Social work cartoon: ‘Mandatory training’

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Picture credit: Fran Orford

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2 Responses to Social work cartoon: ‘Mandatory training’

  1. FosterCarer1964 February 12, 2016 at 12:27 pm #

    Great cartoon. After 10 years of learning about babies, care leavers and other stuff that we’ve never done as Foster Carers I recognise the frustration of having your time wasted and your skills ignored with pointless broad based training.
    How frustrating it is to complete another First-Aid refresher and nobody needs CPR or even a plaster until the next refresher. People can be so selfish hahaha.
    I did ADHD training in which we were taught no skills in dealing with a child with the condition just a history and an acknowledgement that it’s a modern thing.
    We did Children moving on in which there were no real-life similarities to children actually moving on (apart from them being with us one day and somewhere else the day after).
    We did child exploitation where we discovered the risk to children from communicating using Playstations and X-box consoles was unknown by the training team (when kids have an Xbox with Xbox-Live the risk to them, particularly vulnerable children is huge. They can be found and befriended and they can find others without anyone needing to use their real age, name or picture…
    I remember Child Development training in which we had to make a toy from a cornflakes box to understand children. We also learned from the instructor (who’d asked us to create a fictional person on paper) that a British Ginger haired, middle-class child, living with both parents had no culture but all other nationalities and ethnicities do!
    But the absolute worst part about training that takes a part of your life never to be given back is the ice-breaker games. Humiliating and degrading for some. At one training session I overheard a trainer whisper,- “watch what I can get them all to do!”
    If training was just, “real-life” and not, “in the ideal world” it would be a start.

  2. Steven Donea February 23, 2016 at 8:20 pm #

    Suggestive illustration of the solid big boss metal gear being aware of the social work practice implications, such as their actions, and the likelihood of an adverse impact on the legal & ethical issues at an organizational level.

    Social workers need to be aware of the power of reflective learning and recognize the evaluation, and revision, and the invisible power relationships to identify what they learned.