Contributions to Social Work Education

In the 1940s some leading social workers, drawing on their reading, continuing contacts and pre-war experience, thought that a good deal could be learnt from the more systematic development of social work practice and education in the USA. By the early 1950s regular exchanges began. These were made possible by American generosity that enabled British social workers and students to go to the United States for observation and study under the Fulbright and Smith-Mundt Programs and through the activities of the British Committee for the Interchange of Social Workers and Administrators (which covered other countries as well). American social work educators also came here under the Fulbright Program and other auspices. They usually had university or other attachments for a year: during that time they helped to plan new applied social studies courses, or, more frequently, ran seminars for practising social workers. These discussion seminars in different parts of the country to which members brought their own ‘live’ case material helped to create a climate in which it was easier to admit how much there was to learn. They led to an orderly working method in which some social workers became more adept at assessing a situation, learning to pose relevant questions in their work, to observe significant interactions, to become more aware of their own attitudes and to evolve some criteria by which to assess progress or the lack of it. Social workers from different settings discovered, sometimes to their astonishment, that they shared common assumptions about the range of human behaviour and reactions to stress and the use of a professional relationship to help people to cope better; and that the clients of one agency were no different or more complex than those of another.