Social Work Practice Placements

Critical and Reflective Approaches

Sue Jones

• Publisher: Learning Matters
• Year: 2014
• Print ISBN:
  9781473902244
  9781473902237
• Edition: 1
• eBook ISBN:
  9781473911024
• Topic: Social Sciences
• Subtopic: Social Work
• Index: Social Sciences

All social work students must undertake Practice Placements in the second and final years of their programme and the placement is a crucial area of assessment for passing the degree course.

This book will help to develop student?s critical thinking, analytic and reflective skills as they progress through their two placements. It will help them build a successful practice portfolio and understand exactly how they fit into the myriad of other professionals and services that make up day to day reality of practice. Crucially, this book will also feature a chapter on developing these skills into the workplace. Uniquely, it argues that becoming a competent and thriving social worker is dependent on success in the placement.

Chapter 1

Preparation for your social work placement

A C H I E V I N G A S O C I A L W O R K D E G R E E

This chapter will help you to develop the following capabilities, to the appropriate level, from the Professional Capabilities Framework:

• Professionalism: Demonstrate ability to learn, using a range of approaches.

• Critical reflection and analysis: Understand the role of reflective practice and demonstrate basic skills of reflection. Understand the need to construct hypotheses in social work practice.

It will also introduce you to the following standards as set out in the 2008 Social Work Subject Benchmark Statement:

4.2 At Honours level, the study of social work involves the integrated study of subject-specific knowledge, skills and values and the critical application of research knowledge from the social and human sciences, and from social work to inform understanding and to underpin action, reflection and evaluation . . . and to foster this integration of contextual, analytic, critical explanatory and practical understanding.

4.4 Honours graduates in social work should be equipped to both understand and work within a context of contested debate about nature, scope and purpose and be enabled to analyse, adapt to, manage and eventually to lead the processes of change.

6.2 The learning process in social work as expressed in awareness raising, skills and knowledge acquisition, conceptual understanding, practice skills and experience and reflection on performance.

Introduction

The focus of this chapter will be for you to reposition yourself within the domain of placement learning. I invite the term ‘reposition’ because so far on your course you will have been coming to terms with who you are within the context of academic life as an undergraduate or postgraduate student. Working through this chapter will help to prepare you to demonstrate a high level of professionalism through knowing what to expect from the placement. This will include the ability to situate your experiences within placement expectations and to articulate these effectively using your course documentation. You might think about how to express your experience as a carer. What skills and knowledge do you have that would transfer over to the placement? If you have only worked in a non-statutory organisation how might you articulate your roles and tasks for a potential statutory placement? Perhaps you would use organisational rather than descriptive terms. So if you worked on an advice line for the Samaritans you might express this as having a calm and resourceful manner, able to deal with crisis situations and having good communication skills. Through an understanding of how decisions are made as to the allocation of a placement within an agency you will appreciate that there are different ways to express your knowledge, experience, aspirations and qualifications on the placement application form.

For example, your placement request form will be sent via the university placement team to an agency representative who will then select a staff member to be your potential practice educator. They might reject your request if they feel they cannot provide you with an appropriate learning opportunity. The person who eventually makes a judgement about whether there is a ‘fit’ between your requirements and their offer is wholly reliant on what they read on your form. There is a skill in writing the request form that is broad enough to encompass various fields of practice and demonstrates a depth to your experience and aspirations.

Also, it is vital that you demonstrate your openness to engage with learning, and to welcome challenge and set out what you judge your learning needs to be. An example of a completed placement request form is given in this chapter. Throughout the chapter you will begin to recognise social work as a considered and carefully expressed enterprise where reflective and critical thinking is paramount. Some dilemmas will be posed for you where you have to work with situations that are not of your choosing yet provide opportunities of breadth and depth that will lead you to a wealth of career trajectories as yet unconsidered.

By the end of this chapter you will be able to:

• demonstrate an ability to manage personal, professional and university life while successfully completing the placement;

• prepare for your practice placement using an appreciation of the necessary knowledge, skills and aptitudes;

• recognise and evidence your existing abilities and knowledge through a contemplative approach that enables you to express these formally to the placement providers;

• anticipate the essential factors surrounding the placement experience and their place in your own professional behaviours.

The placement structure

The College of Social Work (TCSW) has set down guidance to universities and employers on the expectations of readiness for practice in social work students who are preparing to undertake practice placements in service provider agencies. The structure of these is as follows:

Undergraduate programmes

• Year One: 30 days of developing skills for practice.

• Year Two: 70 days of formal practice, practice educator supervision and assessment, followed by the student submission of a portfolio of evidence to the Practice Assessment Board.

• Year Three: 100 days of formal practice to include practice knowledge of statutory requirements, practice educator supervision and assessment, followed by the student submission of a portfolio of evidence to the Practice Assessment Board. Placement two should offer learning experiences with a different service user group from placement one.

Postgraduate programmes

• Year One: 100 days of formal practice, practice educator supervision and assessment, followed by the student submission of a portfolio of evidence to the Practice Assessment Board.

• Year Two: 100 days of formal practice to include practice knowledge of statutory requirements, practice educator supervision and assessment followed by the student submission of a portfolio of evidence to the Practice Assessment Board. Placement two should offer learning experiences with a different service user group from placement one.

In both routes the Professional Capabilities Framework (PCF) will apply throughout and your course might decide to separate them so that the complexity is heightened as you progress through the programme. The portfolio will demonstrate a standard of competence that must be clearly evidenced in practice. This includes the ability to think critically, reflect, create personal learning opportunities, work individually and with a team and manage the tensions and dilemmas of the work created by contentious situations in which there is often no clear resolution. The PCF is included as Appendix 1 of this book for your information. Alternatively, it can be accessed at www.tcsw.org.uk along with a wealth of information relating to social work placements. As the framework for learning also includes the Higher Education Subject Benchmarks for Social Work, these can be accessed online at www.qaa.ac.uk.

Reflecting on skills for placement

While working in the placement agencies you will also be attending university, either one or two days a week, maybe taking a specialist unit or returning for contact days once every two months or so. The level of contact differs with each programme. How might this shifting attendance pattern affect you?

ACTIVITY 1.1

Preparing for placement: the reality of practice

What questions might arise for you in meeting the needs of the programme structure once you are on placement? Read the following then review alongside the Comment section.

Shamira had managed to get her head around what social work was about after the first few terms at university – at least theoretically. She now knew it was about social change, risk and protection, control and empowerment. She had shadowed a social worker in a child protection team and in her reflective report about this had confessed to feeling overwhelmed. She had looked at her own family, her own children and the support she both received and gave and could not reconcile this with the treatment that the children in the placement had received from their parents. She thought them irresponsible – taking drugs and drinking, not cleaning the house or making sure that the children got to school. Shamira had now found that her first placement was in a child protection team at some distance from her home. She was worried about compromising the care of her own children as she would need to leave them with a childminder before and after school. She also felt her feelings would compromise whether she would be able to help these families if she were their social worker. She didn’t want to mention this to her tutor or lecturers as they might think her unsuitable to continue on the course but she made a note to speak to some of the other students at the callback day.

COMMENT

Shamira struggled with the reality of social work practice. She had felt competent in the knowledge from her academic learning and although she had researched the law relevant to her practice she felt her own value base was intervening and preventing her from engaging with the family. She was anxious because she felt it necessary to hide her feelings from the university and placement staff. She genuinely wanted to help the family but seemed unable to resolve her difficulties in order to act as an advocate on their behalf. No matter how much she delved into her capacities for thinking through these things she felt insincere and always returned in a cyclical manner to her original unhelpful thoughts. In effect, she was unable to act as an independent thinker because her personal views were interfering with her professional self. One might say there was too much ‘noise’ from her private entity that was not being resolved in order to deal with her professional persona. Shamira needed to develop her skills in deep reflection, linking with socio-psychological theories and situating herself within a set of professional ideas that would act as a catalyst to both reflexive and critical positioning.

In dealing with this dilemma Shamira might apply the work of Jung (1989) and of Bourdieu et al. (1992). Jung uses the concept of ‘individuation’ to describe how we apply our sense of who we are (the self) to fulfil our potential for all that we can be. In this way, Shamira recognises the dilemmas she faces. There is a need to integrate the two distinct parts of her psyche; the personal versus the professional self applied to what she knows must constitute her values, beliefs and behaviours in social work practice. In a similar vein, Bourdieu speaks of our ‘habitus’ in recognising that our whole personality is contributed to by our lifelong experiences and how these have been imbibed to form our aptitudes and abilities in our interpretation of the world over a period of time. This process continues throughout life causing us to constantly reflect on, and revise, our perceptions of how we act in the world. Here Shamira recognises the impact of her life so far on her ability to act in certain ways and to question the rightness of these ways. These two approaches cause her to accept the dissonance that might exist once she experiences the practice of social work. In reasoning in this way, she will see the need to take her feelings to supervision as a professional activity and not as a failure to be thinking the ‘right’ thoughts.

It is through the questioning, relinquishing or embedding of our psychological makeup as social workers that we develop the emotional resilience needed to undertake the social work role.

Developing your resilience while on placement

Most social work students have embarked on their careers wanting to help others and it comes as a shock that some of the work may involve working with people who are involuntary service users and unlikeable. It is therefore vital that you prepare your personal life to run as smoothly as possible and know how to manage difficulties that will invariably arise while you are on placement. Posing yourself some questions to deal with your feelings will help you to see more clearly through the fog of your emotions. Here are some to help you.

1. What do I need to do to ensure that my children and I are comf...

Table of contents

• Cover Page
• Halftitle
• Advertisement
• Title
• Copyright
• Contents
• About the Author
• Series Editor’s Preface
• Acknowledgements
• Introduction
• 1 Preparation for your Social Work Placement
• 2 Understanding your Placement through an Organisational Journey
• 3 Embedding Critical Placement Learning
• 4 Preparing for and Using Supervision
• 5 Completing your Portfolio
• 6 Moving on: NQSW, ASYE and all that . . .
• Appendix 1 Professional Capabilities Framework
• Appendix 2 Ladder of Citizen Participation
• References
• Index