The Development of Socially Skilled Practice: Social Skills Training in Social Work Education

SUMMARY The paper describes some monitoring the authors have done on the effectiveness of an interactive social skills programme for social work students. The monitoring was done by before-and-after video role-play of a small group of non-programme and programme students. The general repertoire of both groups was reasonable but distinctly limited with the non-programme group rather worse than the programme one. The programme group showed significant gains in identification of skills and in classroom practice after the skills course. The importance of an activity base to teaching in other areas of the social work curriculum is considered. Finally it is argued that the development of socially skilled practice must take place, above all, in the field and it is suggested that students learn the theoretical approach to skill development used in skills work, (as opposed to learning skills per se) so that they can more consciously monitor their own development in the field. It is desirable that practice teachers too become familar with the training model that the students are using.