Good for them. Community Care this week focuses on the evaluation of the social work degree, whose first graduates are coming off the assembly lines in greater numbers. CC focuses on how the report has come out against splitting the social work degree into children and adults work, as some directors of children services are advocating. The child care mafia at work claiming that work with children is oh so much more important than anything else. When is the Department of Health going to stand up and say actually older people and mentally ill people and disabled people and people with learning disabilities are just as important and need skilled work just as much? And they’re also in families with children in, so this nonsense about only some social workers needing skill in considering children’s needs should be firmly knocked on the head. This would set us back 40 years.

The social work degree is not just a qualification for the limited interest (and limited practices) of local authority social work jobs. The government has already interfered far too much in pursuit of its political interests in producing a degree that only qualifies people for its local authority workforce, rather than for the more extensive social work that a lot of Europe and north America has. If we’re ever to maintain a decent quality of social work in the UK, we need to increase the range of social work skills and specialisms.

In particular, minority specialisms like palliative care and end of life social work need a look in; see what I said about the GSCC conference, where it was clear that GSCC, government poodle as ever, is only bothering with adult and child care issues, and not the huge range of other social work skills that are required. The Report has lots of good things in it, and this issue in teresting though it is, actually does not have high profile in the whole thing.

Evaluation of Social Work Degree Qualification in England Team (2008) Evaluation of the New Social Work Degree Qualification in England. Volume 1: Findings, London: King’s College London, Social Care Workforce Research Unit.

Evaluation at (from the University of Glasgow, the Social Work Workforce Unit at King’s College London and Sharpe research):

http://www.dh.gov.uk/en/Publicationsandstatistics/Publications/PublicationsPolicyAndGuidance/DH_086079