A unplanned course. Like many of my contemporaries, my path into social work education was the result of a fortuitous conjunction of biographical factors and wider social and political circumstances. After studying sciences at school I took what was then seen as the natural step to a degree course in electronics at the University of Birmingham. I soon discovered that I was not at ease with a career track that seemed likely to lead towards consumer goods production or worse, the armaments industry. Nevertheless I finished my degree while spending most of my student years involved in voluntary work. I lived for two years at the Birmingham Settlement and this provided my gateway into the world of social welfare. Three years later, after working on the staff of International Voluntary Service, I went on to study for the Diploma in Social Administration and Diploma in Social Work Studies at the London School of Economics. I was particularly influenced by the emergence of community development as a specialism and I took the main option in this field for my social work studies.

After graduating from the LSE I went with my wife to work in the Yemen for three years under the auspices of the British Volunteer Programme. Initially responsible for a centre for blind people, after some months I became the country coordinator for the programme of projects in health, education and agricultural development. On return to the UK I took a post as a community development officer in the Wirral social services department. Fairly soon I began to feel discontented with the methods and standards of work that seemed to prevail in the public sector, and made a previously unpremeditated career turn into academia. Edinburgh happened to offer the job at the time I was looking – but for this chance, I might very well have gone in a different direction.

Foundations. At Edinburgh I started to learn much more about social work than I had previously needed to know. I was apppointed to teach community work, and over time acquired an ever widening portfolio of teaching, research and administration interests. Together with Stewart Asquith I began to work in the fields of social philosophy and professional ethics. However, now better understanding that my previous education was wholly inadequate as preparation for a social scientist, I signed up for a part time PhD. My project was an attempt to reconcile the models for applied scientific knowledge that I had absorbed from the natural sciences with the humanistic practice of the social professions. This interest gradually expanded into ongoing research on the basis of applied knowledge for practice, and into teaching research methodology to many generations of MSc and PhD students in the Faculty of Social Sciences. I also taught several undergraduate honours options in what had become the separate Department of Social Policy.

Broader interests. Over a long career within the same institution comes the opportunity to diversity into different roles and activities. From 2000 to 2003 I was Head of Social Work, a particulary interesting time as it involved the absorption of the former Moray House social work staff and the creation for the first time of an undergraduate professional degree in social work at Edinburgh. It was also the time of the historic shift of control of social work education away from the unloved quango, CCETSW, towards the higher education institutes themselves. The social work teaching institutions worked with the Scottish Executive, which took a leading and creative role in developing new curricular frameworks. From 2004 to 2008 I was Dean of Postgraduate Studies in the College of Humanities and Social Science. This involved strengthening and systematising the many kinds of taught and research postgraduate courses across the immensely varied College, and was enjoyable for the contact with colleagues from very different disciplines.

The themes of professional ethics and knowledge remained central to my research interests and I continued to publish in this area until retirement in 2009. I then served for seven years on the Registration and Conduct Subcommittees of the Scottish Social Services Council – the professional regulatory body set up by the same Regulation of Care (Scotland) Act 2001 that had initiated the key changes in social work education.

This Act marked the very belated creation for social work of a professional regulatory structure comparable to that for other professions.

Lessons of experience. At the beginning of my career, social work was full of arguably naive optimism about its capability to achieve solutions for individuals’ problems and wider social improvements. But giddy ambition and concept spinning were often too little restrained by sober evaluation of evidence and resources. Social work’s professional disciplines were rather poorly developed and its research base was woefully inadequate. We are now in a time where proper professional caution is frequently tinged with pessimism. Nevertheless, there has been fundamental advancement in the scientific quality of knowledge to inform practice, together with the gradual development of better institutional structures. We may hope the public will one day receive services that match the ambition of the best professionals in social work.

Source: own contribution (11 September 2017)