How did you come to be involved with working with the University of Edinburgh? My first contact with the University was in 1960 as a graduate student at Oxford University doing a Diploma in Social Administration. This involved a long placement with an agency in Craigmillar – then a desolate place from which all agencies had fled except for the agency where I was placed. Invitations to events at the University were a much needed opportunity to try and put the tribulations of Craigmillar into some kind of social policy context.
Then as a probation officer in Brixton where every person in my caseload was an immigrant from the Caribbean – about which I knew nothing – John Triseliotis prompted my interest in migration. He was then virtually the only person in the social work world with such an interest. The role of social policy in combatting discrimination and social work with immigrants, and then with minority ethnic communities, became enduring teaching and research interests.
Some years later, as a Lecturer at Oxford University, and deeply involved in teaching social work students I had various research and other contacts with Stewart Asquith and Mike Adler. Adrian Sinfield inspired and enabled us to think about the role of social work in combatting poverty. Then Jane Aldgate joined the Oxford Department, so enhancing our links with Edinburgh.
The most active contacts came when I became the Director of the newly-established Social Work Research Centre at Stirling University. Edinburgh colleagues stimulated us in our horribly difficult task of trying to evaluate social work effectiveness. We had useful collaborations (and sometimes competitions for research grants!) The Centre was greatly enriched by staff who had at one time been students at Edinburgh – notably Alison Petch.
During my time at Stirling, Oxford University, like so many others in the UK, decided to withdraw from graduate professional social work education. It could no longer struggle with the tensions which have been so clearly described by Brian Kerr on this website. I remember admiring and envying Edinburgh for continuing with this struggle with much success. All around Scotland, I met graduates of the Oxford social work course now working in senior social work positions. Several had been funded as trainees by the Strathclyde Social Work Department, an arrangement which benefitted them and social work. I remain sad that this collaboration between local authorities, voluntary agencies and universities in the development of social work is now so much rarer.
When I left the Social Work Research Centre I was keen to move closer to the practice of social work and its related disciplines. I achieved this through establishing support for carers and then working as the Social Work Commissioner for the Mental Welfare Commission. These experiences brought home to me how far apart the worlds of practice (and sometimes policy) and research and academic life remain. This is despite our best efforts and convictions. It was a good stimulus and pleasure to follow whatever seemed relevant to my work in Edinburgh and other universities through attendance at open events and contacts with former colleagues.
This distance between theory, policy and practice became even more obvious when I joined the Social Work Inspection Agency (then to become the Care Commission). The triumphs, endurance, achievements and occasional disasters of social work and social care organisations have so much to teach us and are such a fruitful arena for research and enquiry of various hues. I was fortunate to be able to explore some matters with Edinburgh and other academic colleagues but mostly in informal ways.
I now work as a General Member for the Scottish Mental Health Tribunals. Social work and social care have major roles in the delivery on mental health care; so far, that is an area of work too little researched.
The growing emphasis on continuing periods of supervised practice seem to me to be a good way forward but I hope too that social work education will continue to set social work and social care in the broader context of social policy. We need to remain aware of their impact on individuals but also on wider society. We need to be reformers as well as operatives. And to achieve this social work education has to prepare us to be open to and knowledgeable about research and to move confidently in those areas of work and policy which can have such a major influence on us and those with whom we work. And social work education, at its best, and at its various levels, should enable us to demonstrate what social work and social care has to teach all those who wish to move towards a fairer and more contented society ... in C. Wright Mills' words ... the 'public' meaning of 'private ills'.
Source: own contribution (11.9.2017)
Reference: Mills, C.R. (1959) The Sociological Imagination, Oxford: Oxford University Press.