Introduction: The context of social work education

Arguably, social work education, in terms of both its classroom teaching and practice placements, is the place where future practitioners’ values, understandings and approaches to their practice are formed. Its influence on the whole of the social work profession should therefore not be underestimated. This chapter will briefly explore the origins of social work education, its role in the framing of the social work profession, the relevance of regulation and some of the challenges that social work educators face. This will help explain why it is that community social work (CSW) is not widely taught as a core approach to social work practice in the UK. The chapter will then go on to consider how embedding pedagogical practices that promote CSW is possible in social work education, even within the restrictions of the neoliberal university. Before continuing, a note on language is important. In this chapter, CSW is referred to in line with the philosophy and practice set out in previous chapters of this book. Individualised casework or a case- management approach will be used to define the most common approach to social work in the UK currently (Smith and Whyte, 2008), that is, an approach in which practitioners have a ‘caseload’ allocated to them and they work on an individual basis with the person or family in need of support rather than the locus of practice being communities.

The history of social work in the UK is well documented (see, for example, Bamford, 2015; Pierson, 2021). Such accounts outline how social work has developed in line with the political and economic ideologies of the times. Social work is not a neutral or objective activity; it is always influenced by and embedded in the ‘social’ because its very nature is a desire to address the suffering and hardship that citizens experience because of membership of our social world. It is possible to trace the development of social work from its voluntary and philanthropic origins in the late 1800s to the tightly regulated profession that it has become today (Burt, 2022).