Sue Dumbleton

Goodies and Baddies: Equivocal Thoughts about Families Using an Autoethnographic Approach to Explore Some Tensions between Service Providers and Families of People with Learning Disabilities

This paper will explore the power of history in affecting contemporary caring practice. Drawing on the authors personal experience as a social worker, researcher and parent of a daughter with learning disabilities, the article will consider the ways in which the experience of (and to an extent, nostalgia for) the ‘heady days’ of de-institutionalisation continues to influence staff perceptions about their work. In doing so, this article will critique normative notions of choice and control that are at the heart of current moves towards self-directed support and personalised services. The author contends that staff who support people who have learning disabilities need something with which to compare and validate their practice. In the 1980s the hospitals were easily identifiable as something negative with which practice ‘in the community’ could be compared. In the twenty-first century the need for a comparator is still there, but the hospitals and many of their associated structures such as Adult Training Centres have gone. The paper argues that the family can be a contemporary structure against which current practice can be measured.

‘We thought we would be the dunces’ – From a vocational qualification to a social work degree: an example of widening participation in social work education

The policies of successive UK governments have promoted access to higher education by students from diverse social backgrounds. This paper uses the example of social work education to examine one way in which The Open University (OU) has sought to attract ‘non-traditional’ students into higher education. It draws on findings from a small-scale research study that explored the experiences of students with vocational and other prior qualifications who gained ‘advanced entry’ to the University’s social work programme in Scotland. The paper explores the interplay between students’ day-to-day experiences of transition and broader influences on widening access to education, including the political and organisational contexts within which this change has taken place. It reflects on both the University’s learning from the experience of implementing this initiative and the continuing experience of widening participation in relation to social work education and, more broadly, to distance learning practices in higher education.

The changing face of parent advocacy: a long view

This paper reviews the history of parent advocacy in the UK on behalf of and with people with learning disabilities since the mid-twentieth century and reflects on the role of the academy in illuminating and documenting its story. It argues that parent advocacy has flourished at times of change and challenge, and has seen a revival since austerity began to bite. In the twenty-first century parent advocacy has mutated into working with, rather than for people with learning disabilities, a development to be welcomed, given the cuts to services, and the impact of ‘welfare reform’. This once more united voice is manifested in the launch of Learning Disability England in June 2016.