Learning about Practice from Practice: A Peer-based Methodology

Abstract

A recommendation from the Social Work Task Force was that all employers of social workers should conduct a regular ''health check'' of the social work profession to learn from practice as part of a continuous cycle of improvement. This article documents how the London Borough of Tower Hamlets has gone about this. I describe the methodological and practical pathway we followed so that others can see what we did and why we did it. Like other busy social work offices, we had to set out a plan of methodological action in order that we achieved the learning from practice to inform our health check, and it is the planning work that is engaged with in this article. We have found that by involving and engaging our staff in the health check work, we have gained more than we had set out to find. An organisational commitment to act on what social workers have told us about practice is offering the senior management team new ideas about the best ways of delivering professional and reflective support mechanisms for staff. Learning from practice is now one of the core functions for the new Principal Social Worker.

Challenges facing international social workers: English managers’ perceptions

“…For example, the dominant social work paradigm in the UK has developed in response to a particular set of national needs and conditions characterized by an emphasis on direct practice and the need to balance empowerment with notions of social control (Crisp, 2009) particularly in statutory social work. The rise of new managerialism and prioritization of case management processes have combined with a high level of public and political scrutiny, of child and family social work (Stanley, 2013) leading to a distinctive form of ‘British social work’. This practice paradigm often poses considerable challenges for local social work graduates and practitioners, and presents a practice reality which is difficult to anticipate for the ISWs who have never previously worked in the UK.…”