Social Work - Theses
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ItemSchool social work in the state of Victoria, Australia: 65 years of student wellbeing and learning support( 2014)School social work is one of the earliest fields of professional social work practice in Australia. Despite the lack of accessible literature to document it, successive Victorian practitioners have perpetuated an unbroken tradition of practice, supporting students to achieve their potential through education. The research used professional narratives and documents retrieved from private and public archives to consider the organisational, theoretical and practice developments of school social work in the State of Victoria. The findings represent the first broad picture over 65 years of school social work as professional practice. State education department school social workers, employed within multidisciplinary teams delivering visiting services, have frequently experienced organisational reconfiguration, often associated with newly elected State governments, changing social and educational policies, and the restructuring of successive departments of education. In particular eras, a much smaller number of school social workers has been appointed by individual schools as members of staff. Since the 1973 publication of an Australian Government report into schooling, Commonwealth and Victorian State Government policies have increasingly focussed on concepts such access, equity and excellence for all students, inclusive of individual difference, socio-economic background and cultural diversity. Professional identity was found to be based on dynamic school social worker interaction with the changing context of practice, but fundamentally founded on values, knowledge and methods for intervention. School social work was embedded within the ethical base of social work, with particular emphases that identified it as specialist practice. School social workers were driven to focus particularly on the student in the learning environment, in order to facilitate children’s rights to education, and support social justice outcomes. School social work was integrated into the policies, practices and programmes of the school as host setting, with the purpose of improving student potential, through minimising the effects of inequities and removing impediments to best learning outcomes. School social workers primarily used an ecological-systems approach, and an eclectic repertoire of theories and methods, to work at the interface of multiple environments around the student. While prevention and early intervention were the preferred levels of practice, most time has been allocated to more complex casework intervention. School social workers needed generalist and school-specific expertise including: counselling and supporting children, young people and their families; teacher consultation and professional development; small group and whole class work; facilitating school policy and practice change; and building school-family-community relationships. It was by way of the acquisition of specialist knowledge and skills for school-specific methods of practice that practitioners were able to narrate school social worker professional identity at individual and communal levels. The research proposes that “the tradition of practice” is the stream of continuity of shared professional identity, where meaningful connections are made with past, current and imagined future narratives essential to the profession. Finally, the study proposes multiple areas for further consideration and research into school social work in Australia, including its effectiveness in facilitating school engagement and learning, the impediments faced by students and young people, and comparative studies with international settings.