Advanced Social Work with Children and Families

Christine Cocker, Lucille Allain, Christine Cocker, Lucille Allain

• Publisher: Learning Matters
• Year: 2011
• Print ISBN: 9781844453634
• eBook ISBN: 9781844457762
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Social Sciences
• Subtopic: Social Work
• Index: Social Sciences

Practice and legislation in child and family social work are always changing and have once again come under the spotlight. This text contextualises the bureaucratisation and managerialism of modern social work while also covering the advanced and complex skills necessary for competent social work practice in this area. The recent introduction of a new framework for Post-Qualifying social work practice provides an opportunity for the development of a robust text covering the basics at an advanced level.

Chapter 1

Consolidating practice with children and families

Patricia Cartney

CHAPTER OBJECTIVES

If you are a registered social worker, this chapter will assist you to evidence post-registration training and learning. It relates to the national post-qualifying framework for social work education and training at the specialist level:

iii. Consolidate and consistently demonstrate in direct work with users of social care service and carers the full range of social work competences across all the units of the National Occupational Standards for Social Work and in the context of one area of specialist social work practice.

It will also help you to meet the Children and Families standards for social work, specifically Requirement 3:

All students must consolidate their initial competence in a specialist context before they move on to other modules. In the case of social work with children, young people, their families and carers, this module must ensure that competence in relation to the 21 units of competence identified in the National Occupational Standards for Social Work is fully integrated with the Common Core of Skills and Knowledge for the Children’s Workforce.

Introduction

This chapter discusses how practising social workers move from the point of being newly qualified to becoming post-qualified workers studying on professional and academic award-bearing programmes. The importance of consolidating your practice experience and evidencing what you have learned is a cornerstone of preparing for your continuing professional development. While the emphasis will be on working with children and families, the process of consolidating and articulating learning has importance across all areas of social work practice.

Studying for post-qualified social work awards is hopefully an anticipated trajectory for many social workers. Newly qualified social workers are encouraged to see continuing professional development (CPD) as underpinning future career development (Keen et al., 2009). This chapter focuses on the processes involved in undertaking post-qualified learning and identifies some of the opportunities and challenges you may face as you embark on this journey. The concept of professional knowledge is explored and the ‘messy terrain’ travelled when transferring knowledge from practice to academic settings is debated. The challenges involved in transferring ‘knowledges’ and knowing across contexts are explicitly addressed and particular issues about how you evidence the consolidation of your ‘practice wisdom’ are explored. Strategies to enhance the articulation of practice knowledge are suggested and the opportunity to name and articulate this knowledge is explored as a key part of professional development and an opportunity to contribute to the development of effective practice with children and families.

Setting the context

The revised post-qualifying framework for social workers in England came into force on 1 September 2007. Three separate levels of award are now offered which correspond to different stages of professional and career development:

• specialist;
• higher specialist;
• advanced.

Specialist awards focus on the knowledge and skills needed for consolidating, extending and deepening initial professional competence. Higher specialist awards focus on the knowledge and skills needed for discharging high levels of responsibility and the need for complex decision making. Advanced awards focus on the advanced knowledge and skills needed for the improvement of services at a strategic level, alongside professional leadership. There are five specialisms running across all of these levels. These are:

• mental health;
• adult social care;
• practice education;
• leadership and management;
• children and young people, their families and carers.

The consolidation of competence in a specialist context begins with the study of the consolidation unit, which provides a structured introduction to the specialist award and underpins future studies. To complete this unit successfully, you need to demonstrate that you have consolidated and extended your initial competence as well as developed confidence in one of the specific areas of practice identified above. Successful candidates are expected to use reflection and critical analysis to demonstrate how their practice has developed and to draw on theories, models and relevant up-to-date research in evidencing their consolidation (GSCC, 2005).

The broader context of continued professional development is currently changing across the social work landscape. The first year of practice for newly qualified social workers (NQSWs) is now increasingly acknowledged as a crucial transition point between leaving university and undertaking the responsibilities of a qualified practitioner. The need for high quality supervision and support for NQSWs during this year is acknowledged. The Social Work Taskforce are currently recommending a new ‘licensing’ system which will introduce an assessed probationary year in employment for new social work graduates, similar to the probationary year for newly qualified teachers. This aims to ensure that NQSWs are both properly supported in their first year of practice and are properly assessed before they are fully licensed. A revamped framework for CPD, underpinned by a practice-based Master’s qualification, is also being recommended, so that all social workers can keep their skills up to date and develop specialist knowledge as they progress in their careers (see www.dcsf.gov.uk/swtf).

Evidencing your consolidated and extended practice – how you know what you know

Looking at the current post-qualifying requirements (GSCC, 2005) the evidencing of practice appears clearly in line with professional development and a logical progression as you move from being a newly qualified social worker to a more experienced practitioner. You will probably have worked in a broad range of complex situations and have a wealth of experience of working with service users who have presented with difficult situations where your extended knowledge of practice has been crucial in working successfully with them. Surely all you need to do is provide evidence that your practice has improved as your experience has grown and you have developed greater knowledge and more advanced skills?

In the author’s experience of teaching on post-qualifying social work programmes for over 20 years, however, many highly competent and experienced practitioners struggle initially with how to articulate and evidence their deepened knowledge and skills. A particular issue is how they write down and identify their evidence in a way which meets the professional demands and the academic requirements of post-qualifying social work awards. It is worth pausing to consider why this might be so and to explore the complexities some practitioners face when writing about their practice knowledge in an academic context. Identifying this as an area to reflect on at the start of any post-qualifying learning journey allows us to anticipate where there might be challenges in advance and to consider how we can best prepare to deal with this. It also encourages us to plan for the journey ahead and be aware of the terrain through which we will be travelling.

ACTIVITY 1.1

• Take a few minutes to think about your own knowledge as a practising social worker. Undertaking this exercise will be a helpful starting point for reflecting on the issues explored in this chapter and will act as an aide-memoire for you.
• Jot down a few examples of what you know and how you came to know this.

Comment

Clearly, there are numerous answers you could give at this point. For most practitioners, however, the examples you gave will result from an interplay between many different factors. You may have included your formal knowledge (knowledge you gained from formal education and training), your practice wisdom (knowledge you have built up from doing your job) and personal knowledge (knowledge you have gained from your own and others’ life experiences). Evidencing how you have consolidated and extended your practice involves identifying how your different ways of knowing interact to improve your work as a social worker within your specialist setting.

Understanding professional knowledge

In recent years, a great deal has been written about how professionals come to know what they know. Dreyfus and Dreyfus (1986) developed a model to illustrate how people acquire and master a skill. They identified five steps involved in moving from a novice to an expert.

Step 1: Novice

Novices are taught context-free rules to guide their actions. They lack experience of situations and so are not operating with reference to the full context in which they are acting but are following generally applicable rules. When we learn to drive a car, for example, we are taught where to position our hands on the steering wheel, at what speed to change gear, etc. While such knowledge is initially helpful, to become a skilled driver we need to move beyond this to be able to change our driving in line with traffic conditions on the road we are travelling on. To develop our skills further we need to adapt our general knowledge and apply it to particular situations. This stage might remind you of your very first experiences as a social work practitioner on your first practice placement when you were taught how to conduct ‘a social work interview’ or undertake ‘an assessment’ in general terms without reference to particular people or more complex situations. Interestingly, it is rather easy to evidence this type of knowledge. You can write what the rule/procedure is and then say how you acted in relation to this without much difficulty.

Step 2: Advanced beginner

After the novice has accumulated considerable experience of dealing with real situations, the person starts to become aware of ‘situational’ elements in different circumstances. The advanced beginner practitioner now begins to incorporate knowledge from the specific situation they are in as well as the earlier context-free rules. When driving a car we start to become aware of what is actually happening in our driving alongside general rules. We may find the engine in the car we are driving needs us to go up our gears slightly earlier or later than the general rule suggests. Maybe this stage reminds you of your final practice placement on your qualifying social work programme? You may recall beginning to understand that different service users responded differently to variations in your interview style. You may remember starting to adapt the way you communicated in response to this while still holding on to your general rules about how to interview people. While writing about and evidencing this knowledge is a little more complex than at the novice stage, it is still a fairly straightforward process.

Step 3: Competence

The ability to plan as a way of organising knowledge and guiding action becomes increasingly important at this level of professional development. The competent practitioner is doing more than simply following context-free rules and taking into account situational influences. A range of possibilities is seen and the practitioner engages in decision making to choose their plan of action with a clear goal in mind. Knowledge here is related to seeing sets of facts and patterns emerging in situations. Work here is often organised and efficient although it lacks the speed and flexibility of the proficient practitioner. In our driving scenario, we are less concerned with the general rules around operating the vehicle and we drive more with our destination becoming the main goal as we travel. What we know is still conscious and our competence is dependent on being able to think quickly about what we have learnt and to apply it quickly. Drivers who have recently passed their driving test, for example, tend to be aware of what gear they are driving in most of the time. Maybe this stage of learning reminds you of your increasing competence as a social work practitioner as you worked to complete your first year of practice as a NQSW? At this point you knew what you knew and evidencing this was relatively easy as you constantly checked your learning against the requirements of your programme in terms of Core Competencies or Key Roles, etc. In the current post-qualifying framework you may have been studying awards at Specialist level.

Step 4: Proficiency

For the proficient practitioner ‘detached decision making’ rarely takes place in the way it does at earlier stages. Knowing what to do may appear to ‘just happen’ rather than be the result of conscious deliberation across a range of alternatives. The idea here is that the knowledge base of the practitioner contains memories of similar situations that the person has experienced in the past and these are triggered by the new situations they encounter. Knowledge about what worked in the past and what might be expected to happen next is brought to bear on current situations. Situations are not broken down into component parts but are seen holistically. Notions of intuition come into play at this point. Intuition here is abou...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Half Title
• Series
• Title
• Copyright
• Contents
• Foreword
• About the authors
• Acknowledgements
• Introduction
• 1 Consolidating practice with children and families
• 2 Policy and legislative frameworks in contemporary child and family social work
• 3 Safeguarding children
• 4 Family Intervention Projects
• 5 Skills in direct work with looked after children, their carers and families
• 6 Foster care: learning from research and inquiries
• 7 Adoption
• 8 Practice education
• 9 What’s important for looked after children?
• Conclusion
• Bibliography
• Index