I hope none of you ever need a social worker...

Categories: uncategorized

Date: 26 June 2007 19:11:55

Today I have been at the university validating the portfolios of social work students who have been out on placement. Sometimes I utterly despair! Now I don't want to get all 'it wasn't like that it my day' but I truly am appalled by the standard of some of the work that has been churned out by some of the students. Don't get me wrong, some of them are brilliant, they have had fantastic placements and they have made the most of the learning opportunities that have been offered to them. Others, however, appear to have little grasp of the English language and I just want to take a red pen to their portfolios and correct their spelling and grammar.

Throughout the day there were moments when I sat with my head in my hands, and at other times I was in gales of laughter at what had been written. Here are two gems (both from the same student!) from the day...

“Throughout this exercise planning has been very important. As a social worker I will have to plan in advance and follow a process. This is a good example of what I will have to do. Therefore by doing it now I am getting trained to do it and so will be good at doing it in the future. Planning is important so that you know what may happen. If the situation changes, then you would have done the relevant planning to know what may happen. Today the exercise went as planned.”

“The three children in the play area were all different ages and played with the toys unaided. I felt a bit uneasy so close to the prisoners. Even though there were several officers around I seemed to be very aware of the fact that there were more prisoners than officers. I had an image in my head that the prisoners would look rough and scary. When I saw them, they looked like ordinary people.”

These sound like they have been written by a 12 year old and she fails to demonstrate that she has any idea of reflective practice, theory to practice or even the ability to write up a piece of work in a professional manner.

The thing that frustrates me the most is that now social workers can start their training at the age of 18 meaning they will qualify at 21. It used to be that they couldn't start their training until they were 21 so they had to go out and get a bit of experience before they were let loose on the general public. It seems to me that 21 is still very young to expect someone to work with clients who are in potentially vulnerable situations and often times of crisis. When I qualified I was 24 and I was the youngest of my cohort. Looking back now I feel that even at that age I was very young and I'd had several years of experience in working with different client groups.

One if the reasons I agreed to sit on this panel was that I am sick to death of seeing shit social workers qualify who are unable to string a sentence together and who are incompetent to the point of being dangerous. The panel has always functioned as some sort of quality control with practitioners able to query whether someone is fit to practice. Today I have been told that the panel is to be disbanded and there is to be no outside validation. This really worries me as the university is fundamentally a money-making organisation and they show little consideration to the quality of their placements/student social work practice/the sorts of practitioners they allow to graduate. They are mainly concerned with the academic work to the detriment of practitioner ability. The tragic thing is that really vulnerable clients will suffer when social workers who are unfit to practice are given a licence to do so.