Should unions and professional associations do more to engage social work students? This was one of the central questions raised at the first ever student-organised social work conference, which took place at London South Bank University this week.
"When I became a student, I expected BASW or Unison to come to me," said Dan Morton, a second year undergrad and one of the conference organisers. "But it never happened."
John MacDonough, one of the lecturers at LSBU and a member of BASW, admitted part of the problem was that universities did not do enough to teach students about unions and professional associations.
Later, at one of the workshops, students were given the chance to challenge David Barnes, professional officer at BASW, and Chris Taylor, assistant branch secretary of Unison Haringey, on their views about working with universities.
Both said they were keen to engage more students, and discussed the possibility of joint approaches between BASW and Unison at a local level.
At the end of the day, Gurnam Singh, principal lecturer in social work at Coventry University, announced to the entire conference that he intended to begin teaching about the history of social work trade unions on his course. A small but not insignificant victory for the students.
The unions debate was just one of those to come up at the conference - others included the Social Work Task Force, caseloads, dealing with bureaucracy and the importance of social justice over neoliberalism (don't ask) - but it exemplified why students should be encouraged to hold more conferences on the future of social work.
In Community Care last week [Feb 18]Steve Rogowski argues the case against a neo-liberal approach to social work and against privatisation of services. I have a great deal of sympathy with this argument but where are the workers who are willing to resist these policies, which are now well-advanced. In 30 years of working with a local authority and being a trade-union activist I have seen very little evidence of resistance. Social work for me changed fundamentally in the 1980s with the Thatcher government and to turn the clock back,or forward,now will be a mammoth task. Managerialism rules-in all professions !
It's encouraging to see students pressing for information and access to the labor movement; we in the U.S. have seen the same privatization/managerialism trends as overwhelming for social workers, but, given the weaker status of the labor movement generally here, students are less politicized to know what they're missing!