Social Work Education and Training

Joyce Lishman

• Publisher: Jessica Kingsley Publishers
• Year: 2011
• Print ISBN: 9781849050760
• eBook ISBN: 9780857002624
• Topic: Social Sciences
• Subtopic: Social Work
• Index: Social Sciences

Excellent social work education and training is vital for ensuring best practice, and it is important to understand the key approaches and methods in order to provide the best teaching and ensure effective learning.

This volume provides an overview of social work education, including the background and current context. It covers the key debates surrounding social work education, such as the evaluation of social work education, the use of IT, research-mindedness, and the effectiveness of interdisciplinary education. The book also offers guidance on effective teaching and learning approaches tailored to the needs of social work educators, covering teaching within a higher education institution, on student practice placements, and in post-qualifying settings.

This will be an indispensable text for educators and trainers in the field of social work.

PART I

The Context

CHAPTER 1

Evaluation of Social Work Education

Joan Orme

Introduction

There is a paradox in discussions about evaluation of social work education. On the one hand, social work education is over-evaluated. Along with all other subjects in higher education in the UK, there is a requirement to set up systems for student evaluation of their learning experiences related to various aspects of individual modules. At a national level, feedback is sought by, for example, the National Student Survey (NSS),¹ and this can have a direct impact on funding mechanisms or indirectly influence student choice of institution and/or course. It is also used for reviews by regulators such as funding councils or care councils to try and evaluate the quality of the education being offered in particular institutions.

On the other hand, it is claimed that there is a scarcity of evaluative research on the outcomes of methods of social work education (Carpenter 2003). This conclusion is drawn on the basis of the quality of the evaluative studies that have been undertaken. The nature and design of the evaluations undertaken beg a number of questions. As Carpenter argues: ‘It is rare to encounter an evaluation with carefully designed outcomes, and even more rare to find a controlled evaluation’ (Carpenter 2003, p.3). The module evaluations (or ‘smiley face’ evaluations as they have been dubbed) tell little about what has been learnt or how effective the learning has been: they merely give a picture of how particular students feel about a particular module at a particular point in time. Such descriptive evaluations are prone to vagaries such as the difficulty of the subject matter, how many technological learning aids are used and even the comfort of the teaching room. They rarely indicate changes that have been brought about in students’ knowledge or, in the case of professional education, changes in practice on the basis of what has been learnt.

This chapter will consider some of the extant evaluative studies to identify the complexity and the challenges of undertaking rigorous evaluation of social work education. In drawing some conclusions, it highlights developments in evaluation of social work education. The chapter is an overview and does not claim to be comprehensive. Also it focuses predominately on the UK. However, in that a review of comparative studies of European social work (Shardlow and Walliss 2003) found that the majority of studies were theoretical rather than empirical, and only two of the empirical studies in their sample focused on social work education, it is apparent that the UK picture is not too different from other countries.

Politics of evaluating social work education

While evaluation of the education process is necessary in all subjects, it is particularly important in professional education – that is, subjects such as medicine, nursing, education and social work where the education process is integrally tied to training for a profession. In these subjects, all learning (academic and skills) is expected to inform and improve the professional practice of the students and ultimately to benefit those who require the services of those professions. This adds a level of complexity because evaluations have to be of academic learning, but also learning usually acquired through practice experience provided by organisations that deliver the services.

In social work, there is an added dimension to evaluations of education and training: that is a political dimension. In the last decade, inquiries into the provision of social services precipitated by, for example, deaths of children or abuse of adults in the care of the state have led to criticisms of qualifying training and reviews of the provision of social work education. Such reviews have led to changes in the length of the training, curriculum content, the academic level at which qualifying training is set and the institutions in which it is taught. They therefore have an impact on the status of the social work profession, the number and quality of the people recruited and the morale of the existing workforce (Lyons and Mannion 2004; Preston-Shoot 2004). Evaluations of social work education that inform such reviews therefore have implications for the delivery of that education and the constitution (in all senses of the word) of the qualified workforce and those who require its services.

Nowhere is this more evident than in the report of the Social Work Task Force (2009). Set up in the wake of the baby Peter Connelly case in England, it recommended wide-ranging changes to social work education, despite the fact that a new degree level qualification had only been introduced in 2003. The Task Force reported that it ‘heard from many sources’ that initial education and training was not yet reliable enough in meeting its primary objective (2009, p.16). However, there was little direct reference to empirical evaluations despite the fact that there was a government-funded evaluation of the social work degree (Department of Health 2008). The fact that the Task Force gave weight to the voices of ‘some employers’ that they were unable to appoint newly qualified social workers because they were not competent to do the job reflects the influence of employers even though they were drawing on what is effectively anecdotal evidence (see the submission from the Children’s Workforce Development Council [CWDC] 2009). However, these views are also reflected in a consultation undertaken in Scotland that reported ‘lingering doubts among some external stakeholders about whether universities are according sufficient weight and importance to practice...seeing practice as very much secondary and subordinate to theory’ (Bellevue Consultancy and Critical Thinking 2006, p.13).

The recommendations of the Task Force for a reformed system of initial education and training included the view that there would be greater assurance of quality consistency if there were stronger local partnerships between universities and employers. It stated that educators had to have a realistic view of what organisations required of beginning social workers, and that employers had to be more involved both in delivering academic content and in assuring the quality of learning opportunities in practice. These recommendations reflect the continuing tensions about what constitutes appropriate learning and achievement for a beginning social worker, and who decides. Employers’ requirements for beginning practitioners moulded to the immediate requirements of a particular agency at a particular time can be at odds with an educational process that prepares practitioners to be critically reflective on, and challenging of, the systems they are joining, but also able to respond to the inevitable changes in policy, practice and organisation.

Approaches to evaluating social work education

While evaluation of social work education has proceeded along parallel lines, reflecting the paradox identified earlier – from regular overviews of what is taught to the dearth of rigorous scientific evaluation – it is important to say that an overview of social work education literature indicates that the picture is more complex than this. Over the last 15 years, since the mid-1990s, there have been some substantive studies of social work education (Blewett and Tunstill 2009; Department of Health 2008; Fook, Ryan and Hawkins 2000; Lyons and Mannion 2004; Marsh and Triseliotis 1996; Pithouse and Scourfield 2002). These studies to evaluate the effectiveness of qualifying social work education and training were often developed in the wake of changes in the requirements for such training brought about by criticism of the effectiveness of the existing provision.

Impetus for evaluation

One approach involves the descriptions of approaches, sometimes innovative, to the delivery of social work education in individual institutions. In the last decade, the number of such approaches to evaluation has increased. This may be because the changes brought about in social work education in the UK at the beginning of the century, which introduced an undergraduate degree as the qualifying level for social work, have been far reaching. They include raising the level of the qualification; lowering the age of entry into the social work profession; benchmarking the expectations of curriculum content for undergraduate degrees (Quality Assurance Agency 2000, 2008); changing the requirements for the involvement of service users and carers in the development of the social work degree; and altering the arrangements for the practice component of the social work degree.²

Such changes provide fertile ground for enquiry and evaluation. They have also been accompanied by the growing pressure on social work academics to undertake research for inclusion in the periodic assessment of research performance in the Research Assessment Exercise (RAE) (Orme and Powell 2008). Social work has sought to bring the two factors together by arguing the case for pedagogic research. The work of the Higher Education Academy Social Policy and Social Work Subject Centre (SWAP), originally part of the Learning and Teaching Subject Network, has both championed and provided an infrastructure and resources for pedagogic research (Taylor and Rafferty 2003). The Social Care Institute for Excellence (SCIE) in England and the Institute for Research and Innovation in Social Services (IRISS, formerly the Scottish Institute for Social Work Education) in Scotland have also championed the need for high-quality evaluation of education and training provision as evidenced by their joint support for the Carpenter (2003) paper and a subsequent initiative focusing on Outcomes of Social Work Education (OSWE) (Burgess and Carpenter 2008, 2010).

View from the local

Evaluation at the local level explores many aspects of social work education. Examples discussed in the following section, which include a focus on admissions to social work courses, processes in learning, service user involvement and practice learning, have been chosen not because of any assessment of their rigour but to illustrate particular aspects of evaluation.

Admissions

In the area of admissions, for example, two studies (Holstrom and Taylor 2008; Perry and Cree 2003) focus on the local context but use data to ask broader questions about the process. Perry and Cree (2003) compare their local statistics on admissions with UK data from two official sources to explore the gendered nature of applications to social work courses. In an evaluation which they call ‘exploratory’ and ‘illustrative’, Holstrom and Taylor (2008) use student data and interviews with staff to explore the relationship between information on applicants’ pre-admission with their subsequent performance on a qualifying course. In using a methodology developed elsewhere, they sought to both test the methodology and provide a comparator to the original study. Their findings relate to crucial debates about the quality of entrants into the social work profession and their observation that being ‘research informed’ is pertinent to the use of evaluation in social work education. They reject the notion of using research to develop exclusionary admission practices (Holstrom and Taylor 2008, p.834) and argue that what is needed is support strategies throughout the education process. This leads them to call for larger scale, funded, longitudinal studies.

Learning

Heron (2006) focuses on student performance and processes in learning. He analysed student assignments for evidence of critical thinking, comparing the work of students from different qualification routes (HNC and BA Social Work) in different institutions. He used categories of ‘critical thinking’ developed in the wider literature as an external objective measure, but it could be argued that the independence of the study was compromised because the judgement was undertaken by a lone researcher. Lack of resources for the evaluation of social work education means that this is a common problem.

For example, Heron’s work can be compared with a related study on what is called ‘criticality’ in social work, which benefited from funding from the major UK social sciences research council the Economic and Social Research Council (ESRC) (Ford et al. 2004). This meant that a multi-disciplinary team could employ a full-time researcher. The study used mixed methods over time to compare social work students with those studying languages. Classroom observations and interviews about practice were undertaken as well as the analysis of assignments.

Service users

While many courses had involved service users in social work education, the introduction of the social work degree required course providers to involve service users and carers in the development and delivery of programmes. Waterson and Morris (2005) acknowledged the dearth of empirical research in this area and used the requirement to undertake an evaluation. Their research approaches involved the presentation of two case studies (in the areas of children and adult care), which were ‘described and reviewed’ (Waterson and Morris 2005, p.655) to provide a framework for setting suitable learning outcomes and evaluative criteria for the involvement of service users and carers in social work education.

Learning for practice

In the light of the criticism that academics are more concerned about theory than practice, and also of the significance of practice learning in the preparation of beginning social workers, evaluations of practice learning are crucial.

Parker’s (2007) research involved a small-scale qualitative study of key stakeholders involved in practice learning and education in social work to assess the relationship between practise learning on social work courses with readiness to practise. This emphasis on readiness to practice was another new development in the degree. Courses are required to prepare and assess students’ readiness for practice before they undertake their supervised practice in social work agencies. O’Connor, Cecil and Boudioni’s (2009) study uses questionnaires, attitude measures, observation journals and a focus group to evaluate the curriculum content and design of a module delivered on one social work course. While this approach could fall into the category of ‘smiley face’ evaluation – assessing whether students enjoy the module – the multi-method approach seeks to provide a qualitative descriptive evaluation that is used to critically evaluate the teaching materials and methods used. The study does not assess whether the module had any impact on the students’ readiness to practise, either by assessing them before and after the module or by seeking the views of other stakeholders such as practice assessors or service users.

In the area of evaluating practice learning, the work on Learning for Effective and Ethical Practice (LEEP) funded by the Scottish Institute for Excellence in Social Work Education (SIESWE) is signifi...

Table of contents

• Cover Page
• Other Books
• Title Page
• Copyright
• Contents
• Introduction
• Part I: The Context
• Part II: Teaching and Learning in Social Work Education
• Part III: Critical Issues and Debate in Relation to Social Work Education in the UK
• The Contributors
• Subject Index
• Author Index