Perfect opportunity~perfect storm? Raising the standards of social work education in England

Government plans to reform social work in England, led by the Social Work Reform Board, have resulted in far-reaching changes to social work education. These include establishment of The College of Social Work and adoption of its Performance Capability Framework, and transfer of regulation to the Health Care Professions Council whose Standards of Proficiency competences gate-keep the threshold to practice. A critical scrutiny of the literature on competence and capability used by the architects of change provides a lens with which to explore findings from a content analysis of the new standards. Comparisons are made with the 2008 Educational Policy and Accreditation Standards (EPAS) competences approved by the American Council on Social Work Education. Fault lines are identified that might seriously jeopardise the future of social work education in England and ways forward are explored to address these. First, given the importance of making what's important assessable, the choice is presented between opting for ‘wicked competences’ or investing in the design of complex assessment models and their operation. Second, the priority of building robust partnerships to contain different stakeholder objectives is underlined. Both are essential to prevent fault lines developing into a perfect storm

Making rotational field placements work

This paper describes the development and successful pilot of rotational placements by the social work faculty of a large Canadian university. Modifications required for the pilot are discussed, particularly related to recruiting settings, enlisting field instructors and students, developing new field materials, training field instructors in the model and developing an evaluation tool used by field instructors and students. The strengths, limitations and lessons learned from the experience are discussed as well as the potential usefulness of rotational placements as an approach to addressing resource challenges in field education

Making rotational field placements work: Review of a successful pilot of rotational field placements in hospital settings

This is the final published version of an article originally published by Whiting and Birch in the Journal of Practice Teaching & Learning. Reproduced with written permission of the publisher. Further reproduction prohibited without permission.This paper describes the development and successful pilot of rotational placements by the social work faculty of a large Canadian university. Modifications required for the pilot are discussed, particularly related to recruiting settings, enlisting field instructors and students, developing new field materials, training field instructors in the model and developing an evaluation tool used by field instructors and students. The strengths, limitations and lessons learned from the experience are discussed as well as the potential usefulness of rotational placements as an approach to addressing resource challenges in field education

The Development of an Online Practice-Based Evaluation Tool for Social Work

Objective: This paper describes the development of a practice-based evaluation (PBE) tool that allows instructors to represent their student’s clinical performance in a way that is sufficiently authentic to resonate with both instructors and students, is psychometrically sound, and is feasible in the context of real practice. Method: A new online evaluation tool was designed to address several of the problems associated with previous methods of evaluation, and was tested on 190 field instructor—student pairs. Results: Results demonstrated feasibility of the tool, high acceptability from students and faculty, high internal consistency, and clearly reduced ceiling effect, when compared with a traditional competency-based evaluation (CBE) tool. It did, however, continue to result in a strong skew toward positive evaluation and did not increase the identification of students at risk. Conclusions: The online PBE tool demonstrates promise in redressing some of the evaluation issues posed by the previous CBE model of evaluation.This research was generously supported by a grant from the Social Sciences and Humanities Research Council of Canada

Competency Frameworks: Bridging Education and Practice

The Sophie Lucyk Virtual Library thanks the Canadian Association of Social Workers for graciously permitting their work to be reproduced. Further reproduction prohibited without permission given by publisher