Social Work Education: Sustaining the Faith

Abstract

Even if one takes a most cursory overview of the recent history of social work, one feature that stands out is the extent to which increasing controls have been introduced for governing the activities and work of social workers. The range of measures has been wide and varied, and has included large-scale changes in the organisation of social services departments, with their expanded bureaucratic management hierarchies, more direct supervision over the social worker, and an expanded array of work processes which attempt to direct and regulate the social worker’s contact with clients. These changes are explored in detail in Chapter 7; this chapter examines some of the key factors which have given rise to them.

The national community as a whole now commands the services of thousands, indeed millions of other individuals, who are not civil servants in the strictest sense: policemen, firemen, postmen, the employees of the National Health Service (including a high proportion of the medical profession), the employees of local government (including the bulk of the teaching profession), and so forth. Effective government requires the obedience and the co-operation of all of these, and the only phrase that seems to meet the need is ‘servants of the State’.

(Beloff, 1979, p. 7)