Whiting & Birch (E-Journals)
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The power of low-key groupwork activities in mental health support work
Get PDFAbstract: The UK government’s Health and Social Care Bill (Department of Health 2011) proposes that the delivery of care, including mental health services, will be organised through a range of different providers including social firms and charities. General practitioners (GPs)will be at the core of this process (GPonline, 2011). This paper explores the group based practices of two voluntary social enterprise projects in one of the most impoverished inner city areas in England (Sheffield City Council, 2004). This paper results from a realistic evaluation project which explored how the service delivered benefits for members, using focus groups, a wellbeing survey, and interviews. The findings and thematic discussion show that both services are characterised by groupwork underpinned by local involvement and community feel. The groups have been developed so as to allow a low key, mutually negotiated level of engagement, focussed on attendance, support and enabling participation
Using groupwork in the designing and playing of board games in occupational health and safety
Get PDFAbstract: In order to ensure the safety and health of workers, Occupational Health and Safety practitioners must have an excellent understanding of the Occupational Health and Safety Act and Regulations. They must therefore be able to interpret statutes and legislation which ensure that all sorts of work activities are carried out safely and with minimal risk. The aim of this study was to determine the effectiveness of the designing and playing of the board games as an educational intervention in Occupational Health and Safety within a groupwork context in a diverse classroom at a tertiary institution in South Africa, and report on students’ reflections of the process. Using groupwork, the boardgame exercise proved to be an effective teaching methodology and deep learning was achieved by designing, playing, and being assessed on the games. The use of groupwork also promoted improved relations and interactions, and effective teamwork. Valuable lessons in communication, collaboration and conflict resolution were also learned
Groupwork Training for social justice
Get PDFThis paper examines and analyses experiential groupwork in delivering community and youth work training at Goldsmiths, University of London. The programme has, over its forty year history refined a model of education and training that combines large groupwork and experiential learning. The paper explores our experience of groupwork training. The model developed combines groupwork as a tool for learning and teaching. It is in this arena that students explore and critically reflect on their life and work experiences, and learn to process and articulate their feelings and understandings across a wide range of issues, including democratic social change, equality, identity, empowerment and leadership which all comes from learning how to inwardly reflect and change and develop an awareness of themselves. The paper in particular focuses on the development of students’ identity from which they draw out their learning on equality and sets out that this is central to training for achieving equality and social change
What can social workers learn from African proverbs?
Get PDFThere continues to be a call on social work education to incorporate diverse teaching and learning resources and strategies to meet the needs of its diverse learners. Proverbs tend to be well known metaphors, which are memorable and are passed on from one generation to the next, and exist in all cultures and in many languages. This paper presents an innovative and creative use of proverbs to facilitate this process, and provides students from different cultures the opportunity to understand and contextualise aspects of social work education and practice. The paper proposes the use of African proverbs to enhance learning for the growing numbers of African students of social work in England.It is hoped that the use of proverbs, which combine cultural heritage and literature as creative arts, will enable students to view the world of social work with an additional lens, making it relevant, interesting and meaningful. The proverbs used in this paper have been translated from various African languages into English.Writing from the perspective of a black female African social work academic, I believe it is important that black people are producers of knowledge and ideas in order to become a part of the writing of their own history
‘We’ve stood on that precipice’
Get PDFUK police services constantly endure pressures to reduce spending and to reorganise in ways thought to be more efficient. In these moments of scrutiny, non-standard work practices become more noticeable. We report a study of a specialist unit, the Child Protection Unit (CPU), in one police service. In 2011, an initial exploratory interview with the unit head was followed by two discussion groups carried out with a three month gap between them. We found the unit existing and working dynamically between two forces: (a) the needs and expectations of society regarding child protection and (b) how more general expectations and needs regarding crime are normally met by the police service. While ‘traditional’ policing might see the offender successfully prosecuted, there can be deleterious effects on the victim. In consequence, CPU members are: more focused on and sensitive to the victim leading to a risk management philosophy; are more team-oriented with greater awareness of and sense of responsibility for each other; receive greater public support than other parts of the service. These differences result in the CPU members having non-standard organisational and operational work practices: they are less performance target-based; they investigate and prosecute a smaller number of cases; they use different documentation; they are not available to help with other work at times of greater general demand on the police service. Thus existing dynamically and anomalously, the unit’s very vulnerability that helps its members to do their difficult job also raises their profile and increases vulnerability to financial cuts. Their precipice in the title quotation is at several levels. We theorise our findings using contingency and cultural theories believing the findings relevant to other organisations with specialist units
Multi-agency child protection
Get PDFPublic concern over, and recent developments in, the field of child protection are well known (Munro 2012). Within these developments, there has been a strengthening of the role of social work with an increased focus on, and recognition of, professional knowledge, skills and ‘expert’ decision making (Munro 2011; Gilbert et al. 2011). Focus on inter-professional and multi-agency practice has developed alongside (Frost and Lloyd 2006; Frost and Robinson 2007; Ruch 2009), and continues to have a clear focus in the recently issued Working Together to Safeguard Children (H.M. Government 2013).This paper enquires into a relatively under-explored area of multi-agency child protection practice, specifically, that of the police (that is,. non-specialists in child protection) making an urgent, first response to a child protection call, often out of hours and without immediate recourse to the expertise and knowledge of child protection practitioners. In these situations, the police are called upon to make key decisions: for example, whether to immediately protect and remove children using police protection powers (Section 46(1) Children Act 1989), to refer on to local authority social services for a s47 investigation or s17 services, or to take no further action. There is exploration of the issues raised by a request from the police to develop an assessment framework as an aid to practice in these situations. The police had in mind an equivalent instrument to a domestic abuse framework already adopted by them. The paper reviews debates, particularly about predictive efficacy, in the construction of assessment and decision-making tools. The nature and distinction between consensus based and actuarial risk assessment instruments are examined, as are challenges for general multi-agency working, alongside the specific challenges for front line police officers. It is proposed that a consensus based assessment framework to support decision making, drawing on empirically tested, actuarially informed risk assessment evidence, which is collaboratively tested with a multi-agency group, is indicated
Animating experience
Get PDFThe imperative for participation in social work education has led to consideration of the ways in which service users’ and carers’ voices can best be heard by students. At Glyndŵr University, this debate has resulted in the development of a service user and carer-led module which will introduce students to a variety of creative approaches as a way of telling narratives of experience. In preparation for the module, a pilot project was run to assess the particular benefits of using animation for this purpose. This reflective case study describes the experiences of a social work student who worked with a carer to make a short animated film. It articulates the ways in which theoretical teaching was brought to life by working intensively. It demonstrates that creative approaches can offer a constructive means of addressing the need to cater for diverse learning styles. In addition, it adds weight to the argument that service users’ and carers’ experiential knowledge should be taken as seriously as other forms of knowledge
Social work education in the creative arts space
Get PDFThis case study explores how the creative arts can be used in the professional development of student social workers. The study is of a voluntary organisation that works with adults experiencing emotional or psychological distress by helping participants to explore the arts as a means of recovery. The organisation incorporates art and design studios, a community gallery and graphic design service with several community projects including a domestic abuse project, prison project and a hospital in-patient service.Since 2004 the organisation has supported over 40 student social workers in practice learning placements. The project manager and off-site practice educator, supported by the HEI, have been instrumental in developing a practice curriculum.The student social workers develop core professional skills by working with individuals, groups, communities and organisations in a setting that challenges negative assumptions about mental health. The creative arts are used as a vehicle for developing skills in relationship based practice. The study will explore how the placements have evolved; what the student social workers actually do; the effectiveness of the practice experience in preparation for the final placement and the development of their professional identity
Is there a future for the use of non-traditional placement settings for final year social work students?
Get PDFThis paper describes the development of a particular type of nontraditional placement setting for final year social work students: a 100 day, last practice placement based within Police Public Protection Investigation Units (PPIUs) through collaboration between the Police and Manchester Metropolitan University. It will evaluate the degree of progress made since these placements began in 2007 and consider some of the strengths and difficulties encountered in providing consistently good quality practice learning experiences for final year students within PPIU settings. The paper will summarise the learning gained from a recent evaluation of these placements and will describe some of the developments that have resulted from this evaluation.This paper will also consider whether such non-traditional placement settings can continue to provide suitable practice learning opportunities for final year social work students in the light of the newly proposed placement criteria for final placements (TCSW, 2012a) and in the increasingly challenging climate for practice learning reflected in the continuing decreased availability of ‘statutory’ placements