'Developing practice learning: student perspectives',

The introduction of the new social work degrees in the UK has further underlined the importance of practice learning in social work education. However, student perceptions of practice learning and their view of quality standards in this area have been under-researched. This paper reports on a two-year study of MSW students at Queen's University, Belfast that examined, from the students' perspective, a number of key quality indicators relating to practice learning. One of the main aims of the study was to identify significant contextual features of the practice environment that affect the quality of the students' learning experience. Northern Ireland provides a useful case study in this context as it is thought to have some advantages in its practice learning provision in comparison to other parts of the UK. The paper concludes with an analysis of the main implications of the research and highlights key issues which need to be considered by academic institutions and employing agencies in further developing quality standards of practice learning.

Reflections on Practice Learning in Northern Ireland and the Republic of Ireland: Lessons from Student Experiences

Practice learning is viewed as one of the most important components of social work education wherever in the world social work is practised. Northern Ireland and the Republic of Ireland provide an interesting case example of the educational impact on students resulting from their experience of different models of practice learning. Although sharing a common historical legacy, recent developments in policy in both jurisdictions have tended to engender greater divergences in how programmes organise and deliver social work education and practice learning. Drawing on findings from a joint-research project with students in Queen’s University, Belfast and Trinity College, Dublin, the authors highlight significant cross-border similarities as well as differences in the way practice learning is conceptualised, organised and delivered. Through comparing and contrasting student experiences, the authors reflect on how the findings might help to inform the future development of practice learning standards in both jurisdictions.

Family support, social capital, resilience and adolescent coping

All too often young people are excluded in practice from the general policy and professional consensus that partnership and participation should underpin work with children, young people and their families. If working with troubled and troublesome young people is to be based on family support, it will require not only the clear statement of that policy but also demonstration that it can be applied in practice. Achieving that involves setting out a plausible theory of change that can be rigorously evaluated. This paper suggests a conceptual model that draws on social support theory to harness the ideas of social capital and resilience in a way that can link formal family support interventions to adolescent coping. Research with young people attending three community-based projects for marginalized youth is used to illustrate how validated tools can be used to measure and document the detail of support, resilience, social capital and coping in young people's lives. It is also suggested that there is sufficient fit between the findings emerging from the study and the model to justify the model being more rigorously tested.

Work/Leisure Balances and the Creation of a Carnival Cosmopolitanism amongst Salsa Dancers

This article presents a Carnival cosmopolitanism borne from salsa social dance leisure practice. This indirectly fostered cosmopolitanism is facilitated by significant changes in work practice allowing for new work/leisure balances. The means by which this change is brought about is through a Carnival cosmopolitanism.

Exploring Innovative Methodologies in time and place to analyze child protection documents as elements of practice

This paper aims to demonstrate how a derived approach to case file analysis, influenced by the work of Michel Foucault and Dorothy E.Smith, can offer innovative means by which to study the relations between discourse and practices in child welfare. The article explores text-based forms of organization in histories of child protection in Finland and in Northern Ireland. It is focused on case file records in different organizational child protection contexts in two jurisdictions. Building on a previous article (Author 1 & 2: 2011), we attempt to demonstrate the potential of how the relations between practices and discourses –a majorly important theme for understanding child welfare social work – can be effectively analysed using a combination of two approaches This article is based on three different empirical studies from our two jurisdictions Northern Ireland (UK) and Finland; one study used Foucault; the other Smith and the third study sought to combine the methods. This article seeks to report on ongoing work in developing, for child welfare studies, ‘a history that speaks back’ as we have described it.

Evidence-based Practice in Cognitive-Behaviour Therapy

book review

Service User and Carer Involvement in Role-Plays to Assess Readiness for Practice

Service user and carer involvement in social work education is now well established since its inception as a compulsory requirement in the social work curriculum in the United Kingdom in 2003. Since then, there have been many examples of how such involvement has been approached by education providers. Nevertheless, one of the key obstacles and challenges in this field continues to centre on the need to achieve non-tokenistic user involvement which cements the engagement of service users and carers at the heart of social work education. This paper describes one such initiative where service user and carer colleagues in a university in Northern Ireland have been actively involved in the assessment of first year social work students’ preparation for their first period of practice learning. The paper presents the background to this initiative explaining how the project unfolded; the detailed preparations that were involved and the evidence gathered from evaluations undertaken with the students, service users and carers, and academic colleagues who were all involved. We believe that the findings from this project can contribute to the advancement of existing knowledge in the field in exploring and recommending creative methodologies for user involvement in social work education.

Implications for practice of recent effectiveness research

This article results from an analysis of 95 studies of the effectiveness of social work. The good news from this research, which features a wide range of demanding social problems, is that 75 per cent of results are positive. In this article the authors present their findings and consider their implications for practice.

Understanding and Supporting Young Children’s Transitions into State Care: Schlossberg’s Transition Framework and Child-Centred Practice

There is a growing body of research regarding children and young people in state care that is organised around the concept of transition. Focusing mainly on young people leaving care, the research highlights their experiences of multiple transitions that can contribute to poor long-term outcomes in terms of emotional and psychological well-being, educational attainment and employment prospects. The smaller body of research that focuses on young children shows that their journeys before and when in state care are also marked by multiple and fragmented transitions. Despite the growing knowledge base, there are two areas that remain under-developed—research that draws attention to the lived experiences of young children regarding their transitions into state care; and the development of conceptual frameworks that centralise young children's perspectives to support the development of practice. This article begins to address these gaps by applying Schlossberg's transition framework to a case study of a young child regarding their transition into state care. The article highlights, through the child's perspectives, the multiple impacts of the transition and considers the implications for the development of better child-centred practice.

Child Welfare as Child Protection Then and Now: What Social Workers Did and Continue to Do

The research reported here builds on the work of one of the authors who, some thirteen years ago, in a similar study, examined the potential for social workers to shift from a child protection to a child welfare practice orientation. As with the original research study, this present project seeks to examine the everyday practices of social workers with children and families as revealed by file analysis, vignette questionnaires (reported here) and interviews with families and social workers (to be reported). A twenty-item vignette questionnaire was completed by fifty-five social workers (65.5 per cent response rate). It was found that there was little agreement on coding decisions with regard to which cases should be designated child protection or child welfare. Further analysis revealed that, regardless of such coding decisions, families tended to receive similar responses by social workers. The results demonstrate that, whilst there has been a reduction in the headline numbers of child protection investigations undertaken across Health and Social Care Trusts in Northern Ireland, the everyday patterns of practice with families and children where parenting concerns remain evident reflect child protection risk management priorities and practices.