SOCIAL WORK EDUCATION AND THE SOCIAL SERVICES OUTSIDE CANADA: THE BRITISHEXPERIENCEAuthor(s): John SpencerSource: Canadian Journal of Social Work Education / Revue canadienne d'éducation en servicesocial, Vol. 2, No. 3 (1976), pp. 23-31Published by: Canadian Association for Social Work Education (CASWE)Stable URL: http://www.jstor.org/stable/41678937 .

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SOCIAL WORK EDUCATION AND

THE SOCIAL SERVICES

OUTSIDE CANADA:

THE BRITISH EXPERIENCE

John Spencer Visiting Professor University of Toronto

ABREGE La relation qui existe entre la formation en

service social et la prestation des services est toujours importante, mais elle Test particulière- ment aux époques de réorganisation des départe- ments de service social. Ces dernières années, la Grande-Bretagne a connu deux expériences de ce genre: ce fut d'abord l'unification post-Seebohm, puis la régionalisation des pouvoirs locaux.

Cette relation soulève plusieurs questions à étudier: (1)Le problème de la main-d'oeuvre. La réor-

ganisation a été suivie d'une augmentation assez substantielle, quoique non prévue, du nombre des travailleurs sociaux d'expérience.

(2) L'expansion de l'éducation générale et des équipes dites de service social général.

(3) Les conséquences de la création de départe- ments de service social étendus et complexes, chargés d'enseigner l'administration sociale.

(4) Les occasions d'établir des programmes, de préparer des plans et de faire des recherches sur une grande échelle.

(5) L'insistance sur le travail d'équipe. L'une des réalisations la plus significative qui a

suivi la réorganisation en Angleterre a été la création d'un organisme financé par le ministère de la Santé et de la Sécurité sociale - The Central Council for Education and Training in Social Work. Ce Conseil compte de nombreux adhérents et répond de la formation en service social envisagée dans un vaste contexte.

L'enseignement canadien en service social a beaucoup à offrir à la Grande-Bretagne. Mais c'est l'équilibre entre les études générales et spéci-

alisées qui rend l'expérience canadienne particu- lièrement utile.

Periods of change in systems of social service delivery may be particularly useful as incentives for the re-appraisal of social work education as well as by providing a challenge to the eduators to re-think their principles and methods in the light of new demands. If this process of re-thinking can be done on the basis of comparative study then so much the better, but comparative study is at all times a delicate operation and the les- sons to be learned are nearly always two-way. The purpose of this paper is to examine the implications of the British re-organization with a Canadian audi- ence in mind and against the back- ground of change in Canada not only of social service delivery, but also of social work education.

There can be no doubt about the general importance of education for social service delivery but it is essential to be clear about the reasons for saying this. In the first place, there is the responsibility of the educational institu- tions for providing an adequate supply of trained staff for the services under the new conditions of service delivery. At one time this was a relatively simple problem when little attempt was made

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to differentiate social work tasks and when virtually the entire responsibility for social work education rested on graduate education within the univer- sities. This was the case in both Britain and Canada up to the fifties and early sixties.

A second criterion of social work education follows from this point. It concerns the differentiation of forms of education to meet different kinds of social work tasks and at different levels of responsibility. The British reorgani- zation resulting from the Seebohm Report in England and Wales and from the White Paper in Scotland provides abundant evidence of the ways in which new needs emerged, existing gaps in service provision gained recognition, and a re-definition of tasks became necessary. All these points carried with them implications for training. In parti- cular, the experience showed up the issues which had not been predicted or incorrectly forecast. Among these issues was the important question of cost. The Scottish Bill, for example, naively stated that the reorganized services would not cost appreciably more than the old.

Third, there is the particular question of social work method. The traditional emphasis on casework as the main social work method was extended to include groupwork and then later com- munity work. Casework came to as- sume a much greater concern with in- dividuals in a family context and a capacity to deal with the family group. As a result of the pioneering work of Dame Eileen Younghusband and the visit of Charlotte Towle at the London School of Economics, specialized courses of social work education de- signed to meet particular needs such as those of children or the mentally ill gave way to "generic" courses, which fo-

cussed on common needs rather than on client groups. In an important article analysing the results of a survey of social work courses Parsloe (1976) writes:

"The shift has been not only from specific client groups but also towards a classification of method based upon the relational system chosen for intervention."

The Canadian reader will hardly need to be reminded that shifts of these kinds had generally occurred at a much earlier date in Canada and in the United States, and during this period schools of social work in North America have been able to resolve a number of issues which are still, in British social work education, a source of confusion and dispute, especi- ally those relating to methods of in- tervention.

In the fourth place, there are the consequences of British re-organization for the growth of social work teams. Writing with the advantages of hind- sight, it is not difficult to criticise the over-simplified approach of British social work to the development of so- called generic teams of workers, based largely on area and neighbourhood size and characteristics. The early literature (government reports in particular) was unclear as to the precise meaning of "generic" with the result that a kind of generalist ideology grew up in which it was assumed that team members would be expected to deal with a wide variety of client needs.

It is, moreover, somewhat ironic that a profession which had come to rely so closely on the study of group behaviour for working with clients in groups, had received so inadequate a preparation for team-work during the course of their education. The reason perhaps lies in the fact that the challenge of team-work following reorganization proved to be much greater than the experience of the

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teams which had been trained to work with particular kinds of needs.

The fifth reason for the link between social work education and service de- livery is of particular interest to those of us concerned in the study of social administration. There can be no doubt about the significance of experience in Britain where two reorganizations, first in social work delivery and later in local government, have brought about an enormous growth in the structure of the service and in bureaucracy. In short, the unification of a range of small-scale separate services into a single social work service greatly increased the scale of organization, not only in terms of size but also in the levels at which the service has been decentralized.

Concomitant with this increase in bureaucracy have been the implications for social policy and research as an integral part of social work education. Substantial growth in the scale of or- ganization gave rise to new opportuni- ties for planning and research in the social work departments. Questions of policy which had previously been dealt with piecemeal required in a "turbu- lent" environment, to use Emery and Trisťs phrase, a much more co-ordin- ated and planned approach through the analysis of needs and by the develop- ment of methods of evaluation. But it was in these contexts in particular that social work education began to disclose some long-standing deficiencies. Social workers, in short, had not been trained to perform the new administration, policy-making and research tasks that were required by these larger structures.

These are some of the major conse- quences of changes in service delivery which are relevant for social work edu- cation. They are by no means peculiar to Britain but the magnitude of the changes and the relatively short time-

span in which they have occurred con- trast with the slower pace of change in many of the Canadian provinces, among which Manitoba provides a good example. There have been, how- ever, the legislative changes of Quebec and of British Columbia (subsequently hindered by a change of government) which clearly point in the same direc- tion. At the present time, moreover, both Britain and Canada alike are fac- ing the challenge of cuts in expenditure and of retrenchment in the provision of services. The point is important inas- much as it compels us not only to examine critically the question of priorities, in types of need, in forms of provision such as the balance between residential and community care, but also the very complex problems of cost, both on the side of revenue as well as of expenditure.

The subject of cuts in expenditure has been considerably discussed. But the effect of financial stringency on social work education has received much less attention though equally important. In Britain, especially in Scotland where reorganization of service delivery made abundantly clear the very serious short- age of professional social workers, there has been a substantial increase in the output of trained staff from the educa- tional institutions.* In most universities social work departments received both money and encouragement for an in- crease in staff and in student output. This greatly favoured position no longer exists. As in the field of service delivery, so also in social work educa- tion arise the questions of priorities and the most effective use of resources. There is, for example, the balance be- tween undergraduate and post-gradu- ate education, between polytechnics

♦The target set in 1972 was a 60% expansion of training places of all kinds by 1976/77.

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and universities, and more recently there is the emphasis placed by the Central Council for Education and Training in Social Work (the C.C.E.T.S. W.) on post-qualifying studies.

The aims and principles of the reor- ganization in service delivery in Britain have been frequently discussed in the literature, and overseas visitors (John Gandy, for example, from the Univesity of Toronto Faculty of Social Work) have contributed usefully to the study of its consequences. What has received much less emphasis, however, are the other changes associated with the reor- ganization at the level of local govern- ment. The importance of emphasis on the wide range of involvement both in service delivery as well as in social work education is well illustrated by the changes which have taken place in Britain in the following sectors:

( 1 ) In Central government there were changes in the responsibilities of the Home Office and of the Department of Health and Social Security (DHSS) and the establishment of a special Social Work Advisory Service within the D.H. S.S. In Scotland, social work ser- vices were co-ordinated in a new Group within the Scottish Education Depart- ment.

(2) There was an amalgamation of several previously separate profession- al associations within a single body, the British Association of Social Workers. Up to this stage, Britain contrasted sharply with Canada which had long enjoyed a single professional associa- tion, the C.A.S.W. These separate asso- ciations had not only developed very distinct identities and norms but in some cases had published their own journals.

(3) Unification also occurred in the three separate training bodies concern- ed with the promotion and development

of training in the fields of child care, social work (mainly in the welfare ser- vices) and probation when the C.C.E.T.S.W. took over these respon- sibilities at its inception in 1971. In that year, the new council became respon- sible for 150 courses which carried vari- ous forms of nationally-recognized qualifications.

Thus, the reorganization of service delivery involved a great deal more in Britain than changes in social work departments and the development of generic area teams. The point is perhaps best illustrated by the new training structure of the C.C.E.T.S.W. and the experience of this body during the first five years of its existence. At the risk of exaggeration, one might argue that a study of this experience could prove to be of great value for future develop- ments in Canada. Certainly it is clear that it has not yet received the Canadian study which it deserves.

The C.C.E.T.S.W. is a national body, established by Act of Parliament and financed almost entirely out of govern- ment funds. In the year 1975 for ex- ample, government grants amounted to £ 675,000*. But the size of this contri- bution is by no means the only indica- tion of interest from central government which the Council has received throughout its life from care and ex- pertise from the relevant departments. Equally important to the finance and advice from central government is the breadth of representation on this Coun- cil. This breadth in its membership supports the point made earlier, that social work education requires the in- volvement of wide-ranging groups in society. Social work education, to para- phrase an aphorism, is much too im-

*but expected to rise to over £ 1M. by March 1976.

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portant to be left only to the academics who do the teaching in universities.

Members of the Council of the C.C.E.T.S.W. have no doubt complain- ed about the inevitable difficulties of discussion in a body of some 53 people, in addition to the council's own staff and the government advisers in attend- ance. But the point must be stressed that social work training policy is not only open to a wide range of interest but requires their participation in policy discussions. What interests are in- volved? A brief analysis of membership gives an answer. There are four main groups: (i) the employers (ii) the professional bodies (iii) the educational institutions (iv) the social workers themselves, in-

cluding students in training. Among the first of these four groups

there are representatives of the different local authority associations and of the regional hospital boards. The profes- sional bodies include nine members from the professional association and representation from groups of chief officers both in social work and in health. The representatives of the edu- cational bodies show the range of insti- tutions involved, including not only social work departments in universities and polytechnics, but other training bodies with an interest in social work.

Although the fourth category is not formally represented among the list of council members, social workers and students have in fact been consulted in various informal ways, particularly at the level of the regions into which the C.C.E.T.S.W. has been decentralized. In Scotland, for example, considerable attention has been given to building up contacts with a range of groups and associations whose opinions are useful in formulating training policy.

The primary purpose of the Council has always been the establishment of national standards and qualifications in social work and in this context a study of its work is at the same time a reflection of the general structure of social work training in Britain. What was not anticipated, however, at the time when it was established, was the way in which its deliberations, most of them delegated to boards and com- mittees since the full council meets relatively infrequently, have gone a long way beyond the boundaries of what is us- ually considered as social work education.

For Canadians this is surely an im- portant point to appreciate since it is closely related to the consequences of the British reorganization in service delivery. It involves some difficult prob- lems of organization but above all it raises important and controversial questions of principle both for British and Canadian social work. In short, the Council has seen fit to widen the range of its responsibilities beyond those of professional social work to include "other forms of social service closely allied with social work". The C.C.E.T.S.W. Report No. 2 (1975) summarizes the current situation as follows:

"A number of specific issues currently under discussion will compel the Council, in con- sultation with other bodies, to be more specific in defining what it means by social work and the appropriate training for it, so isolating for the purposes of definition, the other areas of work for which it has some responsibility in the training field** (Section VIII, page 37). To be more specific, the

C.C.E.T.S.W. has been active in the establishment of working parties in a number of fields: in the much neglected and under-staffed field of residential social work, in the training of day service staff at centres for the mentally handicapped, in the wider field of

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handicap, and in social work for the educational services. These reports led to the much more debatable question of providing a new form of training for a range of workers in the social services for whom a professional social work qualification is inappropriate. The cur- rent proposal, leading to a certificate in Social Service and designed for students who will be in employment during their courses, provides an interesting blend of a common unit of study with a range of special options, taken in a form which is best suited to the particular needs of the students concerned, in terms of trans- port, geography, and above all, of the availability of teaching institutions and field placements. It is indeed an inno- vative proposal and will be watched with great interest, by enthusiasts (in which group I count myself) and skep- tics alike, albeit for very different reasons.

The Council's main professional qualification (the Certificate of Quali- fication in Social Work, C.Q.S.W.) is awarded for courses of four types:

(a) Two- and three-year courses for non-graduates, taken mainly in poly- technics but also in colleges for further education, and in colleges of education in Scotland. - Total. 51;

(b) four-year degree courses which in- clude professional training, taken in a relatively small number of universities and polytechnics. - Total. 16;

(c) one-year postgraduate profes- sional courses, taken mainly by gradu- ates with relevant degrees. - Total. 38;

(d) two-year postgraduate profes- sional courses, generally for gradu- ates, with non-relevant degrees. - Total. 21.

On virtually all these professional courses the division of time between classroom and supervised field practice is about 50:50, running either con-

currently or through block placements. The fact that all of them receive a single form of Council recognition gives a superficial impression of uniformity which is certainly far from the truth. It is certainly important to emphasize the system of external examiners used by all the universities to maintain high standards of performance in classroom and in field: the system of external academic assessors organized by the Council at all the other educational institutions also contributes to the same end.

There is in fact a much greater variety and flexibility among these courses than at first meets the eye. While some of this variation is easy to categorize such as age (e.g. courses for non-graduates of 30+), or a small number of courses for women non-graduates with family ties, or with special training for particular settings such as probation or community work, the most interesting and often important differences are virtually impossible to elucidate through hand- books. One often wonders how both prospective students and also pro- spective employers handle some of the more subtle differences, such as psycho- analytic or sociological emphases, when attempting to distinguish between courses at different institutions.

This point about flexibility and variety deserves more discussion than it commonly receives, for a social work educational system characterized by a monotonous uniformity would be a poor foundation on which to develop more imagination and responsive forms of service delivery. A good comment is made by a Scottish social work lecturer who recently visited Canada and was impressed by the way Canadian social work educational programmes at- tempt to be responsible to the specific needs of the provinces and of

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their cultural values. By contrast, he is critical of the failure of the Scottish social work schools to prepare students for working in areas outside the large cities and conurbations (Ainsworth 1976). The special needs of the Scottish Highlands are certainly a useful case in point and the University of Regina's plans for social work education in Saskatchewan provide an interesting departure from conventional policy in meeting the training needs of staff of a relatively sparsely-populated region.

But the crucial question - how can we effectively categorize significant differences between social work cur- ricula - remains unanswered and it is in this respect that British educational developments since reorganization are perhaps most unsatisfactory. The survey by Phyllida Parsloe and her colleagues, referred to earlier, throws some light on a very difficult problem. A comparative study of Canadian and British curriculum would also be of value in clarifying some of the areas of confusion.

In the first place, her survey shows important differences of perception about the orientation of courses as between staff and students. The majority of staff responses emphasized the competence of their students to practise as case workers. Competence in community work, groupwork and resi- dential work received about one-half to one-quarter of responses. By contrast, student replies agreed substantially with staff on their competence to practise casework in the general context of individuals and families - but were much more hesitant about competence in the other fields of work, especially in groupwork.

The second point is the limited num- ber of claims made by the staff re- sponses to the questionnaire as to the

competence of their students for prac- tice in fields other than casework. This lack of clarity is of particular interest in the context of the debate over the place of community work in social work education. Behind it lies an ideological issue, contrasting the concern over indi- vidual and community (especially poli- tical) change. Student feelings on both sides of the Atlantic have run high on time issue in recent years, thus reflecting broad swings in opinion throughout the whole of social work history.

Thirdly there were the responses which indicated the objection of a "unified approach". Parsloe suggests that it is "too soon to be clear whether this is the beginning of a new trend in social work teaching, or a fashionable fad". But it is here that Canadian cur- riculum development is likely to be of the greatest value to British education. Canadian social work education, with a much longer experience of balancing the "generic" with the "specialized" in the curriculum, is better able to dis- tinguish between specialized topics within a generic framework on the one hand, and a specialist training in one particular form of intervention on the other. Both constitute an integral part of social work education, but the prob- lem of balance and perspective is not easily achieved.

It is, however, at the level of higher degrees and particularly of doctoral work that changes in education in the post-reorganization years have evolved at the slowest pace. There are several reasons for this. Perhaps the outstand- ing cause is the consequence of short- ages in staff at the senior administrative levels. Field-workers, therefore, who might otherwise have been expected to return to a university for advanced or doctoral research have moved quickly into senior positions in social work

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departments or into teaching and super- vision. Money for research fellowships has been scarce. Universities have been constrained by government policy to devote their major teaching resources to the basic professional education. An analysis, moreover, of doctoral students in university departments of social ad- ministration and social work would show a marked weight of interest on the side of policy, planning and administra- tion rather than in professional prac- tice. This imbalance needs to be re- dressed not by a reduction in the former but by an increase in the latter field. Changes in service delivery in Britain have so far been inadequately matched at the level of advanced research with the result that post-qualifying studies have been seen mainly within the frame- work of short-term courses.

in the following ways: (a)They make it necessary to

examine the staffing and training needs of the reorganized services on a much broader front in terms of priorities of needs and a clearer differentiation of tasks of different levels.

(b)For this purpose a national and widely representative body is required with the power and resources to plan and make educational policy in the light of changes in needs and in service delivery. The Central Council for Education and Training in Social Work in Britain has been established to do this while at the same time leaving the educational institutions free to perform their traditional academic functions.

(c)The Council's progress during its first five years has been marked not only by an expansion in the output of professional social workers, but also in the clari- fication and improvement in the content of a wide range of courses to meet different training needs.

(4) Looking to the future, some of the most outstanding educational problems relate to the curriculum for professional social work courses:

(a)There is a need for much greater clarity and agreement on the balance between generic and specialized training at the basic level, on the co-ordination of classroom teaching and field- work practice, and on the relationship between different forms of social work intervention.

(b)The enormous growth in the organizational complexity of the service delivery system has not yet been matched by appropriate attention to the study of policy,

Conclusions At the risk of over-simplification, the

following points arising from a study of changes in British social work educa- tion following the reorganization of service delivery systems may be of value for comparative study in Canada: (1) Changes in service delivery are greatly dependent for their success on corresponding changes in related fields such as central government, profes- sional associations, and in social work education. (2) In Britain the move towards a uni- fied and more integrated system of social work delivery has led to the growth of more bureaucratic and de- centralized forms of organizational structures, a trend which has been ac- centuated by the subsequent reorgani- zation of local government into larger areas, and also by organizational changes in the National Health Service. (3) The consequences of these changes are important for social work education

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planning and administration in the educational institutions,

(c) Post-qualifying education, except in the form of relatively short courses, remains undeveloped. This is particularly true in the case of research training and at the level of advanced work.

(5) Both Britain and Canada are fac- ing a current period of retrenchment in expenditure while at the same time con- fronted by the pressure of increased public demand and expectation and the consequences of commitment to more sensitive policies such as the broad field of community care.

Britain has much to learn from Can- adian experience in the social work curriculum, from its greater clarity over the balance between the generic and the specialized, and from the closer links

between the teaching of social work methods and social policy in Canadian schools.

REFERENCES Ainsworth, Frank (1976). "A Social Work Edu-

cation for Scotland", Focus, No. 51, June 1976, 20-21.

Central Council for Education and Training in Social Work. Report No. 2 (1975). Social Work Education 1973-74. Clifton House, Euston Road, London. N.W. 1 2 RS.

Parsloe, Phyllida, Elizabeth Warren and Judy Gouldie (1976). "Social Work as Taught", New Society, 4 March 1976, 488-491.

Professor John Spencer is head of the Depart- ment of Social Administration at the University of Edinburgh. He was a member of the Central Council for Education and Training in Social Work and chairman of its Scottish Advisory Committee during the period 1971-74.

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