Fit for Purpose? Post-Qualifying Social Work Education in Child Protection in Scotland

Abstract

Recommendations for post-qualifying training and education in child protection social work consistently form part of the political response to child abuse scandals. The influence of child abuse politics upon the push towards post-qualifying training and education has been consistent across the United Kingdom. Within Scotland educators have been quick to respond to the market demand for programme provision and there is now a growing number of academic programmes being offered by higher education institutions. Yet despite post-qualifying training and education achieving the status of 'panacea' there is little in the way of a national dialogue about what post-qualifying training and education in social work child protection should look like. The parameters of this have not been subject to any kind of national debate and the Scottish academic community has not entered into a professional dialogue on these issues. More crucially, educators have not engaged in any level of identifiable evaluation of their provision and there is an absence of engagement with the scholarship of teaching child protection at the post-qualifying level. This paper connects with these issues to question whether the post-qualifying training and education delivered by Scotland's universities can be considered fit for purpose.

Evaluating the impact of the IPOP (Improving Personal and Organisational Performance) programme

“…McAllan and MacRae' s (2010) evaluation of a leadership development programme for actual and prospective social work managers within a single Scottish council is a rare empirical example. What evidence there is often refers to localised evaluations of (non-leadership and management) postqualifying social work programmes (for example, Bailey, 2002;Bailey et al, 2003;Brown & Keen, 2004;Brown et al, 2008;Doel et al, 2008;Webber et al, 2010;Chapman & Morris ,2011;Kelly & Jackson, 2011;Platt, 2011;Webber & Salter, 2011). Indeed, as Carpenter (2011, p.137) points out 'there is, as yet, little evidence of changes in behaviour as a result of social work education' in general.…”