Building partnerships in social work education: Towards achieving collaborative advantage for employers and universities

Summary: Better partnership working between employers and academic institutions has recently been identified as one of the key developments needed to improve social work education and practice in the UK (Social Work Reform Board, 2010). However, the praxis of collaborative working in social work education remains under-researched and it is unclear what factors are significant in promoting effective partnership. This article contributes to this debate by reporting research that examined the experience of social work academics working with employers to deliver qualifying level social work education in Northern Ireland.

Findings: This analysis explores key factors in the dynamics of the collaborative process and identifies both congruence and discord in academic and employer perspectives. The findings highlight the collaborative advantage accruing from partnership working, which include the benefits of a centrally coordinated system for the management and delivery of practice learning. However, the results also indicate that engaging in partnership working is a complex process that can create conflict and tensions, and that it is important to ground collaborations in realistic expectations of what can be achieved.

Application: This article identifies opportunities for achieving collaborative advantage and the challenges. It identifies lessons learned about the value of partnership working in social work education and ways to increase its efficacy.

Delivering Social Work Education on Case Reviews and Inquiry Reports: An Exploratory Study of Students' Perspectives in Northern Ireland

It is self-evident that we live in the age of inquiry where the negative impact of risk has been examined through numerous formal processes. In the wake of such scrutiny, there have been repeated recommendations for better training of the professionals charged with safeguarding the welfare of vulnerable individuals. Yet there has been very little examination of how student social workers, in particular, evaluate this training. This exploratory study responded to this gap through a mixed-methods design centring on the views of qualifying and post-qualifying social work students attending courses within two regional universities in Northern Ireland. The study found that, in the main, the cohorts responded favourably to certain aspects of the curriculum and how they were delivered. That said, the emotive nature of the case review and inquiry reports was inadequately addressed in the classroom and was not processed afterwards through a psycho-social framework. In effect, students were often left with residual anxieties that potentially hampered learning. On the basis of the findings, the study calls for further research into this highly significant area of professional competence.

(Re)-Introducing Themes of Religion and Spirituality to Professional Social Work Training in the Land of ‘Saints and Scholars’.

This chapter begins by alluding to Ireland’s historical reputation as the land of “Saints and Scholars” and then briefly charts its demise from this position. A parallel process in relation to religiously motivated provision of health and social care is outlined. The inclusion of themes of religion and spirituality within the current professional social work codes in the USA and Britain and the framework for social work training in Northern Ireland is noted. In this context the lack of any substantive inclusion of themes of religion and/or spirituality within the Bachelor of Social Work (BSW) degree at Queens University Belfast will be situated. A series of intersecting reasons for this lack of inclusion are proposed in terms of the experience of living through the recent troubled history of Northern Ireland and a variety of biases in academic thought.
A rationale for the re-introduction of inputs on religion and spirituality is articulated in terms of the widespread resurgence of these themes within health and social care and psychotherapy literature and the new emphasis on practicing in culturally sensitive ways in Britain. The first steps to re-introduce these themes under the higher context marker of “culturally competent practice” are described and an analysis of data from the students’ feedback presented along with illustrative quotations. The dissonance between the initial misgivings of staff and the overwhelmingly positive responses of students are highlighted. The chapter concludes with a discussion of lessons learned through the process with an emphasis on how the inclusion of these themes can result in better practice for service users, including those impacted by “the Troubles” in Northern Ireland.

Asking the Critical Questions: An Evaluation of Social Work Students' Experiences in an International Placement

Preparing social work students for the demands of changing social environments and to promote student mobility and interest in overseas employment opportunities have resulted in an increasing demand for international social work placements. The literature describes numerous examples of social work programmes that offer a wide variety of international placements. However, research about the actual benefit of undertaking an overseas placement is scant with limited empirical evidence on the profile of students participating, their experience of the tasks offered, the supervisory practice and the outcomes for students' professional learning and career. This study contributes to the existing body of literature by exploring the relevance of international field placements for students and is unique in that it draws its sample from students who have graduated so provides a distinctive perspective in which to compare their international placement with their other placement/s as well as evaluating what were the benefits and drawbacks for them in terms of their careers, employment opportunities and current professional practice.

Reviewing the Literature on the Breakdown of Foster Care Placements for Young People: Complexity and the Social Work Task

Young people in long-term foster care are at risk of experiencing poor social, emotional, behavioural and educational outcomes. Moreover, these placements have a significantly greater chance of breaking down compared to those involving children. This article critically evaluates the factors associated with this particular outcome. It was carried out through a literature review conducted by a social work practitioner in one Health and Social Care Trust in Northern Ireland. The findings evidenced that, apart from overriding safety concerns, placement breakdown was not a one-off event but rather a complex process involving the interplay between a range of dynamic risk and protective factors over time, operating in the wider context of the young person’s history and life experiences. The significance of these findings for social work practitioners is finally considered by identifying key theories to inform understanding and intervention.

Risk, Recovery and Capacity: Competing or Complementary Approaches to Mental Health Social Work

Mental health social workers have a central role in providing support to people with mental health problems and in the use of coercion aimed at dealing with risk. Mental health services have traditionally focused on monitoring symptoms and ascertaining the risks people may present to themselves and/or others. This well-intentioned but negative focus on deficits has contributed to stigma, discrimination and exclusion experienced by service users. Emerging understandings of risk also suggest that our inability to accurately predict the future makes risk a problematic foundation for compulsory intervention. It is therefore argued that alternative approaches are needed to make issues of power and inequality transparent. This article focuses on two areas of practice: the use of recovery based approaches, which promote supported decision making and inclusion; and the assessment of a person’s ability to make decisions, their mental capacity, as a less discriminatory gateway criterion than risk for compulsory intervention.

An examination of student and provider perceptions of voluntary sector social work placements in Northern Ireland

Practice based learning in Northern Ireland is a core element of social work education and comprising 50% of the degree programme for undergraduate and postgraduate students. This article presents evidence about the perceptions of practice learning from voluntary sector/non-government organisation (NGO) placement providers and final year social work students on social work degree programmes in Northern Ireland in 2011. It draws on data from 121 respondents from189 final year students and focus group interviews with voluntary sector providers offering 16% (85) of the total placements available to students. The agencies who participated in the research study provide a total of 55 PLOs to social work students, and are therefore fairly representative in terms of voluntary sector (NGO) provision. The article locates these data in the context of practice learning pedagogy and the changes introduced by the Regional Strategy for Practice Learning Provision in Northern Ireland 2010–2015. Several themes emerged including; induction, support and guidance, practice educator/student relationship, professional identity and confidence in risk assessment and decision-making. Social work educators, placement providers and employers must be cognisant of newly qualified social workers’ needs in terms of consolidating knowledge within the formative stages of their professional development.

The inside story: A survey of social work students’ supervision and learning opportunities on placement

Practice learning accounts for half of the content of the Bachelor of Social Work degree course requirements in Northern Ireland in their field education programs and share a professional and ethical responsibility with practice teachers to provide appropriate learning environments to prepare students as competent and professional practitioners. The accreditation standards for practice learning require the placement to provide students with regular supervision and exposure to a range of learning strategies, but there is little research that actually identifies the types of placements offering this learning and the key activities provided. This paper builds on an Australian study and surveys social work students in two programs in Northern Ireland about their exposure a range of learning activities, how frequently they were provided and how it compares to what is required by the Northern Ireland practice standards. The results indicated that, although most students were satisfied with the supervision and support they received during their placement, the frequency of supervision and type of learning activities varied according to different settings, year levels and who provided the learning opportunities.

Comparing Social Work Students' Perceptions of Risk Using Online Discussion Fora: Lessons Learned from a European Pilot Project

Comparisons of international child welfare systems have identified two basic orientations to practice; a ‘child protection’ orientation and a ‘child welfare’ orientation, which are founded upon fundamentally different values and assumptions regarding the family, the origins of child care problems, and the proper role of the state in relation to the family. This paper describes a project which sought to compare how undergraduate social work students from three European Universities perceive risk in referrals about the welfare of children and to explore the impact of different cultural, ideological and educational contexts on the way in which risk is constructed by students. Students from Northern Ireland, Germany and Poland examined three vignettes via ten online discussion fora each of which provided a narrative summary of their discussion. The paper presents some findings from the analysis of the qualitative data emerging from the student discussions and draws out the lessons learned in terms of how the project was designed and implemented using online discussion fora.

Using Audio-visual Presentation to Teach Global Mindedness in Social Work Education

Direct experience of social work in another country is making an increasingly important contribution to internationalising the social work academic curriculum together with the cultural competency of students. However at present this opportunity is still restricted to a limited number of students. The aim of this paper is to describe and reflect on the production of an audio-visual presentation as representing the experience of three students who participated in an exchange with a social work programme in Pune, India. It describes and assesses the rationale, production and use of video to capture student learning from the Belfast/Pune exchange. We also describe the use of the video in a classroom setting with a year group of 53 students from a younger cohort. This exercise aimed to stimulate students’ curiosity about international dimensions of social work and add to their awareness of poverty, social justice, cultural competence and community social work as global issues. Written classroom feedback informs our discussion of the technical as well as the pedagogical benefits and challenges of this approach. We conclude that some benefit of audio-visual presentation in helping students connect with diverse cultural contexts, but that a complementary discussion challenging stereotyped viewpoints and unconscious professional imperialism is also crucial.

How to promote professional competence and identity in social work students

Background: Field placement experiences are frequently cited in the literature as having most impact on a student social worker’s learning as they emerge into the profession. Placements are integral to the development of practice competence and in acquiring a sense of social work identity. However research on the effectiveness of educational strategies used to deliver learning and assess competence during placement are scarce. Internationally, pressures to meet increasing numbers of student enrolments have raised concerns about the potential impact on the quality of placements and practice teaching provided. These pressures may also impact on the appropriate transfer and application of learning to the student’s practice.
Aim: To identify learning activities rated most useful for developing professional practice competence and professional identity of social work students.
Method: Data were collected from 396 students who successfully completed their first or final placement during 2013-2014 and were registered at one of two Universities in Northern Ireland. Students completed a self-administered questionnaire which covered: placement setting and service user group; type of supervision model; frequency of undertaking specific learning activities; who provided the learning; which activities contributed to their developing professional competence and identity and their overall satisfaction.
Our findings confirmed the centrality of the supervisory relationship as the vehicle to enable quality student learning. Shadowing others, receiving regular supervision and receiving constructive feedback were the tasks that students reported as ‘most useful’ to developing professional identity, competence and readiness to practice. Disturbingly over 50% of students reported that linking practice to the professional codes, practice foci and key roles were not valued as ‘useful’ in terms of readiness to practice, feeling competent and developing professional social work identity. These results offer strong insights into how both the University and the practice placement environment needs to better prepare, assess and support students during practice placements in the field.

Social Work, Political Violence and Historical Change:

In this paper the author outlines the background to the history of the conflict in Northern Ireland which led to the current ‘Troubles’. In this discussion a range of key ideas are highlighted, including the nature of sectarianism and patterns of violence which have profoundly affected the society. The second part of the paper reviews a number of issues which face social workers when they try to deal with the effects of such violence as well as highlighting new challenges which have emerged as the society moves towards the resolution of conflict. It concludes with the argument that, wherever there is such conflict in the world, social workers need critically to understand the way in which political and social structures impinge upon their everyday practice.

The Postmodern ‘Turn’ in Social Work: The Challenges of Identity and Equality

Diversity and demands for equality have challenged fixed notions of identity amongst the diverse populations of Europe. This development has prompted discourses about the significance of fluidity and multiplicity in identities that have given prominence to postmodern theories in the profession of social work. A number of social work educators have contributed to the ensuing debates. Walter Lorenz’s work has contributed substantially to developments on this front by:highlighting the dangers of essentialising fixed identities in professional practice, referring to the failure of social workers to live up to professional values and ideals in the Nazi attack on Jews and others who were different from the Aryan norms that Hitler’s regime sought to impose; arguing for racial equality in multicultural Europe; and ensuring that social work theories and practice engaged with innovations in the social sciences more generally to improve the profession’s research, theoretical and practice bases. In this article, I engage with crucial debates that have shaped the profession during the post-war period, honouring Walter Lorenz’s contributions to them in the process.

The Diverse Impacts of the Neo-liberal Social Policies on Children’s Welfare and Social Work with Young People: The Finnish Perspective

This article discusses the impacts of globalization, neo-liberal social policies and the Finnish economic recession of the 1990s on children's and young people's welfare. It summarises some of the impacts of Finnish social policies on the everyday lives of families with children and highlights some of the features of the recent and current debates surrounding youth delinquency and the societal reactions to young generations. All this contributes to a contradictory and conflicting societal context which challenges experts in the field of child welfare social work experts to operate - as expected - at the right moment, legally and effectively. Instead of being overly-defensive for the ‘good old’ ways of practicing social work with children, the authors invite social work scholars and practitioners to reconceptualise both the concept of children's citizenship and its position both in child welfare theory and practice in the context of children's global rights.

International social work education at the crossroads

Social work has been a player in the international arena since 1928 when the International Association of Schools of Social Work (IASSW) was founded alongside its sister organisations, the International Federation of Social Workers (IFSW) and the International Council for Social Welfare (ICSW). These divided their remit into education, practice and policy respectively. Their development has been an interesting one, but the details of it need not detain us here. I only want to lay aside the argument that having an interest in the international domain is a new phenomenon in social work. At the same time, I want to emphasise how impressive it is that a profession that has been so tied into modernity, linked to the modern nation-state (Lorenz, 1994) and rooted in local legislation and traditions has such a long-standing history of involvements that have crossed borders to promote understanding and knowledge-building. In these encounters, social work educators and practitioners have engaged with others who were different from them while struggling to make their interactions egalitarian and respectful ones.