side of that professional boundary and accepting that change is an inevitable part of the work we do.

Homecare Voices is a free-to-join, not-for-profit peer support network run by and for domiciliary care workers throughout the UK. Established in 2023, over 500 homecare workers are now part of this growing community, which aims not only to ensure access to high-quality, peer-led support for lone workers in high-responsibility roles but also to bring the voices of more homecare workers to national conversations about the future of adult social care.

Rachel Kelso is a domiciliary care worker and the founder of Homecare Voices: a free-to-join, not-for-profit peer support network and advocacy body run by and for domiciliary care workers in the UK. With daily talking points and fortnightly online meetups, Homecare Voices is a trusted community of best practice for lone workers in notoriously precarious roles. By connecting people with opportunities to participate in research and attend external events, Homecare Voices provides a channel through which the insights of those at the helm of the adult social care system may be heard.

 Hannah Reseigh-Lincoln is a Senior Care Giver who works full-time in the community, travelling to people’s homes to provide care. She has been in the caregiving profession for nearly three years following a significant career change. Hannah is a volunteer member of the Care Workers Charity Advisory Board and the Champions Project, as well as a member of the Homecare Voices community, founded by Rachel.

Image credit: Alex Boyd via Unsplash

Date of birth: 25 September 1931

Primary condition: Old age

My dear sweet Nancy. This lady was the first client to break my heart. I was the first carer to visit her. She lived in a large detached house in a quiet cul-de-sac. Her front door was unlocked. I knocked and entered. She sat on the sofa with her neighbour and friend. She was small and slight, birdlike, frail. Her skin was dark and looked bruised. She had an air of defiance. She didn’t look at me. Her friend smiled and looked embarrassed. “Hello,” I said. Nancy didn’t respond, but looked to her neighbour and asked, “Who is she?”. “My name is Julie,” I said. “I’m here to help.” Again, she turned to her neighbour: “But I don’t need these people!” Her neighbour turned to me and apologised. “I’m so sorry,” she said. “Nancy has never needed carers before, but they wouldn’t let her come out of the hospital without you. She’s been incredibly independent her whole life. Never needed help before. She’s struggling to come to terms with the situation she’s now in.”

And there we have it. I don’t know Nancy from Adam. I’ve never set foot in her home before, and yet here I am. I have let myself in, just shouting “Hello” as I enter her hallway. This is my workplace, but it’s also Nancy’s home, a place where she feels safe and secure. She’s always been able to dictate who comes through her door, until now.

Nancy wasn’t happy I was there – a stranger in her home. I hadn’t been invited. She, like many older people (but not all), was resisting the ageing process with every fibre of her being. Yes, this was going to prove challenging, but her failure to acknowledge she was old and her utter determination to fight the ageing process, ignore it, turn a blind eye to it, whatever term you use, was in itself inspiring. As time went on, I began to admire that fighting spirit. In her mind, she was still youthful, beautiful, spirited and I loved her for it.

I didn’t do much on that first call. I don’t think Nancy once made eye contact with me, but as I left, I turned to her and said quietly, “I understand why you don’t want me here, I honestly do, but one day, maybe you will look forward to my visits.” I didn’t know it at the time, but those words turned out to be more accurate than I could possibly have imagined.

My first few visits to Nancy were stilted. I had an hour for her tea call and an hour for her bed call and there wasn’t a great deal to do. It was difficult to fill the time. I did what I had to do. I never pushed her to open up to me, though I desperately wanted her to. It started slowly, little snippets of her life, which she delivered while I was doing something else – cleaning, cooking. She was from Oxford and had one child, a son. When he was eight years old, she discovered he was diabetic. This was a story she told me many times. How in those days it was much more difficult to give him injections. She said she did it every day for him until he could do it himself. At this point she would demonstrate how it’s done today by tapping her arm gently. “In those days it was a huge great needle and you did this!” She would thump her fist against her arm from a distance to demonstrate just how big and painful that needle was! She bruised her arm many times doing this.

Her son went to Nottingham University, where he met his future wife. They had two children – a girl and a boy. Nancy’s husband decided it would be a good idea to move to Nottingham to be closer to them, so they did. She hated it. Another story she regularly relayed to me was how that very first day in Nottingham, while her husband was out, she left the house and got into her car. It was, she told me, a top-of-the-range sports car. As I got to know Nancy better, I realised that she liked to have the best of everything and she wanted everyone to know it! She drove around Nottingham, she told me. She had no idea where she was going, she just drove, for miles, along unfamiliar roads. As she drove, she began to cry. “Damn that husband of mine,” she said to herself. “Why am I here? I have no friends here, this place is alien to me.” She drove for hours and hours and got utterly lost. She decided she was not going to stay. She was going back to Oxford.

Nancy is now 96. She’s still in Nottingham and I am her carer. Her son brings bottles of white wine. He hides them in a cupboard. I should get one out on a Friday evening, he tells me, for her to have over the weekend. If we don’t hide it, she would drink a bottle a day. I smile and look at his wife, who smiles back. Is she thinking the same as me? She’s 96! I think if I were 96, I would probably do whatever I damn well liked, and if that meant drinking a bottle of wine every day, then that’s exactly what I would do. Obviously her son doesn’t think so, but what her son doesn’t know, although he’ll find out soon enough, is that Nancy knows exactly where he hides that wine!

Nancy’s tea call starts at 3.30pm and ends at 4.30pm. A few minutes before I leave, I can see her eyeing up that cupboard. I know that the moment I’m gone, she will be there rummaging around the back of it for that bottle. When I come back at 8.30pm she’ll be halfway through it. She’s so small and frail that half a bottle of wine is the equivalent of you or I drinking two. She laughs and giggles like a child. She recounts the time she kissed another man behind her husband’s back. He went to his grave not knowing about that one. She has been propositioned more times than I think I’ve had hot meals. She was stunningly beautiful. She believes she still is. Next to her bed on her bedside table is some face powder and lipstick. Every now and then, she reaches for it and applies it while looking into her little handheld mirror. “I look good for 96, don’t I?” she says. “You look amazing,” I tell her. What she actually looks like is a 96-year-old woman applying make up to a little wizened face, but she’s happy in her belief, and if Nancy is happy, then so am I.

It isn’t long before her son realises that hiding the wine is a fruitless endeavour. She will find it no matter where he puts it. She can smell the alcohol from any room in the house. In the end he concedes defeat. “She can have it when she wants it,” he says, so her first glass gets earlier and earlier. She begins to pour herself a glass before I leave her tea call and then she starts pouring it as I walk into her home for her tea call, eventually having a full glass in hand when I get there at 3.30. Sometimes she meets me at the front door, glass in hand. She knows all the young children in the street. They shout “Hello!” when they see her. She presses her small wiry fingers to her lips and blows them all a kiss. “Hello darlings!” she smiles.

I continue to see Nancy regularly. We talk, we laugh, we cry and on one occasion she turns to me and says suddenly, “who are you and why did you start coming here?” “I’m your carer,” I say. “Oh no,” she replies. “You’re not my carer, you’re my friend!”

Of course, Nancy is old, and with or without her wine, she’s getting more and more frail. Although it’s a slow process, I see her deteriorate before my eyes. She just finds it harder and harder to get around, until eventually she is bedridden. A few days before she passes, she’s not really engaging anymore. Her friends and family come more frequently. They’re often here when I visit. They sit next to her bed and hold her hand. She stops eating and eventually stops drinking. Not even the wine can tempt her. On her last evening, I sit on the edge of her bed. As I reach for her hand, she opens her eyes. Smiling sweetly, she simply say,s “hello darling,” and closes her eyes again. The next day, she is gone. She died on the same day as my daughter’s 18th birthday. I won’t forget that day, nor will I forget my dear friend Nancy.

The day after Nancy’s death, the office removed her calls from my rota. In Nancy’s space, there is simply an unpaid gap. We only get paid for our time with clients, nothing in between, not for travel time nor for gaps between calls, so my pay will inevitably go down. I may or may not be able to afford my bills because of this.

When I receive my rota for the following week, there is another call in Nancy’s place. A lady I have never met before, a new client perhaps. I don’t want to go. She is not Nancy. I’m yet to meet her, but I feel I already dislike her for no apparent reason. There is a word, you see, that no one in the office ever cares to use. They are aware of this word, but it’s not in their interest to acknowledge it. They are a business, and their primary objective is to make money. If it isn’t profitable for them, then it isn’t going to happen.

The word I’m talking about is grief. To be an exemplary carer, we must care. Sounds obvious! And yet the companies we work for seem to lack compassion for anyone – their staff, their clients. A client dies. This means the funding this client brings to them ceases. So they simply look for another source of revenue.

Not once did anyone from the office ask if I was OK, if I needed some time to grieve, a couple of days off, a chat, a good cry, or a hug. They don’t want carers to care, they want us to do the tasks set out in each care plan, then move on to the next call. They don’t want us to form bonds. They want to be able to change our rotas when it suits them. Clients we saw every day for years could suddenly be whipped off our runs and allocated to someone else, someone who had no idea of their routines, their needs, their likes and dislikes. This has a detrimental effect on us and the clients we are caring for.

In the end, I had no choice but to accept the change in my rota. I couldn’t take time off as these companies don’t provide sick pay. So you bury your grief. It’s all you can do, but it’s something we all experience, and the lack of support we receive when it happens is just one of the many injustices we experience as care workers.

Julie Sansom has worked in domiciliary care for around seven years. She entered the care sector after being made redundant from a 20-year career in an office-based role. She is a passionate advocate for fair employment practices within the care sector, especially the elimination of zero-hours contracts. She believes these contracts offer no job security or consistency and can often be used exploitatively by employers, silencing workers’ dissent by threatening to reduce their hours.

This article is part of a book Julie is writing about her experiences working in the private care sector. The book seeks to lift the lid on what is really happening from the inside.

Image credit: Chastagner Thierry via Unsplash

The role of employers in supporting the provision and providers of care labour takes various forms. Employers of workers in the social care sector are clearly critical. However, there are other important relationships between carers and employers that are less well recognised or understood. A growing number of employees in the general workforce provide unpaid care outside their paid employment for a family member, friend or neighbour affected by long-term illness, disability or old age. Perhaps employers are seen to have a less moral, more instrumental economic stake; we are therefore less inclined to call on them to create a supportive environment for effective and sustainable caregiving alongside employment. However, we suggest that employers play an important role in shaping experiences of care provision. Neglecting to understand their perspectives is likely to be to the detriment of both carers and employers.

Globally, unpaid caregiving is a widespread phenomenon. According to the International Alliance of Carer Organizations (IACO), reported in Embracing Carers, there are 63 million carers internationally, with 67 per cent of them being the primary carer for a household member. Around the world, 16 billion hours are spent providing unpaid domestic and care work. If a monetary value is to be assigned, then the hours spent are equivalent to a substantial portion of global GDP, exceeding 40 per cent in some countries according to conservative estimates. While the economic value of unpaid care work is acknowledged, it does not reflect in measures of the economy. Unpaid or underpaid care work fundamentally remains invisible, and potential costs to the economy resulting from providing unpaid care, e.g. loss of labour and skills and underemployment in terms of hours, wages and skills, are largely overlooked.

Given the ageing global population, it is estimated that care needs will increase significantly, worsening the existing care crisis. By 2030, an extra 100 million older people and an additional 100 million children aged 6–14 will need care.

Increasing demand for care is also an important issue in the UK. Carers UK’s Valuing Carers 2021 report suggests that unpaid carers provide care worth £162 billion a year in England and Wales (similar to the year’s NHS spending budget!). The Labour government’s current economic growth agenda to promote employment, increase productivity and reduce economic inactivity offers fertile ground to explore further the implications of care for employment. Unpaid carers are explicitly mentioned in the Ministerial Foreword to the Get Britain Working White Paper, but they are not a focus of the report. This is surprising, given that the majority of unpaid carers are of working age. Carers UK suggests that as many as one in seven of all employees are unpaid carers, and it is estimated that almost two million employees in the UK will take on this role every year.

Considering the current spiralling social care crisis, working carers are an increasingly critical resource in an already burdened social care system. While much emphasis has been placed on the value of this unpaid care and carers’ struggle to combine care roles with paid employment, things have not improved much beyond the Carer’s Leave Act and the Flexible Working Act. In this regard, we draw attention to employers’ relative lack of voice in the debates concerning working carers. While some employers have policies to support carers, many do not. We argue this could be because supporting working carers is framed as a wider social responsibility and an issue for the social care sector, wider community and voluntary sector organisations. A key stakeholder is thus overlooked, alongside their responsibility, capacity and motivation to support working carers.

Carers are often understandably reticent to discuss the impact of care roles on their paid work, and employers may be unaware they have carers working for them. This limited visibility makes it difficult to identify or attribute monetary/economic value to what skills are lost from the labour force when combining unpaid care with employment failures. What types of carers most successfully juggle these roles? Which groups do we lose altogether from the labour force and at what career stages? What skills are lost? Where are employers more effective at retaining skills, or more motivated to do so? What drives employers to support carers beyond appearing ‘carer friendly’ and meeting CSR objectives? By raising these questions, we propose a more nuanced examination of the ‘business case’ for providing workplace policies to support carers. While there is an estimate of the value to the economy of unpaid care work, there is a limited assessment of its cost to the economy (few reported estimates, e.g. £3.5 billion annually) in terms of lost productivity, skills and expertise. This should be of concern not only to employers but also to the government, and it is unlikely to be solved merely by employers offering family-friendly policies, flexible working and an annual week of paid leave.

In drawing attention to the role of employers in supporting working carers, we recognise that just as diversity is observed in carers – in terms of socioeconomic status and career needs – employers are also diverse (e.g. size, sector, financial resources and skills needs). Will all employers be equally committed to supporting carers? Are the espoused financial costs and benefits the same for all employers? And are employers equally equipped and resourced to support the diverse needs of carers working in their organisations?

There are tensions and complexities of relationships between employers and carers who are in, or wish to be in, paid employment. While there may be a moral and social case that we would all support, we need to better understand the role of employers as key stakeholders and the drivers that may leverage employer support of this critical but diverse group of carers in employment.

Chandrima Roy is an Assistant Professor in Work, Employment and Organisation Studies in the School of Management at the University of Leicester, UK. Her research explores the complex interplay between employment and caregiving, with a particular focus on the UK social care sector. Chandrima investigates care workers’ employment experiences and perceptions of job quality, offering insights with policy implications for employment practices, public service HRM and the retention of frontline care practitioners who support vulnerable populations. She collaborates closely with community partners, charities and care organisations to better understand the social and political tensions surrounding care provision and employment.

Katharine Venter is an Associate Professor of Sociology in the School of Management at the University of Leicester, UK. Throughout her career, she has explored the intersections between various forms of care roles and the dynamics of careers and working lives. Partly inspired by her own experiences of caregiving, Katharine’s research has focused on issues including the work and career experiences of those caring for children whose paths to independence may be affected by chronic illness or disability. She has also examined the tensions inherent in both paid and unpaid care roles within the non-profit and charity sectors.

Image credit: Max Kleinen via Unsplash

The facts on the climate crisis are now so clear that it would be a waste of my time to write about them at any length. In fact, Professor Kimberly Nicholas summed climate science up in 12 words:

I would also argue that many of the ways that we need to fix climate change have been rehearsed ad nauseam, yet it is meaningful action that proves more difficult. So the real question is what are the barriers that are stopping us from acting more decisively and how can we break them down?

The answer is of course multilayered and different for every section of society. I am going to focus here on education. This is partly because of my personal experience – I was, for a long time, a secondary teacher and I am now working with Let’s Go Zero, a project run by the charity Ashden, which supports climate action in hundreds of schools across England. And it is also partly because education has such potential to make change when it comes to the climate, given the way that schools act as a hub for so many communities.

Change is of course already taking place in schools, and despite the enormous pressures that they are under, there are some wonderful examples of action – from the installation of solar panels and heat pumps, and the embedding of sustainability in the curriculum of primary schools such as St Edmund Campion to the United Learning Trust’s switch to a renewable energy tariff for all of its 100+ schools. But change is not happening quickly enough for the generations that the schools exist to serve.

The obvious answer to the question of what is stopping more decisive action on climate change within education is money and capacity. The challenges of funding in education are well documented, and the 2024 NASUWT survey reports that four in five teachers say that teaching has adversely affected their mental health, the most important reason for this being workload.

In the current climate (no pun intended), an injection of cash or more teachers into the education system to tackle climate change is exceedingly unlikely, so I want instead to explore some more hopeful ways that we can drive forward climate change action in schools. There is no shortage of staff and students who care passionately about the environment. This is demonstrated both in the statistics – more than 7k schools have signed up to the Let’s Go Zero campaign (the national campaign uniting teachers, pupils, parents and their schools as they all work together to be zero carbon by 2030) – and through the numerous conversations that I have had in schools. However, we need to find better ways of channelling this care and passion to bring about meaningful action.

The first such way is by ensuring continuity. As I have discovered through my work with Let’s Go Zero, change within schools is so often driven by one person – a passionate teacher who leads an eco council, a committed headteacher who threads sustainability through the curriculum, a business manager who invests in renewable energy, or a site team who puts up solar panels. And while this change is often wonderful, it raises a problem – what happens when that person leaves? How can the momentum be sustained? Continuity can be enabled if climate action becomes a whole-school project that involves all of the people mentioned above. So instead of sporadic one-off assemblies, or brilliant but isolated projects by the eco club, there must be a wholehearted effort to embed sustainability into the school fabric – a continuous thread through all parts of the school with sustainability the focus in the way the school estate, the curriculum and the leadership is managed. This idea is supported by the DfE expectation that all schools will have a Climate Action Plan and sustainability lead in place by 2025. And importantly, the four areas covered by this plan (Decarbonisation, Adaptation and Resilience, Biodiversity and Curriculum and Green Careers) by necessity require a whole-school approach, since they cut across the responsibilities of many different staff. That is why I would encourage all schools to get support from Let’s Go Zero’s Climate Action Advisors, because we give free, independent support to create and deliver climate action plans.

The second way of achieving meaningful action is to align caring for the environment with caring for yourself. This could be seen as counterintuitive, given that the narrative around climate change action is usually one of denial and self-flagellation – deny yourself the enjoyment of flying to other countries, deny yourself meat, deny yourself consumption of fast fashion. And while all of these things are important to act upon, it seems to me that they will not be sustainable unless action is framed in a different way, by seeking to make change joyfully. Unless you find a way to care for the environment that motivates, sustains and inspires you, you are doomed to fail.

I have drawn this idea from the brilliant work of biologist and writer Ayana Elizabeth Johnson. She has created a Venn diagram (based on the Japanese concept of Ikigai) to inspire action.

She argues that the action you take as an individual should be at the intersection of three circles, each of which represents a question: What works need doing? What are you good at? What brings you joy? If you are a student in a school, you might know that the work that needs doing is to lower your school’s carbon footprint. You might recognise that your skills do not lie in altering the gas boiler settings, and equally you don’t have the influence to persuade all your teachers to car-share. Instead, you might draw on your interest in clothes and your skills in organisation and influencing peers and set up a uniform swap shop, recognising that a large part of a school’s carbon footprint lies in the production of school uniforms. Johnson believes that everyone should create their own Venn diagram and use the intersection of the circles to drive forward climate action. Self-care in this context means an acknowledgement of your own skills, needs and passions in the work that you do.

Finally, we need to give the care that young people feel about the environment a meaningful outlet when they leave school. It is not enough for schools to educate and take action on climate if there is no way for young people to then realise their passion for change through their work. It is well documented that green careers (in the broadest sense) are going to form a critical part of our economic future – in fact they are already playing a vital role in our current economy: The Confederation of British Industry (CBI) has just released analysis that states that the ‘green sector’ is growing at triple the rate of the UK economy and providing high-wage jobs across the country while cutting emissions and increasing energy security. As is stated by Green Shoots, a report by Green Alliance,

Numerous surveys have shown that young people are enthusiastic about working in green jobs, viewing them as modern, high skilled and interesting. But they are being held back by poor knowledge and awareness of the green economy. There are few opportunities for young people to develop the skills for this work both within and outside the mainstream educational curriculum…those from marginalised communities face additional barriers to accessing training.

As climate education and action takes hold in schools across England, this must be echoed by opportunities for meaningful careers in the environmental sector. We need to build on the work of organisations such as the Youth Environmental Service whose vision is that ‘every young person should have the chance to spend a year doing paid environmental work, addressing the growing gap between what needs to be done and the capacity to make it happen’.

Competing priorities in schools make it difficult to focus on an issue that sometimes feels far removed from the day-to-day struggles of getting students through the door, safeguarding them from numerous challenges and supporting them to pass exams that may shape their life opportunities. However, if the purpose of education in its broadest sense is to enable young people to thrive in the world, then caring for that world must be fundamental. In Johnson’s words: ‘Averting climate catastrophe – this is the work of our lifetimes… Be tenacious on behalf of life on Earth.’

 Oci Stott is a teacher and environmentalist, now working as a Climate Action Advisor for Ashden’s Let’s Go Zero Campaign. In this role she advises schools and trusts across London on how to embed sustainability in all aspects of their work (including green skills and careers). Prior to this role she was a secondary English teacher and sustainability lead for many years. She has extensive experience of working in schools and is passionate about supporting them to take action on climate change.

Image credit: Markus Spiske via Unsplash

In this Futures of Work issue, we focus on continuity and change in caring relationships. In the NICE (National Institute for Health and Care Excellence) quality standard on people’s experience using adult social care services, quality statement 3 asserts: ‘People using adult social care services have continuity of care and support.’ Knowing a person, their preferences and needs, goes the rationale, allowing better care provision, with positive impacts for a person’s wellbeing and quality of life. Unfortunately, the articles in this issue show that this is more of an ambition than a reality. We include diverse perspectives on what it means to provide care, whether in the workplace or in the home. We explore relationships between care providers and care recipients, both in the context of adult social care service provision and beyond it. 

 A theme of continuity and change in care runs through all the pieces. In the opening article, Duncan U. Fisher uses Penny Morland’s book A Fortunate Woman as his jumping-off point. He considers Morland’s argument that continuity of care should once again be integral to shaping general practice services and work. This theme is reflected in Hannah Reseigh-Lincoln and Rachel Kelso’s piece, written from the perspective of domiciliary care workers. They outline how boundaries between care worker and cared for can become blurred and how this makes it all the more important to have continuity of care. They also describe, however, how the very nature of such care means that ‘many people live with a “revolving door”’ of different faces turning up at their home. This can have huge implications for those receiving care and their ability to engage with and trust their (changing) care workers. Julie Sansom describes this in her account of client Nancy S, who initially rejects her and then becomes a friend. The cycles of continuity and change continue after Nancy dies, as the care worker has to adapt to supporting a new person requiring care without much time to grieve. The role of the employer is key here, and this extends beyond employers in adult social care. Chandrima Roy and Katharine Venter discuss the role of employers of individuals who care outside their employment context, and query what such employers can and should do to support those caregivers. Some organisations work hard to (appear to be) ‘carer friendly’ and have good corporate social responsibility objectives, but the reasons that motivate employers to commit to supporting carers are still poorly understood. The final piece by Oci Stott also considers care beyond the health and social care sector. Examining the provision of climate change education in schools, this article emphasises the centrality of continuity but also highlights the dangers of such continuity being driven by individuals who might leave. An alternative approach is suggested to make sure that care for the environment turns into meaningful action that is aligned with self-care. In the process, Stott provides positive and practical suggestions of how caring could be undertaken differently.  

Vanessa Beck is a Professor in Employment Studies at the University of Bristol. She is interested in individuals and groups at the margins of the labour market, including those who are unemployed or underemployed, and who experience multiple and complex barriers to (decent) employment. Her work centres on the interrelationship between individual experiences and social or structural contexts, with a particular focus on gender and age. She publishes in journals such as Work, Employment and Society, Human Resource Management Journal, Organization, Education + Training, and the Journal of Education and Work. 

 Duncan U. Fisher is a researcher at the ESRC Centre for Care at the University of Sheffield, UK. His research focuses on paid care work within adult social care, with his current project a study of organising, activism and trade union activity among paid care workers in England. He wrote this article about the depiction of paid care work in Ken Loach’s film Sorry We Missed You for a previous issue of Futures of Work. 

Image credit: Claudio Schwarz via Unsplash