John Coffey / Molly Mathieson: Making Undercover Social Worker
All undercover investigations undertaken by Dispatches are a challenge but this was one of the toughest yet. Undercover Social Worker was more than a year in the making, and it meant negotiating an ethical minefield within the fraught and often controversial world of child protection. The challenge was to show the viewer the reality of life in a highly pressurised arm of Social Services, particularly in the wake of high profile tragedies like the Baby P and Victoria Climbie cases.
For John Coffey it was a question of steeling himself to go back into a world that he had made a deliberate choice to leave six years ago. Since leaving social work, John has built a successful career in television but soon realised what the stresses and strains of both working as a family support worker and making a film would mean. When you go undercover as a reporter, you always have to make whatever job you're doing the priority – and the protection and welfare of any children he might encounter very much came first, and making the programme second.
For that reason, the production team liaised closely with a very experienced expert in the field of child protection throughout the filming, so that informed advice and consultation was immediately on hand whenever John needed expert advice in facing situations he felt were outside his comfort zone.
For producer / director Molly, the challenge was to keep John's morale up over three draining months undercover. Once John had got the job with Surrey Social Services, there were three months waiting around while his Criminal Record was checked and references taken up. From his first day on the job, the pressures of the job were obvious. The fact that he was immediately catapulted into dealing with two potentially dangerous clients on his very first day meant he had no time to worry about whether he was up to it: he just got stuck in. By the time he met up with Molly at the end of that first day, he was pretty much shell-shocked, just like the other family support worker he'd started with on the same day. For the three months whilst undercover, as well as our social work expert's support, Molly's support and advice every evening as he came off shift proved crucial. She knew how powerful the material was that he was filming – and by watching the rushes, was able to give John direction in following certain story lines and getting crucial shots.
In an undercover investigation as sensitive as this, we always knew that most likely the faces of all families and children in particular would have to be blurred. In the end the only face that would be visible in the final film was John himself. Weekly interviews of John were shot by Molly and he used state of the art new miniature cameras to film himself. We can't tell you what they were hidden in – for obvious reasons – but they helped enormously in giving the viewer a sense of John at work.
