NEW ZEALAND
SOCIAL WORK EDUCATION: AGENCIES AND ACADEMIC
DISCIPLINES
Mary Nash18
Universities were established in New Zealand to serve society by preparing individuals for vocations which involve advanced skills and learning. The relation between the professions and universities has always been a close one. Which new types of study leading to professional careers should be accepted into the universities and which would be more appropriately placed in technical institutes?
Social work as a discipline which is at once academic and professional, exists in tension between the competing demands of the profession, the state, social service providers and the community of scholars. At the same time, universities have to earn their funding along with other institutions. Higher education in the modern world is inescapably bound into its host society. This may put academic freedom at risk, given that it entails the right to study, carry out research, publish ones findings and teach what one believes in.
It has been argued that academic freedom is endangered only if external political, economic or industrial pressures impinge in such a way as to cause epistemic drift. Epistemic drift refers to the tendency whereby knowledge structures and social structures within the university system tend to become reorganised into dysfunctional patterns when research communities come under strong external pressures of relevance and accountability.
Social work is recognized as a discipline likely to encounter government and employer influence. Case studies of the history of social work reveal a relationship between changing systems of state welfare and the stages through which the profession has gone. Social work and the education of social workers are changing. Pressures on curriculum and funding have prompted departments of social policy, social work or social
18 Mary Nash. Social work education: Agencies and academic disciplines //International Social Work. – 2003. - №46. - 23-35.
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administration in other countries to question whether the teaching of social work can continue to take place within a university setting. Who in the end will decide what social work programmes should be available for service users and how social workers ought to be educated? The answers depend partly on whether one considers social work to be an academic subject in its own right.
Academic disciplines. An examination of the characteristics of an academic discipline together with a conceptualization of the epistemological structures of the subject matter within disciplines is useful in understanding professional social work education. The idea of enough education for the purposes of the market may be too superficial for the academic community, which aims to turn out social workers with a generic education. Under such circumstances tensions inevitably arise, where the distribution of educational resources is concerned, in the relationship between economic and social policies.
Goodlad (1976) and Becher (1989) examined what makes an area of study into a discrete discipline, and what gives a discipline value and status in a plural society. Related to this discussion is a further question raised by Goodlad: how can one best educate the expert? This confronts the problem of education and training in a society which requires experts for technological progress, yet risks a narrow and prescribed study programme to effect economies of both time and money. These international concerns are shared by those involved in the development of social work teaching in New Zealand and are explored below.
An academic discipline has its own specific characteristics, classification of knowledge and development. Hirst identified forms and fields of knowledge as useful criteria for distinguishing between academic disciplines. Forms are primary, discrete disciplines which involve highlevel critical analysis, complex criteria and a relationship between theory and reality. Fields are complex ways of organizing knowledge in an area that combines several branches of knowledge, skills and practices.
Using Hirsts rather narrow definition, one can argue that social work has the characteristics of a field rather than a form. There has so far been little examination of the characteristics of social work as an academic discipline. A more developed understanding of social work in these terms can facilitate the analysis and evaluation of current educational policies and practices.
Disciplines are a social as well as intellectual phenomenon. Disciplines claim property rights and close relations between academic
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disciplines may be interpreted as either a takeover bid or a love match. According to Goodlad, a discipline has vitality when it is neither divorced from nor wholly dependent upon education of students for a role in society, but is rather related to some aspects of social living. Neither Goodlad nor Becher disputed the place of vocational or technological disciplines in a university. Law, theology and engineering have long been part of academia. Intellectual conflict has to be separated from personal or political (or cultural) conflict, but a discipline has vitality when it has contextual relevance to some occupation or occupations. Similarly, an institution is really alive only when it has its feet on the ground of social need.
According to Becher and Goodlad, a discipline must have areas of debate and the unknown waiting to be explored. Research is seen as an essential component of any academic department. For a discipline to it into a university, two criteria are the presence of a considerable body of knowledge and the existence of uncertainties which can be explored from an institutional baseline. In the early years (the 1950s) of professional social work education in New Zealand, there was debate as to what was known and whether there was enough expertise to insist that all social workers should be qualified.
By the 1960s, New Zealand was striving to educate its own professional workforce, rather than rely on a series of transient immigrants. The colleges of the University of New Zealand were therefore open to influence by approaches from government and professional bodies to offer training courses that at other times might not have been deemed appropriate in an academic setting. Social work has struggled to achieve status as an academic discipline in the university system, let alone in medical and other fields of practice. This is so in other countries too, and it is critical for the professionalization of social work that it succeeds in gaining academic respect and autonomy.
The second aspect of an academic discipline concerns the classification of knowledge. The status of academic disciplines has tended to be related to the extent to which they are perceived as abstract, theoretical and scientific. Becher, noting the complementary nature of Biglan and Kolbs findings, combined them to form the Biglan-Kolb classification of knowledge. This offers a framework within which to situate social work as an academic discipline. The outcome is a quadrant divided by two axes as seen depicted below.
Using the Biglan-Kolb model, it has been argued that social work is traditionally a soft, applied area of study which draws on established and
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universally recognized disciplines such as sociology, psychology, history, law and education for much of its curriculum. This classification of social work as a soft, applied discipline offers a position which accepts the validity of variety and difference. Dominelli (1997), for example, argues that social work is at once a discipline in its own right and interdisciplinary in that it draws on other disciplines.
The third, developmental, aspect of an academic discipline has particular relevance for this thesis. In a study of the process by which academic disciplines develop, Goodlad (1976) argued that four conditions were necessary for a new discipline to take its place in higher education. It would need to be recognizable to others, with a transcending theoretical perspective which makes visible the content or subject matter; the host educating institution would have to make room for it; it would need contextual relevance to some social activity, job, or vocation, since it would require funds and these would be available in proportion to its viability and the need for it; and finally, its chances of recognition would be increased by a similar discipline developing in another country.
The development of social work as a new discipline in New Zealand exhibited all of the above features: recognition by academics, international status, processes of socialization into a discipline and the influence of the provenance of leading scholars. This was the case for the establishment of the School of Social Science at Victoria University College of the University of New Zealand. The story of appointments there and the intellectual networks of the staff of the school were significant. The founding professor came from the UK, and another staff member came from the UK via Australia, where she was also teaching social work. Subsequent staff had in common connections with the Victoria University, Wellington, the London School of Economics, the Probation Service in the UK, the Tavistock Clinic and the Family Welfare Bureau.
Universities and their departments and schools must decide on their goals and the type of students they intend to graduate. Schools of social work have to recognize the goals of host institutions. Universities rank disciplines according to the needs and values of the institution and these will vary from time to time. This is the case today in New Zealand universities, where funding and demand affect supply, and tertiary institutions are now more than ever sensitive to government funding strategies.
Implications for professional training in a plural society. It is predictable that there will be a difficulty in prioritizing goals in a society
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that has no integrating and commonly accepted ethos but tolerates an immense variety of beliefs, lifestyles, moral standards and forms of art. The goals of education in such a society will themselves be plural and may be incompatible with each other. The plural nature of contemporary New Zealand society, with its uneasy acceptance of the free market economy and cultural differences, its this description.
Four dominant goals exist in such an environment. Manpower planning is socially and politically defined and equips people with the knowledge and skills society wants. Courses are more likely to be funded by government if they are developed as the result of manpower planning. Consumer goals are socially defined by students and their parents seeking an assured career and the social status of a degree. Individual goals, where students want education in order to understand and critique their world and to further their self-development, form the third category of dominant goals, and the fourth is scholarship.
What authority can a university invoke in order to prioritize educational goals in a pluralist society? It has to be one of accepting and maintaining the tension between competing goals without burning the thread. Effectiveness and competence, where relevant, become attractive goals and though they are in themselves the means to an end, can acquire the status of ends in the context of professional disciplines. It seems much easier to set goals for the training of the expert than for education in the humanities.
The funding base of tertiary education has changed since Goodlad conducted his research. For example, in New Zealand some regard tertiary education as a public good, which should be funded by the state, while others see it as a private good, for which individuals should take financial responsibility. Any concession that tertiary education is a private good raises the question as to whether it should be those who pay for their education (students) or those who employ them (reaping the benefit of their investment in themselves) who should dictate, through the industry training organizations, what competencies they must acquire.
I would argue there is another possible goal for higher education, namely, conscientious. Conscientious provides an opportunity to those who wish to take control of their lives in an exploitative world and recognizes the potential of education for the self-determination of groups as well as individuals. It was cited as a new theme for social work education in 1972 and represented the strong human rights element in social work which now includes feminist and ethnic analyses.
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Issues for social work education. Social work has always acknowledged its dual function of social control and social liberation. There is a constant balancing act within the profession to practice according to recognized ethical standards. The International Declaration of Ethical Principles states unequivocally that Social workers have a commitment to social justice and Social workers have the responsibility to devote objective and disciplined knowledge and skill to aid individuals, groups, communities and societies in their development and resolution of personal-societal conflicts and their consequences (IFSW, 1994). Setting the goals for social work education within the tertiary sector is a challenge.
The categories and frameworks set out above offer a structure for considering how social work has been accommodated into the culture of New Zealand universities and tertiary institutions. They provide a context within which to address the question of how a balance between the competing goals of manpower planning, research, scholarship, professionalism and conscientious has been negotiated and reworked over the years.
With social work established in a university setting, the question of curriculum development became significant. Three kinds of curriculum were identified by Bevis and Watson (1989) who argued that they are present in every course of study. The first and most apparent is the legitimate curriculum, which is the public and recognized study programme. The illegitimate curriculum is the second. It is openly taught but unspoken. It is not assessed, lacking measurable behavioral objectives. Instead, it puts students in touch with their creativity, and personal development occurs. The third curriculum is hidden. It is the curriculum of subtle socialization in which students learn approved values and attitudes. This is certainly significant for social work, where it is quite openly acknowledged that during their courses students are socialized into the way of thinking of the profession.
This analysis of layers of meaning in a curriculum comes from a nursing milieu, but its into the social work context. It helps to explain the resistance, particularly, but not exclusively, among universities, to competency-based training and assessment. Socialization into the social work profession, together with the need to put social workers in touch with their inner selves, has always been part of the professional education of social workers. This is so particularly whenever the social work profession guides the curriculum and pedagogy of social work education. The competency movement may be unsympathetic to anything but the
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legitimate curriculum.
The call for competency, nationally and internationally, has come partly from employers and partly from practitioners and professionals. Three forms of competency-based education can be distinguished, the first being task-based or behaviorist, assessed by direct observation of performance. This usually occurs in an agency setting. The second is the underlying attributes approach, in which the competent practitioner will have certain general attributes, such as knowledge and a grounding in critical thinking. Here, assessment is not context-specific and some people question whether generic competencies actually exist. Gonczis third form is the integrated approach, which takes into account both the qualities and attributes of candidates and their ability to perform. It acknowledges the complexity of combining knowledge, skills and performance. Professional judgement is recognized and in this approach to assessment there is an emphasis on a great variety of evidence, more direct evidence. Gonczi favours the integrated model, arguing that it has a more flexible approach and incorporates the best elements of the other approaches.
For Gonczi, competence does not simply mean performance. It includes knowledge an`d he has confidence in the existence of suitable ways to assess knowledge. He argues that appropriate methods of assessment can improve courses, and promotes assessment as an art: a competency is a combination of attributes underlying some aspect of successful professional performance. Thus competence is a construct that is not directly observable, rather it is inferred from successful performance.
While some favour this form of competency-based education, others in the UK and in New Zealand have had reservations. There are concerns about student assessment, lest objectivity is achieved by breaking student exercises into discrete tasks or goals and measuring these individually at the expense of developing a holistic approach to the working relationship. Could such a fragmenting approach restrict the curriculum to what is measurable?
The Aotearoa New Zealand Association of Social Workers (ANZASW) introduced its own competency assessment programme in response to the registration debate in the late 1980s, as a means by which full membership of the ANZASW could be determined. It was part of a strategy to increase membership of the ANZASW which had reached very low numbers in 1988. The ANZASW designed its own measure of accountability and the competency assessment programme which evolved has been running successfully for over a decade.
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A government organization representing an alliance between industry and the government, the New Zealand Qualifications Authority (NZQA), was formed in the early 1990s. The NZQA explicitly serves the interests of industry in making available a trained workforce. The NZQA approves unit standards and national certificates and diplomas for all vocational courses. A National Certificate in Social Services and a National Diploma in Social Services (Social Work) have now been registered on the National Qualifications Framework by the industry training organization for the social services.
The academic environment is not immune from market forces. Accommodations to external factors over time have always resulted in new ways of prioritizing educational goals in tune with agency expectations. This affects the curriculum and even the availability of courses. It is to be expected that social work educators and other interested parties will have different views as to what factors should have a particular influence on the setting of goals and the consequent curriculum. The balance of power between the educators and standard-setting bodies (where these are distinctively different entities) may be mediated by current knowledge, policies, resources, the requirements of the employers and government agencies in particular, and the profession.
The immediate postwar era in New Zealand was characterized by the public service ethos, in which professionals, academics and public servants had a shared view of the world. Vocation, service and a community ethic were taken more or less for granted. Character and experience were considered as crucial elements in the selection of candidates for social work education. As the economy changes, so do the pressures on vulnerable people in society and the social services at their disposal. This in turn influences the demand for particular types of social workers. New Zealand examples are the demand for Maori social workers in the mid-1980s, the demand for qualified staff when the Children, Young Persons and their Families Act (1989) came into effect, and currently, the demand for mental health workers.
Swinnerton-Dyer (1995) has highlighted the contrast between the immediate postwar era when government agencies were expenditure led (taxes were raised till they reached the level required to afford what the nation wanted) and the present day when the government is more sensitive to the size of the budget and money spent must be shown to be put to good use. Those who wish to purchase can demand goods to their specification. This has implications for social work education. Social work educators
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offering higher-level social work courses are confronting a less collegial and highly competitive environment and one where societal, agency and professional values are less harmonious in relation to social work and the education of practitioners.
The social contract has been renegotiated with resultant alterations in the balance of responsibilities carried by the state, the family and local communities. The state in New Zealand has customarily been seen as responsible for providing, at the very least, a residual welfare system, without which it would be unable to obtain sufficient political consensus for government. The more residual state social services become, the more social work is challenged with regard to its social justice stance. At the same time there is pressure on social work educators to concentrate on teaching technical skills rather than critical and theoretical material.
It is commonly recognized in New Zealand that where once public policy objectives were couched in terms of social goods, the 1990s saw them expressed in terms of economic goods. The dominant style of administration has become corporate or generic managerialism. In some cases, groups have harnessed these opportunities for their benefit, by contracting to offer social services which suit them. This new organizational context for social work raises questions as to what happens to theoretical knowledge under the new, fragmented and prescriptive social service approach in which organizations that purchase services can dictate what those services shall be. It also reopens old questions as to whether the profession to date can be so sure that it does know what makes a difference to clients and how social work performance can be measured. The identification of key tasks, together with the knowledge and skills these require, is one method by which social work could, some would argue, be assessed for effectiveness. This is where the competency approach has been able, understandably, to gain acceptance in many quarters.
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