Social Work Role

These materials are all openly accessible on the Support Around Death  website and can be used in a range of different teaching settings for health and social care professionals.

Placements are crucial for the education of student social workers, but they have a huge benefit for the teams they're placed with too. Deirdre Fitzpatrick, ScOPT Trustee, has made a short video illustrating the advantages to teams of having a student and the benefits, too, to the student. It's just one minute long.

This is a four nation UK research project funded by the ESRC that explores how social workers communicate with children in their everyday practice and how social workers and children involved in these encounters experience and understand them.

The TLC materials are designed to support a range of professionals in the social work arena. Each phase has its own web page where materials can be viewed online or downloaded, along with other relevant materials and links for you to explore.

In UK social work education, practice educators supervise and assess students while they are on placement. Practice placements are the most important element of social work degree courses, accounting for half of the overall programme for undergraduates. So the role of the practice educator is vital, particularly if a student is struggling or at risk of failing.

What does it take to become a resilient practitioner in social work? This free course from the Open University will guide you through some important concepts. An understanding of 'emotional resilience' and 'professional leadership' will help to guide you through taking a positive approach to problems that arise in social work practice. You will also be introduced to some ideas about leadership in social work practice.

The course is available online, but is also available to download for your Kindle as well as in PDF format, as a Word document, and many more.

Supporting struggling students on placementA new book by Jo Finch is published next month: Supporting struggling students on placement, a practical guide.

Test your ability to judge appropriate use of social media use in social work, with this quiz by Denise Turner by @DeniseT01 and @SussexTEL at the University of Sussex.

It will be useful to use as a discussion starter with students too.

This is an online guide that aims to simplify how the youth and criminal justice system works for under 18s in Scotland by describing the processes, practices, law, guidance, roles and responsibilities at each stage of the young person's journey.

This resource details the journey a young person can make from an offence allegedly being committed; routes to court, court processes and sentencing; stages in the journey should a young person be remanded or sentenced to secure care or custody or sentenced to a community disposal; and post-sentence support.

Care Inspectorate: The Hub provides 'one-stop-shop' access to a range of resources aimed at supporting improvement in the social care and social work sectors through the use and sharing of intelligence and research-led practice.

Resources include: