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Social Work Education – A Local and Global History

This special issue is an unusual one for Practice for three main reasons; we would like to invite you to think about each of them before we introduce the papers themselves. First, we would like you to reflect on why Practice is publishing an issue on social work education. The answer, for us, is straightforward. Not only does social work education influence social work practice (and vice-versa), but social work education has been one of the key drivers for social work on its professionalisation journey. As new training programmes for social workers began in the early years of the 20th century on both sides of the Atlantic, knowledge, skills and values were increasingly claimed as core to social work’s professional identity. What this reminds us is that social work practice needs social work education, and it is social work education that continues to sustain and nourish social work practitioners on both their individual and collective social work journeys through continuing professional development, and further training and education. This leads to a second question – why a special issue about social work education history? We believe that in order to understand where social work is going in the future, we need to be able to reflect on its past, to identity the continuities as well as the moments when changes in direction have taken place, and times when social work became something new and different from before. An appreciation of history encourages us to ask questions and adopt a critical stance to theory and to practice, thus challenging myths of past practice as being either a ‘golden age’ or a time of social work oppression. Finally, we would like to explain why Practice agreed to publish a special issue on social work education now. Social work history has been celebrated in several ways over the last year; here are some important landmarks: