50th Anniversary Virtual Issue

The late 1960s and early 1970s was a remarkable period in the history of social work in the UK. The 12th of June 1970 was a particularly historic moment which marked the formal recognition of the emerging profession itself...

Using a natural history model, this paper attempts to understand and explain why the problem of child abuse was recognized in Britain when it was and in the manner in which it was.

The family backgrounds of 2500 children admitted to care in England were investigated, to quantify the association between indicators of material and social deprivation and entry to care.

This article argues that the 1989 Children Act must be understood in terms of themes, issues, developments and conflicts that emerged in the 1970's and worked themselves out in the 1980's.

Parental participation and, to a lesser extent, that of children at child protection conferences is seen as an important element in resolving some of the conflicts that beset child protection work. Using data from a study of participation in one metropolitan borough, those outcomes that are generally regarded as positive in this respect are critically examined.

This study examines post-adoption contact between adopted children and their birth relatives where adoption orders have been made against the wishes of birth parents following contested court hearings.

Little is known about the characteristics of children with disabilities who meet the British legal definition of ‘looked after’ children. Future service needs included increased respite breaks for families and the provision of both more residential placements and more appropriate accommodation, especially for teenagers.

Using some key ideas from ethnography and narrative therapy, this article examines existing literature on silence in the lives of unaccompanied minors, and on how the choices they make about talking and not talking can hinder or facilitate resettlement.

This paper re-examines the nature of social work from the perspective of movement and ‘mobilities’. It shows that social work is at all times ‘on the move’, yet theory and analyses of policy and practice largely depict it as static, solid and sedentarist.

The harm consequent on children's exposure to domestic violence is recognised in legislation in England and Wales. This paper reports on a study of the social work response to 184 families notified by the police to children's services in two English authorities. 

The past five years have witnessed a growing recognition of the importance of management and leadership in the social work profession. The Social Work Task Force Report has underlined the need for ‘dedicated programmes of training and support for frontline social work managers’ and the Social Work Reform Board is tasked with taking this recommendation forward. 

Building on a body of previous research by the author and colleagues in relation to multiple adverse childhood experiences (MACE), this paper addresses the question of ‘why multiples matter’ in relation to issues of cumulative adversity.

In this article, we will argue for the moral legitimacy of support and its difference from intervention and the need to engage with and develop a family support project for the twenty-first century.

Analysis of data from a two-year evaluation of the piloting of a child-centred framework for addressing child sexual exploitation in England revealed an intrinsic practice dilemma, whereby many practitioners experienced profound ontological, ethical, emotional and intellectual dilemmas in reconciling young people’s rights to voice, privacy and autonomy with their rights to safety, guidance and protection.

This paper reviews developments in the study of ageing as an individual and social experience and it considers recent studies of practical services for the elderly. In so doing it aims to highlight the ways in which social work skills and helping techniques can be developed. It also relates the findings of studies of service delivery to the elderly to the development of future policy.

This paper reviews evidence relating to the classical Parsonian model of the sick role in which empirical variations are found on every dimension: motivation, role exemption, conditonal legitimation and participation in treatment. 

The paper examines the possibility of discharging mentally handicapped patients from hospital to a wide range of community resources. Following the assessment of a sample of hospital patients they were matched to appropriate care settings ranging from independent living to relatively expensive hostel accommodation.

The purpose of this paper is to consider some of the barriers to the identification of abuse; to look at the similarities and differences between the abuse of elderly people and other forms of family violence (in particular child abuse) and to discuss the implications of these for social work practice.

This paper reports interim and largely positive results from the continuing evaluation of ‘Straight Thinking on Probation’, a substantial intensive probation programme in Mid-Glamorgan based on the work of Robert Ross et al. (1988) in Canada. 

The survey of people from the Asian communities in ‘Milltown’ included people who used mental health services, family members of service users, and members of the Asian general public. The findings of the survey are compared with similar studies, where available, which focus on indigenous white British service users. Some findings are common; other issues are specific to this Asian group.

This paper examines the contribution of social work practice to the care of people who are dying or bereaved. It considers current challenges to traditional practice arising from societal and organizational change, reaffirming the importance of the social work role but arguing that, in order to face those challenges, social workers must broaden their perspective to incorporate a spiritual dimension.

The 1990 National Health Service and Community Care Act appeared to herald a new dawn for social work with older people, which had previously been a relatively neglected and undervalued area of social work practice. This paper explores the extent to which this shift has substantively altered the nature of social work practice with older people. 

The paper considers the representation of probation themes in the British Journal of Social Work (BJSW) since the early 1990s, and reviews developments in probation policy and practice since then, with a focus on the relationship between probation practice and social work.

Within a very short space of time, the concept of personalization has come to occupy a central place within dominant social work and adult care discourses within the UK. Through an analysis of one influential model of personalization, this paper will explore the factors behind the concept’s current popularity.

Internationally, interest is developing in the challenges of developing evidence-based guidelines for social work practice. The paper reports on the process of establishing the UK’s first joint health and social care evidence-based practice guideline, which is in dementia care. 

Understanding of the 2005 Mental Capacity Act in England and Wales is discussed in the context of modernist assumptions of rationality and self-interest, the demands of a ‘risk society’ for adeptness at decision making and the relationship between moral and legal discourse where social workers intervene when capacity is challenged.

The paper explores the notion of ‘dirty work’ in relation to the newly created role of the Approved Mental Health Professional (AMHP). An AMHP undertakes various duties set out in the 1983 Mental Health Act, as amended by the 2007 Act, in relation to assessments to make applications for compulsory admission to psychiatric hospital.

"Carved along the side of the college to which I belon g is the inscription: 'get riches, get knowledge but with all thy getting , get understanding' . This i s a useful starting point. For we cannot take knowledge as a good without first examining the doubt and the ambivalence which surroun s the notation and the limitations inherent in it ."

The integration of theory and practice has long been a topic for debate and concern amongst social work educators. This article studies two models of social work students, concluding that these models are essentially contradictory and pose serious problems for the development and maintenance of social work standards.

The belief that the profession gets unusually poor news media treatment is common among social workers. As a result, the social work press regularly prints articles discussing the issue and suggesting solutions. This paper outlines the main sociological approaches to theorizing about the media and locates the majority of the profession's own accounts of its coverage within an idealist/pluralist model.

This paper argues that over the last fifteen years social work in Britain has undergone a significant transformation. Under increasing attack, both in the media and from government and its new right ideologues, social work has faced an increasingly impoverished client group with fewer resources and growing uncertainty about its legitimate role.

Over the last decade black students' experiences of higher education, and in particular social work education, have been described within a discourse which highlights the negatives. This article questions this wholly negative analysis and rejects simplistic explanations.

Social Work is in a state of flux. One of the key factors impacting on the direction it is currently taking is market forces. This article argues that the globalization of the economy and the internationalization of the state are affecting social work education and practice in Britain through the competency-based approach being promoted by CCETSW and the government.

The process of making social work ‘auditable’ is in danger of being destructive, creating a simplistic description of practice and focusing on achieving service outputs with little attention to user outcomes. Alternatively, however, if it is linked to research methods, it could be highly constructive, producing reliable evidence not only on efficiency but on effectiveness.

Social workers in rural areas often live and work in the communities that they serve. Consequently, they may have, or later develop, dual relationships with service users. These ‘out of hours’ connections raise some complex issues about how social workers conduct their practice and comport themselves socially within the wider community. 

A measure of self-efficacy was used to assess the development of competence and confidence for participants in a one-year national programme of supervision and support for newly qualified child and family social workers (NQSWs) in England.

Service user and carer involvement (SUCI) in social work education in England is required by the profession's regulator, the Health and Care Professions Council. However, a recent study of eighty-three Higher Education Institutions (HEIs) in England reported that, despite considerable progress in SUCI, there is no evidence that the learning derived from it is being transferred to social work practice.

Communication skills are fundamental to social work, yet few studies have directly evaluated their impact. In this study, we explore the relationship between skills and outcomes in 127 families.

The purpose of this article is to examine the published views of two leading politicians who can claim to speak for their parties. From their discussion of poverty and social deprivation (and the terms will be used interchangeably) an attempt will be made to emonstrate that their policies or proposals rest on similar assumptions about society and a similar model of poverty.

This article reviews the contributions of sociology and political sciences to the understanding of communities and relates these to some of the key problems facing community workers. It suggests that an effective assessment of some of the ethical dilemmas facing community workers must be based upon a cool appraisal of those urban social structures.

This paper seeks to explore some of the factors underpinning social work's apparent resistance to feminism and to dilineate ways in which a more active relationship might benefit social work's women consumers. It argues that, by marginalizing feminism, social work has perpetuated individualistic explanations and responses to women's specific needs and problems.

This paper takes the view that the findings and methodologies of experiments seeking to test the effectiveness of social work are too little known and understood. Now is a particularly good time to attempt to remedy this since a new generation of studies is available showing results which, in contrast to those earlier times, are largely positive.

This paper addresses a subject relatively unknown to the British and international social work audience—that of training for anti-sectarian practice. In doing so, it points to some of the complex, even dangerous issues raised by such training for social work students and practitioners in Northern Ireland. 

In this paper the author offers a review of some of the major critiques of anti-racist theory and practice within social work and critically examines the trend towards anti-oppressive theory and practice as the ‘way forward’.

This paper considers an inclusive approach to social work theorizing. While highlighting the importance of service users and their organizations being effectively included in social work theorizing, it also argues the need for them to have support and opportunities to develop their own prior and separate discussions about theory, including social work theory.

This paper is concerned with children's involvement in decisions and with what happens when adults communicate with children to discover their thoughts and feelings. It is based on a study of the participation of children aged between 8 and 12 in decisions when they are looked after by local authorities.

The feminist ethics of care present a challenge to social workers to re-assess not only the place of care within professional social work practice but also the way in which concepts of justice, autonomy and rights are conceptualized and ageing is understood. In this article, the arguments for an ethics of care are considered in relation to social work practice with older people. 

This paper, drawing on a study of social work research in UK universities, asks—and suggests provisional answers to—two questions. First, is it possible to identify ways to categorize the kinds of research in social work in a form that recognizes and respects the aims and values of social work? Second, assuming we ought to do so, in what ways should the quality of social work research be assessed?

This paper presents arguments for recognizing and tackling health inequalities as a major new challenge for social work. Four underpinning points provide the building blocks for this case.

Service user research has increasingly become a significant development on the research landscape. This article seeks to critically examine this development and to identify ways in which service user research can retain its honesty and avoid the twin dangers of either becoming a tokenistic exercise or being seen as a panacea.

This article explores whether paradigms for social work that helped structure and focus social work theory in the late 20th century can continue to inform social work theorising in the present day.