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Published online by Cambridge University Press: 08 January 2025
The origins and purpose of this book
This book has been almost 50 years in the making – back to the earliest days of my career, when I was introduced to the notion that community was central to social work. In 1975, still young and impressionable, I started a three- year social work course, from which I qualified in the summer of 1978. Those years were significant, and it is no coincidence that they took place in Edinburgh's Moray House College School of Community Studies. At that time, the student social workers and community workers who were working towards professional qualification studied together for much of the time – only going their separate ways for the more specialised aspects of learning towards the end of their time at Moray House. Community was an important concept drummed into us from the outset – along with some dynamic groupwork ideas that, it must be said, were controversial at the time but that I survived anyway though mostly forgot afterwards. The community ideas, however, left a lasting impression, even if I entered social work in Glasgow after that as no evangelist of community social work (CSW) – such an orientation was simply taken for granted in those early years following implementation of the Scottish legislation (the Social Work Scotland Act 1968) that carried such a notion at its heart. I was, however, committed to the public sector as the place I wanted to practise. This, I believed, was where the real work took place and where collective solutions might be argued for and found. That was still with me almost 40 years later when I retired as a children and family team manager not too far from where I started in the West of Scotland.
A few years after I qualified and started serious social work practice in Glasgow, the Barclay Report brought ideas about CSW into the centre of social work thinking, but did it or had it come too late? Anyway, as experienced by almost all my colleagues, things began to change as we got into the 1990s and we were asked to care- manage adults and focus on risk with children and their families.
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