Bill Whyte

Social Education and Social Pedagogy: Reclaiming a Scottish Tradition in Social Work

Social pedagogy is the discipline underpinning work with children and youth across most of Europe. The concept has struggled to find a place within social work in the English-speaking world, partly because of difficulties in translation and partly as a result of different welfare traditions. In particular there is a limited conception of education within the Anglo American Saxon tradition and a consequent bifurcation of education and care. This article argues that ideas enshrined within social pedagogy have a resonance with Scottish approaches to social welfare, which culminate in the Kilbrandon Report of 1964. We argue that there are recurrent themes in the Scottish tradition with roots in the Reformation and the Scottish Enlightenment. Foremost amongst these is the focus on education as a vehicle for both individual improvement and social cohesion. Social pedagogy or social education offers an integrating conceptual base from which to develop models of social work practice which promote social wellbeing through socio-educational strategies. The current review of social work in Scotland offers opportunities to reclaim a socio-educational tradition.

Effectiveness, Research and Youth Justice

Policy and practice developments in the field of youth justice have become highly politicised across the UK. The growing demand for greater transparency of outcomes sets new challenges for practitioners who have to marry direction from research with practice experience. A better dialogue is needed between practitioners and researchers to support the generation of a wide range of meaningful data on what is likely to be effective, with whom and in what situations. This paper examines issues of responding effectively to youth crime by drawing key messages from the research literature.

Children and young people with harmful sexual behaviours: First analysis of data from a Scottish sample

Abstract Despite a growing awareness and acknowledgement of the incidence of sexually harmful behaviour by children and young people, research on this group remains limited. A number of recent publications have reviewed UK systems and practice and suggest that the issue is better appreciated than a decade ago. To date, however, there is no published information on this group in a Scottish context. As a first step in addressing this lack of empirical data, a joint exercise was conducted between the Criminal Justice Social Work Development Centre for Scotland and a number of specialist services for children and young people involved in harmful sexual behaviour to develop a picture of this group. Data on 189 such individuals were collected from cases active during 2004. This forms part of an ongoing data collection process, which is intended to provide practice relevant information and contribute to the development of services and interventions for this client group.

Young and Persistent: Recent Developments in Youth Justice Policy and Practice in Scotland

This paper draws on a Scottish study of young people persistent in their offending to examine recent policy developments aimed at improving the effectiveness of response to youth crime. Developments include: the establishment of national objectives and standards for youth justice; provision of specialist social work and multi-disciplinary youth justice teams; piloting specially resourced fast track hearings; and re-establishing a youth court in Scotland for the first time since 1971. Developments which include proposals to introduce electronic monitoring and community service for those under 16 may be the beginning of a shift away from the traditional and long standing adherence to welfare principles in dealing with young offenders in Scotland.

Valuing Desistence? A Social Return on Investment Case Study of a Throughcare Project for Short-Term Prisoners

A social return on investment (SROI) has been widely promoted by both third sector organisations and the Scottish Government reflecting greater demands for financial accountability among the voluntary/third sector and charities who are under increasing pressure to evidence their effectiveness. There has been little academic scrutiny of the use of the SROI by human service agencies in the field of criminal justice where the impact of desistence from crime is valued, but the quality of data in social agencies is often problematic. This paper draws from the evaluation of the Routes out of Prison Project (RooP), a peer support prison throughcare initiative, to provide a case study of how the SROI model might be applied positively to a criminal justice context and provide a consistent framework for valuing and comparing initiatives aimed at promoting desistence from crime. The paper provides an overview of both the RooP and the SROI, before examining the issues raised by RooP and the advantages and limitations of SROI in this context.

Towards an interactional approach to reflective practice in social work

Reflective practice is a key aspiration within social work; being a reflective practitioner is considered to be a foundational attribute of the social work professional. However, achieving reflective practice is not straightforward. Reflection is inevitably subject to issues of memory and recall, so that the recollection of a case is likely to differ in important ways from the original instance. Moreover, giving an account of an event to ones peers or supervisors involves aspects of justification and self-presentation that may emphasise selectively and ignore key details of the original event, whether through a process of conscious omission or subconscious forgetting. This article reports on a knowledge exchange project that sought to enhance criminal justice social workers’ reflective practice through the use of the Conversation Analytic Role-play Method, an approach that is methodologically and theoretically grounded in the study of talk-in-interaction, drawing on video re-enactments of real encounters between practitioners and service users. We argue that by engaging collaboratively in this way, the practitioners and researchers learned a great deal about how practice in criminal justice social work is ‘done’ and also about the wider context within which criminal justice social work is practised.

Social work in Scotland: who calls the shots?

Like most human service professionals, social workers are subject to growing scrutiny and regulation. There is, however, little research on the impact of regulation on building professional confide...