One of my jobs is generally overseeing Community Care's Student Zone. Community Care has received a letter from a student about social work training which I thought would make an interesting guest post. Here it is:
by Wendy Jones
I am a student, currently undertaking an MSc in social work. I have previously worked in the health and social care field, in a number of capacities, for several years. A year into my course and unfortunately all is not well: social work training in the UK has a lot to answer for.
I feel I have been taught very little of practical use about crucial areas such as risk assessment or how to spot potential indicators of abuse in children or vulnerable adults. Such things are the nitty gritty, 'bread and butter' of social work. Instead, what I have learnt is a vast amount of dry academic theory.
I think it is more important that social workers are firstly taught skills to do their jobs. Perhaps the reason we are not is because this is seen as too basic and not appropriate for a Masters. However, the course should be a vocational, training course first. Some might say that we should know about areas such as risk assessment and safeguarding before we start the course. But students are not all starting from the same baseline. Some of my fellow students have never worked in social care.
These courses need to start with the basics. It's great if social workers can link their practice to ecological/post-modern/systemic/whatever theory, but can we please know a little bit about the practicalities of keeping children and vulnerable clients safe first? This may sound very simplistic, but it's what's needed, and before we go on placement.
I think one of the root problems is that social work degrees and masters courses are generic. Unlike, for example, nursing; social workers are not allowed to specialise from the outset. Nurse training can be purely in mental health nursing, paediatric nursing, adult nursing etc. Consequently nurses develop respected, specialised knowledge of their subject area. Social work training, by contrast, is ridiculously broad, generic and confused.
Although it should start with the basic principles, if it was more targeted and more specialised to the relevant client group, it would be easier to do this and to relate relevant theory to practice. No wonder social workers are often seen as underskilled 'Jack of all trades, master of none' types, with little in-depth knowledge of anything.
Doing a generic award and then later a specialised post-qualifying course will not solve any problems. We need specialisation from the outset. Similarly, cutting undergraduate courses and only making postgraduate courses available is not going to improve the quality of training. Making the training pathway longer and ever more complex and convoluted is not the answer. It only devalues the training further.
I appreciate that social workers are not medics or clinicians and do not operate within a 'medical model', however I really think that a bit of clinical knowledge about the particular service user groups we are working with could help inform practice. For example, it might not be a bad idea for social workers who work in adult services to know about conditions such as dementia and its clinical features. A bit of science isn't going to kill us. Similarly, knowledge of child development for those in children's services would be useful.
Social work training really needs improving. I want to be a social worker. I feel that social work is a crucial, challenging and fascinating profession but in terms of training there is much work to be done.
