Introduction: The Quest for Quality

Introduction: The Quest for Quality

Social work and probation practice have always been in the news. Normally, their appearance in the media signals bad news. This bad news has been amplified by the numerous childcare inquiries which time and again have found social work knowledge and practice to be deficient and lacking in competence. In particular, social workers’ repeatedly exposed (albeit in some instances inflated) failure to follow legal requirements, required standards, agency guidelines and procedural rules; their limited and dated knowledge of the law; and their lack of appropriate accountability brought disrepute, diminished confidence and demoralisation to a battered profession. At the same time such professional failures caused a public outcry and calls on the government to curtail the powers of social workers or to demand that they learn to be efficient and competent first before they are allowed to practise. Questions about social workers’ training and the quality of that training began to be asked.

Social work and probation are, therefore, subject to considerable upheaval. On the one hand, there is pressure on the Central Council for Education and Training in Social Work (CCETSW) from central government to improve standards in social work and to ensure that such standards deliver value for money. In turn, CCETSW comes up with ideas, policies and requirements which are directed at programme providers (education and training establishments). These policies force programme providers to constantly return to the drawing board for revisions upon revisions of those rules. Social work in the United Kingdom is standing at the crossroads: there is a distinct unease that it will emerge out of this upheaval either as a stronger profession or, as some fear, a weaker and ineffective minor anomaly in the social and political structure of contemporary Britain.

Added to those concerns is the Home Office's expressed intention to alter probation officer recruitment and qualifying training by opening up recruitment to almost anyone who is prepared to consider working in the probation service and removing probation training from the higher education sector (Dews and Watts, 1994; Home Office, 1995a, 1995b). Although this is not an entirely foregone conclusion the very fact that it has re-established the old [Page 2]rifts between the role of the Home Office, CCETSW, social work, and higher education in the training of probation officers (for a critical discussion see Nellis, 1996) demonstrates that social work in this country is still going through significant stages of development and has not as yet reached, or been allowed to reach, a period of consolidation to establish itself as a full-blown, credible and reliable profession characterised by concreteness and distinctive purpose, structure, knowledge, values and skills.

This recognition of the lack of distinctive core knowledge, values and skills which social workers and probation officers could claim as their particular property and the means to deliver competent practice, prompted CCETSW to call for changes in the way in which social workers and probation officers are trained. Since 1989 CCETSW has pursued a crusade to introduce the amendments deemed necessary for raising standards and establishing a clear and credible purpose, a knowledge, value and skill base for all social workers including probation officers.

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