Introduction

This final chapter of the book summarises the substantive content and offers basic guides to the separate but connected thrusts of community orientation and community social work (CSW). The book has argued throughout that CSW offers an attractive preventative and relationship- based model of social work practice that can and should be adapted to local (bottom- up) co- design and co- production.

The examples given, while rare, indicate that this is not just an ideal but, when tested in practice, can have good outcomes. As explained early in the book, they have all been chosen from local authority (and equivalent in Northern Ireland) settings to demonstrate their significance to mainstream service delivery; while there is nothing wrong with CSW being applied in the third sector, particularly by grass- roots community- based organisations, this does not have to be their natural home. It is almost inevitable that this is where they might be found when competing for direct funding is an increasingly found method by which governments try to meet their welfare targets (rather than through core funding to the local authorities providing statutory services [Turbett, 2023a]). The book also criticises the notion that such preventative services should be provided through the currently popular medium of community link workers (community connectors) and volunteers. Such services are rarely confined to signposting but are advertised as providing generic low- level direct interventions by staff without social work qualifications and volunteers. It is argued here that properly funded CSW using the skills of qualified social workers can target the same goals, as well as additional ones requiring more expertise, more effectively because the skills required are ones taught in social work training.

Testament is offered through the examples of what is described in the book as ‘creativity and artistry’. Although university social work courses in the UK are focused on training for the job, as discussed by Jane Pye in Chapter 11, the efforts of teaching staff to encourage creative and critical thinking must be working for some students, despite Jane Fenton's fears discussed at the start of Chapter 2.