Jane Fenton

Reflective Social Work Practice

1. Introduction - The Social Work Context 2. Dynamics of Critical Reflection and Reflexivity 3. Communications Skills for Building and Sustaining Relationships 4. Undertaking Life Changing Assessments 5. Critically Informed Interventions 6. Making Significant Risk Decisions 7. Meetings 8. Records and Report Writing 9. Effective Supervision - Reflection, Support and Direction 10. From a Reflective Social Work Practitioner to a Reflective Social Work Organisation

‘Risk is King and Needs to take a Backseat!’ Can social workers’ experiences of moral injury strengthen practice?

This paper considers the idea that moral injury may result from social workers being exposed to sustained ethical stress – the stress experienced when workers cannot base their practice on their values. It is suggested that a particularly salient feature of agency working which might contribute to the experience of ethical stress is risk aversion. This paper is based on a study of one hundred criminal justice social workers in Scotland, who were questioned on their experiences of ethical stress and risk aversion. Quantitative and qualitative data were collected and analysed using standard multiple regression and inductive thematic analysis, respectively. Findings demonstrated that how risk-averse an agency was contributed in a unique and significant way to the worker’s experience of ethical stress. Qualitative comments illustrated why this relationship might exist, but also demonstrated that a variety of views were held by social workers and that ethical stress was not experienced by all. The findings are discussed in terms of moral injury and its links with risk aversion, bureaucracy, neoliberal hegemony, notions of ‘underclass’, personal moral codes and professional integrity. Explicitly exploring these related concepts in social work education might impact on the new generation of social workers and strengthen the profession.

Putting old heads on young shoulders: helping social work students uncover the neoliberal hegemony

Abstract This paper explores the suggestion that younger students and social workers are more accepting of neoliberal social work practices than their older counterparts, understanding social problems more readily as failings of individual behaviour rather than as produced by societal forces such as inequality, poverty, and punitive social policy. The suggestion is made that the acceptance of a hegemonic view of people in poverty and other difficulties, which is simple and reductionist, and therefore, easy to grasp, can only be challenged by sophisticated critical thinking. Assignment results from two modules within one social work programme which significantly correlate marks attained and student age are considered in the light of the suggestion that younger students are struggling with critical thinking, and therefore, with deconstructing the neoliberal hegemony.