The winners of the British Association of Social Workers (BASW) Social Work Journalism Awards 2025 were unveiled at a ceremony yesterday.
The awards, now in their third year, recognise high-quality, sensitive and accurate reporting, podcasting and drama on social workers and the people they support.
Among this year's winners was care experienced BBC journalist Ashley John-Baptiste, who jointly won the 'lived experience' award for a Radio 4 documentary, Detained and Restrained: Britain's Vulnerable Kids, on children subject to deprivation of liberty (DoL) orders.
BBC journalist celebrates social workers
In a speech, John-Baptiste praised a social worker featured in the programme for the support she gave a detained young person, as well as one of his own social workers, for accompanying him on an open day to Cambridge University that inspired him to apply and set him on course for his career in broadcasting.He shared the lived experience award with BBC South West's Tamsin Melville, for a programme on the support being given to domestic abuse survivors in Cornwall by family support domestic abuse advisors (DASAs) employed by the charity First Light. This featured the story of one survivor, Hannah, and explained how DASAs had worked with social workers to support her and other victims of abuse in the county.
The 'trade press' award, for specialist social work publications, went to Hannah Crown, for a feature for Children and Young People Now (CYPNow) on making the leadership of children's services' leadership more diverse. This highlighted the work of the Black and Asian Leadership Initiative (BALI), a programme run by the Staff College to tackle the obstacles to advancement for leaders from minority ethnic backgrounds.
CYPNow is part of the Mark Allen Group, which also publishes Community Care.
The other category winners were:
- Written journalism in national media: Rosa Silverman, of the Daily Telegraph, for an article on the pressures facing children's services, written in the wake of the trial of Sara Sharif's murderers.
- Written journalism in local media: Birmingham Live, for an investigation into child poverty in the West Midlands.
- Broadcast journalism in national media: Daniel Hewitt, from ITV News, for a report on burnout among children's social workers.
- Broadcast journalism in regional media: Lucy Kapasi, from ITV Central, for a story on the use of virtual reality headsets to train children's social workers in preparing for home visits with families.
- Podcast: Pod Save the UK for an episode that featured care experienced campaigners Rebekah Pierre and Lemn Sissay discussing the publication of Free Loaves on Fridays, an anthology of experiences of the care system.
- Drama: Lost Boys and Fairies, the story of a gay couple's experience of adoption.
Recognition for journalist who highlighted child sexual abuse
Alongside the category prizes was an award given for an outstanding contribution to journalism featuring social work, which this year was given, posthumously, to the Scottish journalist and academic, Sarah Nelson, who died earlier this year.Her work included covering the famous 1991 case in which children were removed from families on South Ronaldsay, Orkney, for alleged ritualistic abuse and returned weeks later, a case which she argued dealt "a hammer blow to child protection social work".
She also wrote a book, Incest: Fact and Myth, which was described in a Scottish Parliament tribute as "one of the first academic works to suggest that child sexual abuse in the family involves coercion and exploitation".
Her friend Ruth Stark, the former head of the Scottish Association of Social Work, paid tribute to Nelson for the quality and integrity of her journalism and her ability to forge strong working relationships with social workers.
'Insightful pieces of work with nuance and balance'
BASW chief executive Ruth Allen, who compered the awards, said the winners had all shown an understanding of social work, its positive impact and the challenges it faced, and had "created insightful pieces of work with nuance and balance".Social Workers Union general secretary, John McGowan, who was one of the judges, praised the winners for depicting social work "in a fair and accurate way".
"The general public is influenced by what it reads, sees and hears in the media and through drama so these mediums play a significant part in shaping their perceptions," he added. "It is important that we see more positive representations such as this which these awards are here to honour.”
