This is a blog post about endings in social care work. It is adapted from another post for Social Work students that contained examples from practice. If you would like access to the one with examples, please feel free to email me from your college/university email address to andrew.ellery@btconnect.com Other blogs of interest to social care/social work students and practitioners at www.andyellery.wordpress.com

Westmead Hospital is a major teaching hospital in the western suburbs of Sydney, Australia. A student unit exists within the large social work department. As part of the social work practicum, students on placement design and implement a program known as Careers Day. Senior secondary school students attend an interactive day in order to explore the option of social work as a career. This paper will discuss my role as student educator in guiding the social work students to develop and facilitate this unique and evolving program. A multi-layered learning process takes place involving the educator, the social work students and the participants. Social work skills are facilitated and enhanced through the use of role play, groupwork, teamwork and organisational activities. A variety of creative techniques are used to demonstrate and discuss the nature of social work. Students on practicum learn while they teach. Data will be provided about the success, challenges, methods, effectiveness and outcomes of this program for all involved.

Paper presented at 2009 JSWEC Conference. Klein (2004) has summarised accurately the realities of professional practice by suggesting that the problems practitioners face are marked by unpredictability, ambiguity, turbulence and uncertainty. The tragic case of Baby P, like that of Victoria Climbie, has underlined these demands yet again. Both these cases evidence the need for social work and medical practitioners to work together collaboratively, communicating clearly and understanding each other’s language, perspectives and assessments. In qualifying training the need to prepare social work and medical students for practice in these difficult environments and to enable them to develop collaborative attributes is essential. Moving beyond policy requirements in relation to inter-professional practice and learning, this paper proposes that complexity theory should play a central role in the theorisation of inter-professional learning and practice. Informed, inter alia, by the notions of attractors, simple-rules, self-organisation and emergence, it is argued that more emphasis should be placed upon creating receptive conditions and contexts which will support and facilitate good collaborative working. The paper also reports case studies of learning and teaching where medical and social work students work together early in their training, and together consider the difficult realities of service user/ patient need, whilst exploring key skills for joint working. The importance of incorporating openness to collaborative practice as students develop and negotiate their professional identify is highlighted, as is the part played by teaching staff in modelling collaboration. Reference Klein JT (2004) 'Interdisciplinarity and Complexity: an evolving relationship'. Emergence: Complexity & Organization 6:1-2 pp2-10

The current period is dominated by two significant realities which have enormous implications for social work: first, the increasing evidence of the damaging and dysfunctional nature of our economically divided society; second, the banking collapse and bailout. The former poses serious questions about the efficacy of individualised interventions which predominate through much of contemporary statutory social work, while the latter flatly contradicts every argument ever made about the cost of welfare being "too great". In this context, there is an opportunity for re-articulating radical traditions within social work that focus on structural, collective and non-pathological models. We begin by offering a critique of ‘old’ Radical Social Work (RSW) noting it’s emergence from the so-called ‘crisis of Labourism’ of the late 1970s, and the leftward shift within key sections of society in the context of working class radicalisation and the emergence of the New Social Movements (NSM), chief amongst these being feminism, anti-racism and service user activism. Paradoxically while the language of opposition to ‘oppression’, which RSW took from the involvement in NSM’s into social work, has become mainstream, the project of wider social transformation and equality of outcome, which it also saw itself as part of, has been completely marginalised within social work. Crucial to the political marginalisation of radical currents resides in the question of the relation of social work to the neoliberal capitalist state. The idea of being ""in and against the state" was cleverly appropriated by the New Right, who had their own agenda to dismantle the welfare state. It is this that explains RSW’s current difficulty at an analytical level - its language of "liberation", "empowerment" and "anti-oppression" are no longer ‘radical’ in the sense that they now sit comfortably within a neoliberal managerial discourse. In order for a dissenting radical current to re-emerge within social work it is essential that an agenda is set out which genuinely challenges the managerialism which has impoverished and demoralised front-line practice, as well as defending and reconstructing the best traditions within social work’s rich history.

The study upon which this paper is based aimed to explore the experiences of students enrolled on „Access to Social Work‟ courses striving to navigate their way from further education (FE) to higher education (HE) social work programmes. The study was set within the context of widening participation policy and more stringent Department of Health (DH) entry requirements for social work education introduced in 2003. These requirements stipulate that all applicants to social work education must demonstrate key skills in literacy and numeracy equivalent to grade C GCSE, and personal suitability for social work (DH, 2002).

Paper presented at 2010 JSWEC Conference Writing in 1942, as America faced the crisis of joining World War II, Bertha Reynolds argued "The best preparation for adapting to the social work of the future, or to its absence if the good life of that time has no need for it, is to see it now, without illusions, as a part of our own time, and to face what we have with an active determination to be flexible enough ourselves so that we do not hold back its growth into something else". Sixty years later, these words resonate, at a time of what might be describes as ‘perpetual crisis’, within the profession and in the broader society within which social work is defined and practiced. This presentation offers social work practitioners and educators the opportunity to reflect on the context, social, economic, political and spiritual, local and global, that shapes social work practice. It asks: 1. What measures, personal, professional and organisational, must be implemented for practitioners to ‘hold the faith’ as brokers of hope for the poor and marginalised in this fluid, contested and arguably risk saturated practice environment; 2. What new (and perhaps old but neglected) capacities and/or philosophies can assist and nourish them; and 3. What educational strategies, pre- and post-qualifying, are necessary to develop the intellectual rigour, emotional strength and integrity necessary for empowered and creative practice. Bertha Capon Reynolds (1942) Learning and Teaching in the Practice of Social Work National Association of Social Workers, Silver Spring; Russell & Russell, New York

This powerpoint presentation is used on the consolidation module of the post qualifying social work programme.

Effective social work curriculum design needs to open up dialogue between professionals at the earliest stage of their professional development and employ creative and innovative approaches to facilitate this. The ten creative pointers presented here emerged from research into social work practitioners’ views of the implementation of Children’s Integrated Services (within the context of the Every Child Matters agenda and passage of the 2004 Children’s Act).

Inside this issue: 'What has sustainability got to do with social work?', 'In conversation with Amanda Torr (Director of Strategy and Planning, Wellington Institute of Technology, New Zealand)', and 'Environmental justice as a social work issue'. Published September 2010

Paper presented at JSWEC Conference 2008. Social workers are required to undertake continuing professional development to maintain their registration (GSCC 2006). Employers are also expected to provide opportunities for continuing professional development to their staff (GSCC 2002, no 3.3) and many spend considerable resources providing in-service training courses as one way of fulfilling this. Questions remain whether what courses teach is actually used in practice (i.e. what impact does training have on practice). Increasingly inspectors are making recommendations that organisations develop systems to measure the impact of training and ensure that learning about research and evidence-based outcomes is embedded in practice (e.g. Ofsted 2008, p. 13, 29). This interactive workshop will start with a brief presentation discussing the methodology and preliminary findings from an ongoing research project evaluating the impact of a mandatory internal training programme on practice within a social work service provider. This is an attempt to move beyond ‘on-the-day’ participant feedback forms to research (using both quantitative and qualitative data drawn from approximately 1500 employees) that measures the changes in practice as a result of using skills developed through training. The presentation will be followed by a facilitated discussion about the following key issues: What are the inevitable ‘trade-offs’ of doing this kind of ‘real world’ research? How can cost effective research about internal courses become part of systematic processes in social work so that it is embedded in the organisation? How can internal training become more research minded? How can the transfer of knowledge to practice best be measured?

Presentation to 10th JSWEC conference, Cambridge, 9th July 2008.

I have been leading a group of service users, tutors and social workers on the PQ in social work at London South Bank University in the use of poetry as a medium for expressing their creativity in learning. I wanted to invite tutors working with social workers following Leadership and Management and Practice Education Awards and practice assessors following the Enabling Others Unit to think about the relationships between service users, students and practice assessors.

A new programme unit was developed for inclusion in Post Qualifying Awards at the Specialist level to meet the revised GSCC requirements that all such awards should develop skills and knowledge that would prepare candidates to 'enable the learning of others'. The unit was designed to enable specialist social workers to provide basic support to a wide variety of learners in the workplace, equipping them to facilitate and assess the development of competency and develop an understanding of how they could also support 'learners' to develop the wider notion of professional capability.

For the last year the school of health and social care has run a three stage assessment process for all social work candidates. These three stages are designed to measure a range of knowledge, skills and values relating to academic and work experience criteria.

A pilot enquiry into the key moments, processes and people involved in the enhancement of student learning on a social work degree training programme.

This case study describes how we developed an interprofessional PGCert/PGDip/ MA: Education (Professional Practice Learning) as a pathway in the Integrated Masters Programme, Faculty of Education at University of Plymouth. The pathway has been accredited at GSCC PQ Higher Specialist Level and Advanced Level has been applied for. The pathway is open to anyone involved in supporting and/or assessing adults in their professional practice learning and would be of interest, for example, to social workers, clinical psychologists, health professionals and teachers.

A unit for Communication: Theory and Practice course for foundation year 'welfare practitioners' (undergraduate, post-graduate and employment-based trainee Social Workers and Youth and Community Workers) was developed in which online and experiential classroom based learning is integrated. The support from the institution is discussed, together with the need to conserve opportunities for small group work and experiential learning within the module. The author's reflections and key milestones are identified. Examples extracted from the course are given illustrating these milestones. Additional outcomes are also recognised and the question 'Can online learning contribute to a process that will enable the integration of theory and practice/ experience and further develop knowledge and professional competence? is also answered.

A practice teacher working for Gwynedd County Council discusses the importance of language choice and the opportunities available in a mixed language community (Welsh and English) for social work students needing to develop their language sensitivity and anti-oppressive practice. Tensions regarding language can sometimes arise when working with service users and students are given an opportunity to employ their professional skills in challenging oppression and balancing differing rights, needs and opinions.

This case study describes how a practice assessment tool was developed and introduced for further and advanced pqsw courses in child and adolescent mental health at Anglia Ruskin University. The aim was to develop a useful tool that offers social workers a structured, evidence-based learning experience to improve practice with troubled young people.

In this case study formative peer assessment was introduced on an essay that would eventually be submitted for summative assessment on a first year social work undergraduate social policy module. The aim was to promote students’ understanding of the assessment criteria and process in order to enhance their learning and achievement.

This is the project report of a project conducted in 2003/2004 on Information Literacy provision for Social Work.