Initially, I acted as fieldwork educator for a few social work students from different universities and colleges, including some from England and Northern Ireland and some from Edinburgh University, while I was working as a community worker within the Community Work team at Edinburgh Council of Social Service (ECSS). Then, when I became a full-time practice teacher in the CCETSW-funded student unit at ECSS - which became Edinburgh Voluntary Organisations’ Council (EVOC) - I supervised numbers of Edinburgh University social work students. The Student Unit also took students from Stevenson College, Moray House, and universities at Stirling, Glasgow, Dundee, Aberdeen and Robert Gordon's University in Aberdeen.
With the advent of the Diploma in Social Work, the accredited social work courses were considered to be delivered by partnerships of academic institutions and practice partners. At Edinburgh University, the partnership was the University plus the four surrounding local authorities and the voluntary sector. Together with other voluntary sector practice teachers (mainly from funded student units in the area), I had involvement with the practice panel, Board of Examiners and selection committee/group as well as the South-East Scotland Practice Learning Planning Group. My feeling is that was a productive period and there seemed to be a much greater sense of cohesion between the world of academia and the world of practice. I also had some opportunity to be involved in elements of teaching, usually in supporting people with learning disabilities to make presentations to students either on disability generally or on learning disability specifically. This also extended to supporting, for a time, user representatives on the service user committee which had a kind of stop-start history at Edinburgh.
When the practice teaching qualification was introduced, I served as Chair of the Practice Teaching Assessment Board for a number of years, working closely with Edinburgh University SW staff and with the then South-East Scotland Training Consortium and I, with my colleague Marianne Hughes, acted as practice assessors for beginning practice teachers and often had roles in teaching on the practice teacher courses often alongside academic staff from Edinburgh University.
When the student unit at EVOC was closed due to funding no longer being available from Scottish Social Services Council (SSSC), I moved full-time to become the service manager at People First (Scotland) , the disabled persons’ user-led organisation of people with learning disabilities. While there, the relationship with the University continued – I acted as practice teacher for some students and supported other staff in the agency to obtain practice teacher awards and become practice teachers to Edinburgh University social work students and students from other universities – Stirling, Glasgow Caledonian, Open University and West of Scotland.
People First has hosted students (between 6 and 12) on the 10-day observational placement for some years, and more recently, has hosted most of the new intake on their half-day ‘engaging with service users’ session. My role in this was to recruit and support organisational staff to be shadowed on the 10-day experience, offer some teaching and conduct mini-supervision sessions, giving feedback on reflective writing and recruit members (service users) and supporting staff to be interviewed/engaged with for the other ‘engagement’ experience.
I have also, for a few years, supported a senior member to run a session for Mental Health Officer training on Edinburgh University’s course where the People First critical view of guardianship and capacity issues was presented.
Looking back and looking forward, I have, throughout my time in social work education, been on record as believing that large-scale statutory social work practice in local authorities was removed from the aspirations of social work to challenge injustice, work towards fairness and equality and work in partnership with people in their communities. I consider that those ideas have more currency in the universities which run the courses than they do in the statutory practice settings. The austerity agenda has exacerbated that difference, so that statutory social work is much more about rationing scarce resources than about enabling people to maximise potential, recover from trauma or difficulties and bring about anything remotely resembling ‘the good life’. I know many social workers who echo those sentiments, including significant numbers who remain in the statutory sector. That is not to say that good social work can never happen in those settings, but all of the circumstances act against it and the good work is rare in the face of intensive record-keeping, minimal contact time and unreasonable caseloads. Alternatives to individual casework such as community social work are very rare indeed and scandal after scandal and enquiry after enquiry have led to more managerial practice, less creativity and checking the boxes rather than seeking solutions. I believe that social work education could do more to advance person-centredness and creativity and promote the ideas of trust, autonomous authority and negotiation and partnership as cornerstones of good social work practice. Evidence submitted to the Changing Lives report, I believe, pointed us in that direction, even if the findings and recommendations fell short of that conclusion.
My view is that academics in social work do sometimes offer radical perspectives but they do not manage to do that publicly enough, so that poor systemic practice becomes reinforced as the only way to go. I am disappointed in that. We could do with more outspoken leadership in the field and that might come from social work educators.
Source: own contribution, 9 May 2018