Yesterday, Today and Tomorrow: Is Social Work Supervision in South Africa Keeping Up?

Social Work Supervision Policies and Frameworks: Playing Notes or Making Music?

“…Although issues related to workload are addressed in the supervision framework, participants' responses confirmed local research findings of Engelbrecht (2010a) as well as English research findings (Carpenter et al, 2012b) that supervision sessions are sometimes cancelled or delayed because supervisors are too busy or supervision is being conducted "on the run" (Noble & Irwin, 2009:351) and "often focused more on workers completing forms on time rather than on the quality of outcomes for service users" (Bourn & Hafford-Letchfield, 2011:45). A participating supervisor said, for example:…”

“…This view is echoed not only by contemporary research findings in South Africa (Cloete, 2012;Engelbrecht, 2010a), but also in other countries (compare Bourn & HaffordLetchfield, 2011;Carpenter et al, 2012b;Thomas, Propp & Poertner, 1998). Hair (2012) explicitly refers to repeated recommendations from both practice literature and research that supervision training is necessary for supervisors to provide effective services.…”

“…For example: supervision of social workers and related concepts are defined by means of a compilation of different literature sources, without citing them and without revealing the specific country's welfare policy contexts that have moulded and underlie these literature sources. These sources furthermore emanate mostly from clinical supervision contexts, which may be regarded as the exact opposite of South Africa's developmental social welfare policy paradigm (DSD, 2006b;Engelbrecht, 2010a). Moreover, the framework refers to distinct theories, models and perspectives undergirding the essence of supervision, without defining these concepts, nor clarifying or indicating how situational or institutional contexts determine these theories, models and perspectives, and how they direct the definition of supervision.…”

“…This results in competing interests rather than striving towards a common goal in practice (Tsui & Cheung 2004), owing to decreasing central government subsidies, organisational budget cuts and overall austerity measures. These tendencies furthermore result in an excessive emphasis on the administrative function of supervision (Engelbrecht, 2010a) to the detriment of educational and supportive functions in order to adhere to organisational performance management and national accountability systems and statutory requirements. The implication of these neoliberal tendencies for South Africa as for other countries (Bradley et al, 2010;O'Donoghue & Tsui, 2012) is that despite the marketisation of social service delivery and care as a commodity, the South African Department of Social Development is still enforcing a range of managerial measures (DSD, 2006b;DSD, 2012) in order to maintain control over national standards, of which the supervision framework is one example.…”

Coaching, Mentoring and Consultation: The Same but Different Activities in Supervision of Social Workers in South Africa?

“…Attempts to isolate and conceptualise these activities outside the context of social work supervision would merely create confusion. This is evident in research (Engelbrecht, 2010) suggesting that advocating an "either-supervision-orconsultation-approach" in South Africa constitutes a fallacy, as this perception of consultation of experienced social workers simply becomes a misnomer for inadequate supervision, disguised as giving the social worker consultee status -but without any contractual, evidence or competency basis. Hence, although it is particularly apparent that the supervision activities concerned all possess similarities in terms of processes, techniques and methods, the main intrinsic differences in features, scope and utilisation lie in three distinct professional development stages of the social worker, which are those of a student, newly qualified and experienced social worker.…”