Social work education and Islam

Social work education and practice in the UK has been subject to continuous transitions and radical changes over a number of decades, owing primarily to government interference under the purported, clichéd rationale of 'improving standards'. Demands by social work academics for clear evidence of such a need has generated some questionable justifications, leading to the suspicion that policy changes merely feed into a prevailing, cynical neoliberal political agenda for the fragmentation of public (and therefore publicly funded) services in social care and health. The tightening of the social work curriculum to focus primarily on 'safeguarding' issues with a heavy focus on practice learning (practicums), compresses a formerly comprehensive academic education in social work that was once traditionally grounded in the social sciences and psychology. If this were not bad enough, the government promotion of fast-track social work qualifications in children and families work is exemplified by two initiatives in England: 'Step Up to Social Work' and 'Frontline' (Ixer, 2013). The former is premised on the idea of partnerships between local authorities and institutions of higher education (HEI) and is now beginning to be adopted by a number of HEIs as inevitable, although Frontline remains highly controversial and has only been taken up by one English HEI. Fast tracking serves to undermine social work education further and to replace this with an instrumental, training protocol that may serve the interests of local authorities (the main employer of social workers in the UK) in producing a specifically trained workforce but with limited remits which are unlikely to serve service user/client groups equally well.