Social Work Spotlight - International Episode 17: Donald (Wales)

Episode Date: April 11, 2026

In this episode I speak with Donald in Wales, a researcher interested in the relationship between good child and family social work practice and outcomes, and in understanding the features of organisations that produce good practice. Donald has been instrumental in setting up the Tilda Goldberg Centre, academic lead for the Frontline social work programme, founding the What Works Centre for Children's Social Care, helping to found the Better Childhoods Centre in University College Copenhagen and the SCALE Centre for Social Care and AI research, as well as leading CASCADE Centre for Children's Social Care Research and Development.Links to resources mentioned in this week’s episode:Donald’s faculty profile - https://profiles.cardiff.ac.uk/staff/forresterdGreenham Common peace camps - https://phm.org.uk/blogposts/greenham-common-peace-camp/Cascade Centre Wales - https://cascadewales.org/Article on the set-up of the Best Childhoods Centre in Wales - https://cascadewales.org/cardiff-university-to-help-set-up-major-new-research-centre-to-ensure-children-in-denmark-have-the-best-start-in-life/This episode's transcript can be viewed here: https://docs.google.com/document/d/1dUp0vSpayHCnS-5KtI2kuxi4MvN2wUjxb_exfl_J9bI/edit?usp=drivesdkThanks to Kevin Macleod of incompetech.com for our theme music.

Before beginning, I wish to acknowledge the traditional owners of the countries of guests featured in this podcast and acknowledge their continuing connection to land, waters and community. I pay my respects to the First Nations people, the cultures and the elders, past, present and emerging. Hi and welcome to Social Work Spotlight, where I showcase different areas of the profession each episode, with a 12-month focus on social workers around the world as of August 2025. I'm your host, Yasmin Lupus, and today's guest is Donald in Wales. A researcher interested in the relationship between good child and family social work practice and outcomes, and in understanding the features of organisations that produce good practice. More recently, Donald has become interested in the opportunities and risks of applying AI into social work, with a focus on developing ethical and human-centered AI to support and not replace professional practice.

Donald has been instrumental in setting up the Tilda Goldberg Centre, academic lead for the frontline social work program, founding the WhatWorks Centre for Children's Social Care, helping to found the Better Childhood Centre in University College Copenhagen and the Scale Centre for Social Care and AI Research, as well as leading Cascade Centre for Children's Social Care Research and Development. Thank you, Donald. Thank you so much for meeting with me today.

I'm looking forward to having a chat with you about social work, work in Wales and your experience. My pleasure. I'm looking forward to it too. I'd love to know firstly when you got started in social work and what brought you to the profession. Well, so I qualified in 1992. Just feels like moments ago, but quite a long time ago. But your second sort of question was how I got into it.

And after school, I started doing voluntary work. I went to university and after trying a few different subjects like English and philosophy, I ended up doing psychology. But the thing I enjoyed most at university was there was a student society called Children's Holiday Adventure and we took kids from the estates around Edinburgh, away for weekends and swimming and other trips. And I just really enjoyed that. I really liked kids and young people and it just felt more kind of real than a lot of the academic study. So I did lots of that. And then when I was looking around, something to do. A lot of my friends having done psychology were thinking of clinical psychology,

but I felt I wanted to help people, but I thought the social context and the politics and that those sort of issues were really important. So I looked for something else and social work seemed a really good fit. So I got jobs as an unqualified social worker and then went to qualified as a social worker. So that's a bit of a long answer. But yeah, that's how I got into social work. And was your upbringing one where volunteering was just kind of a natural thought for you? How did you even get into that, which then sort of led to the progression of the social work degree? What a good question, because my sister is also a social worker. I don't think it's a coincidence that both my mother and father were ministers of religion in the Presbyterian church. So we grew up

with a strong sense of community. They ran all sorts of different groups, but they also had a political sort of belief so they were always going on marches and writing amnesty letters and being involved in the campaign for nuclearism and Greenham common was a i'm not sure of you aware of it it was a sort of women's protest against nuclear weapons in britain and my my mom and sister went off to that so there was that combination of the political but also we would have different people coming in staying with us all sorts of stuff going on and i guess a strong sense of trying to trying to make a difference, a positive difference, trying to make the world a little bit better. And I think that is, I've never been motivated by money or things like that.

I've also wanted to do a job, which I felt was doing some good, I guess. So I don't have a faith myself. But I think the older I get, the more aware I am that those kind of Christian beliefs of trying to be caring and loving, trying to make the world a better place for everyone are pretty fundamental to, certainly my career and I think really just they provided the foundation for for everything really so yeah yeah that's lovely and what were your placement opportunities as you were going through your student phase and how did that then shape what you wanted to do once you left so I always wanted to do children and family work because it grew up just really liking kids working with them and playing really a lot of it's because

I enjoy playing. First placement was in adult mental health. It wasn't a terribly good placement. Second placement, a good friend of mine had had this practice teacher at the first year. It was in Southwark, which is in London. She was a really good practice teacher. It was a kind of a bit of having a baptism of fire. It was very full on, but I loved it. It was exciting, dramatic. You felt you were making a difference. You were never bored. So I really really, really, I guess I learned to be a social worker while I was on that placement. And for me, a big difference, which I'm sure many social workers experience, is I came into social work wanting to help people, which remains a motivation.

And so most of my work had been working with families to try to help parents and children. And then once you get into the field of child protection, you're still trying to do that. But sometimes you're making one of those people, particularly parents, unhappy by raising issues in relation to the child. So that whole dynamic of how you manage incredibly difficult conversations and maintain relationships. Thinking about that was central to my practice and it's been one of my kind of abiding research interests because I think it's very difficult. I think we expect social workers to do it, but we need to be thinking about how workers do it and how we can support them to do it.

And I think it's also a lot to expect of a baby social worker, I would say probably, in terms of just having the life experience and the confidence and the backing to be able to make some of those decisions. That's a lot to expect of someone. Absolutely. It's a huge amount of responsibility. And I mean, we're brought up to try to be agreeable in conversations.

Actually telling someone, so I have this story, I sometimes tell about having to tell a family that I thought they're dog, to smell of urine, which happened on my student placement. I went several times. I just couldn't, I couldn't tell them. It just felt so confrontative. And my practice teacher was really good, but was essentially saying, well, you've written it down. You cannot write it down without sharing it with the family. That's just not acceptable. So how can you raise it with them? I think in the end, I raised it in a very clumsy way. But I suppose the first thing is you have to learn to be able to say those difficult things. And then the next thing is trying to say it in ways that

are less likely to create confrontation and more likely to allow ongoing dialogue. Yeah. So that was a really key time. And then I stayed as a social worker in Southwark for quite a few years, continuing to wrestle with some of those dilemmas and difficulties. I think also what gets missed in that conversation is what to do or feeling confident about what to do once you've had that difficult conversation and dealing with the response to that.

Right. So in your situation where you had to tell the family and what you perceived to be a clumsy way, how do you then deal with what they're going to come back with, which is probably confrontational itself. Absolutely. In fact, the dad jumped up and got out of his chair and started to come towards me. Because I hadn't done the confrontation, eventually my practice educator had said, I'll send a more experienced social worker with you, and he actually had to intervene. But then what happened is he was really good afterwards and said, are you okay? That must be very difficult.

And I was full of the bravado of youth saying, yeah, I'm fine. It's okay. I went back to my house, which several of us lived there, sort of house shed. And I can't remember the details. I was cooking in the kitchen. And one of my flatmates came in and said, I don't want to play the electricity bill because I never use whatever it was. And I took the frying pall I had and banged it down and said, of course you have to pay.

We're all. And I just suddenly thought, oh my gosh, I wasn't okay. I hadn't broken. And I think for me, that was the sort of secondary lesson. And the first lesson was how to actually say the thing. I mean, there was a second really important lesson about trying to look after yourself and trying to be self-aware. And I'm still not good at that, but I think it's crucial in the sort of work that social workers do

because it's hard to imagine, particularly in the field of child protection, but anything that is more fraught with emotion and values that ties, that sort of links into our own experiences of family and childhood and parenting, and all sorts of stuff. So it was a day where I learned a lot about being a social worker. But I mean, I suppose also, I would say a couple of things. If you take that as a little microcosm, what is, I think having a society where there are people, such as social workers who are willing to have these conversations with parents, is really important because otherwise the rights of children don't get protected. So I think it's really important work. I also think it's really, I mean, I do think it's

interesting. I've been, you know, in this bill for 35 years and I just, I just think it's fascinating work to be doing. It's really important, really difficult, and each person is completely unique. I think also I've had this problem in the past and I know a lot of other people I've worked with have shied away from role play. We hear the word, we start to groan and it happens a lot in training or in supervision where we're invited to be part of a role play. I think what your experience and what you're reflecting on is so important to practice. So to have that opportunity to practice beforehand, to practice responding to a bunch of different responses, then to be able to step out of that, which a good supervisor or trainer can do and say, how do we help you to de-escalate your

emotions and to step away from that person that you needed to be? Because otherwise, you will continue to have those issues once you step out of your workplace, out of the role, whatever it is. But I know that you do a lot in terms of supervision and maybe we can talk to that a little bit later. But is that something that you have worked on continuously throughout your career? Is that something that? Because I don't think we're ever fully at that point where we feel comfortable with every conversation. No. I mean, how could, if a social worker said to me, I'm completely comfortable with every sort of conversation.

None of them are difficult. There's something wrong. Definitely, that would be a red flag to me. And indeed, in some of my early research, we recorded, in fact, as you say, sort of role plays with an actor. And we kind of coded how well the social worker handled it. But we also got them to rate how well the social worker thought they'd handled it. And we found a negative correlation.

And what that means is the better the social worker thought they'd done, the less good they were. And in fact, it was much more like to be humble social workers who thought, well, I could have done that better. It didn't really go very smoothly. They tended to be better social workers because they're thoughtful and reflective. But you were asking about the sort of context of social work. I suppose following on from the idea that there is no work that is more difficult or challenging that I can think of,

we need to have organisations that support social workers to remain close to their emotions. So I think you can only do the job well if you are an emotional person. I don't think it's a job that a robot could do. And yet you're exposed so much day and day out. we can year in, year out to difficult things, that we need to create organisations that support people to stay able to do that difficult emotional work. So quite a lot of my work has been around things like supervision.

I guess, I mean, David Wilkins took this on and did far far more than I've ever done, but his work and some of the work I've done in that area. I suppose it really surprised me that so little supervision actually has emotional content. It's all quite procedural. And I think you can understand that from a sort of broadly psychodynamic point of view that it's like the organisation doesn't want to deal with the emotions

and so it becomes very procedural. But that's not very good for the social workers. And I think in that context, it's unsurprising that we have, and I say we, so in the UK, but I think also in the US, I believe probably in Australia, many countries have very high levels of turnover

of social workers because we don't look after people well enough. I think it was going to, going to summarize it. It's really difficult work. People need support with the emotions, help developing the skills. Yeah. Yeah. How did you make that leap from practice to research and what are the roles that you're, because I understand you've got a few different hats. What does that look like for you? It's really hard to make the move from being a social worker in practice to actually becoming an academic. It's not a talk, even now it's not really clear to me how you do it.

So I became concerned that there wasn't much evidence for what I was doing, and particularly I was working with a lot of parents with drug and alcohol issues. And I would try to find out stuff like what are key risk factors or, you know, how do you even understand what parental so-called denial or minimisation might be? I found very little that was out there. And I went back to my tutor at university as Judith Harbin, who was a professor at Sussex at the time. and said, there's no research out here. And she said, really? And eventually we put together a bid and I got research funding to become a researcher.

And then I thought, oh, that's how this works. And having now been an academic for up to 10 years, I realized I was just unbelievably lucky that my first grant hit the bullseye and I got funding because that's pretty rare. But even then I struggled to get funding for a PhD and I had to largely fund it myself. And even then I had to take, I went back and told my partner and my wife, I took a pay cut of

almost a third from being a sort of senior practitioner to being a very junior researcher. And I did that because I didn't have kids at the time and was able to do it. But it's not an easy and obvious way of changing, which is a real problem because we need the best, well, we need some of the best social workers with experience to go and become academics. yet how they do that is very obscure and very uncertain. So I'm not sure if that's helpful, but that's what I did. That's what worked for me like. Yeah, I think it's going to be an individual case by case.

Some people might go straight into academia and pick up the experience as they go along, and your research draws on that practice experience to a large degree. But you're working across different countries, is that right? Yeah, so I have been, and I suppose increasingly my work is international. So I've had a little bit of an excess of centre. So I lead the Cascade Centre in Wales for Children's Social Care, which is by the standards of social work, a pretty big centre. I recently got involved in setting up an even bigger centre in Denmark,

which is across all the professions that work with Children Under 7, called the Better Childhood Centre, just trying to develop better evidence for practice. And we're also setting up a centre, just set up, looking at the use of artificial intelligence and AI in social work. And given all the technical problems at my end in setting up this interview, you may be surprised to know that we have an AI specialisation. I know very little about AI, but I'm now working with all these kind of computer people.

And that's a really interesting whole field as well. So I've got a few fingers and pies. I've moved away from the better childhoods, one a bit. I was the director of research, and I'm now, I'm still involved, but less hands-on, which is probably for the best because I was a three-year-old. spread a bit thin, I think. And I'm guessing navigating funding and grants and that sort of thing across different countries is a whole different ballgame.

But what I've found, at least in Australia, unfortunately, is that a lot of research funding tends to be, you need to get the word into the right ears, the right eyes. Sometimes it feels like you're screaming in to avoid or people are just, there's a bit of a same, same approach in the sense that it's almost cut and paste. So you feel like you have to repeat. If something worked once, you want to. repeated a second time but how are you developing how are you changing how are you enabling better practice so have you struggled with similar things in your area so have i struggled in terms of getting

research grants is that the yeah and just i guess getting the point through to the right people yeah so i think so i've been an academic man for 25 years i'd say for the first 10 of those there was very little funding for social work research i mean it was just kind of justrophically small really and so that has multiple effects it means for the profession we didn't have a huge evidence base because academics would do sort of little bits of research that they could do often without funding or minimal funding but actually developing a proper evidence base was very challenging it also has a and has had a very negative effect on the place of social work within universities because if you're in a discipline that isn't getting much research funding,

it makes you vulnerable particularly in the more academic universities. So we saw a lot of universities like LSE and Oxford and Southampton and Reading, Liverpool, close their social work courses. I think the situation has changed pretty radically in the UK in the last 15 years. We now have, there was a lot of lobbying by some social academic, so funding from research councils. And then the really big game changer is the national institute for health research included first social care and then including children's social care. So there's now much more funding than we've ever had before. It doesn't mean it's easy to get funding. If you're still, if you're lucky, 25% likely to get funding.

But there's just far more. And it's likely to be a long-term kind of investment. So I feel in terms of research funding, we're kind of in a bit of a golden age for social work in. the UK, that we actually have funding and I hope we're going to see the benefits of that in coming years. It's a fairly recent development the last 10 years or so, I guess. Do you have an opportunity to supervise other students who are doing, say, masters or PhDs? How does that work within your existing? Because you're directing so many other things. How do you have time?

Yeah. I spread myself quite thinly over a lot of different projects and things. Yeah, I supervise, I don't know how many I've got at the moment, but I would think about six PhDs at the moment, so usually six to ten. I always supervise a couple of master's students, and I'm supervising two or three at the moment. So I really enjoy that, and I'm getting to the stage of my career when kind of bringing on the next generation of people is something I get particular satisfaction from. So I enjoy the PhD students, but also I mentor quite a lot of people. So, yeah, I hope I'm supporting the next generation of researchers. And what's your focus at the moment? I know you've done a lot of work on improving

outcomes for vulnerable children and improving the quality of social work and social work research. What are you hoping to work on going forward? Oh, I don't. Sorry, how long's a piece of string? No, no, no. Well, I mean, the good news is the problem I have is almost too many things that I'm interested in and want to focus on. So that's a better problem to have than I don't know what I want to look at. But I think there is a danger that. I spread myself too thinly. I think there are two or three or four priority areas that I'm kind of

actively thinking about. I mean, I suppose the context to this is I'm thinking I've got probably about nine years till I retire and I'd quite like to think about what I use that chunk of time for. So one of the areas is about AI and social work, what good AI could look like, how we can create good uses of AI that will support social work practice. That's really interesting because I think AI is going to have fundamental impacts on society, and it's quite nice to be kind of forced to think about those. I have an enduring interest in how social workers talk to people, and I continue to have bids in relation to that,

and in fact it can cross over with AI because AI can listen to it, evaluate recordings in various ways that are new and exciting. I had a book come out last year about rights-focused social work, and I want to take forward research in relation to that. So in some ways, my book came from two dilemmas. One is a lot of the rhetoric about social work is how we are strength-based and empowering and we're in favour of social justice and all these things. If that's the case, why are almost all the recordings we listen to

and almost all my experience of practice so full of tension and conflict and difficulty? Because that's all good stuff. What's all this difficulty all about? So that's the sort of one thing. And then I thought it was a separate problem, but I think it's the same. It comes from the same issue is I've spent a lot of time evaluating outcomes and evaluating services and children social care. And it's really difficult to know what outcomes we're trying to achieve. And I don't know if the sector really has any sort of real agreement about it.

And I thought those were separate issues. But actually, I think they relate to a lack of clarity about the fundamental purpose of children's social care, which I take to be to protect the rights of not just, children, but also parents and other people, and that we're often involved when rights are in tension or even in conflict. So the tensions and conflicts we experienced, the sort of things we talked about earlier in the interview, they're not an accident, and they're not even just an occasional thing. They're almost part of the rationale for why we have child and family social work. So then a rights-focused approach means we need to think differently about outcomes.

So we often use methods that we have used to evaluate, I don't know, a drug treatment service or a counselling approach, and we then apply it to social work. But what if social work is more like court or the police service, which are about protecting rights, you don't evaluate a judge. But their outcomes, what they mean is it's not even a thing. You might do it by transparency, you might do it by fairness, you might check that they wouldn't be discriminatory, there's various things you could look at. but they're not about outcomes. They're about the process of justice or what you might call procedural justice. So I'm quite interested in developing research projects

that explore rights and how different social rights services can support the rights of children and parents. Yeah. So those are some priorities. Actually, I could give you more, but I think I should probably stop at that point. I need to work out,

which I'm going to really focus on in the next few years. Yeah, of course. Have there been any research findings that have surprised you. You mentioned the discrepancy earlier between how a social worker in a setting might have felt differently about how their work impacted someone and how you could analyse that. But is there something you really weren't expecting to find that jumped out at you in amongst all of that research? Yeah, one of the reasons I like or love directly observing practice and then recording it and analyzing it is so often what you hear is.

really interesting. It's interesting because it's difficult so you're often I'm thinking that it's a difficult conversation to have how could we have it how should we have it but I suppose one of the things that I feel is quite a lot of the recordings are very very far from anything that we theorise as what social workers should be doing so again we have all these kind of words like strength based and working in partnership and things like that and yet very often you hear social workers who are, at least in England and Wales, are telling parents what to do. They're often doing it in rather subtle ways, but they may be saying the child protection

plan says you've got to do ABC and the parent says, well, I don't want to do C. And the social worker will be a bit like, well, it's on the child protection plan. Hearing that is fascinating. Now, if it was one or two social workers who were doing that, we could say they're bad social workers. They haven't appreciated what they should be doing. but it's quite a lot of social workers. In fact, I would say that sort of thing is pretty normal, in which case the question is about organisations and how organisations are creating that type of practice.

So I suppose that's really, it was a surprise to me, and it's something I'm still trying to puzzle out, is how and why organisations produce that. But then on a more positive note, I think another study I did which kind of really surprised me was I did an evaluation of a model called Reclaning Social Work in a London Borough called Hackney. And the practice there was so good and so different from normal practice. It was wonderful to see.

And the reason was that he used a form of systemic practice, but what it really did was instead of social workers individually working with families, it had small units of five people altogether who would be working with a group of families. So you were often working with a therapist or with a more experienced social worker and maybe even an unqualified social worker. And there was also a single administrator who would kind of hold everything together and if there was a crisis, was on the phone, and I just, it just made me think, why on earth do we individually allocate this incredibly difficult, challenging, emotionally draining work when it is obvious when you see it that we should be working in small groups or teams supporting one another? So those are some of the findings that surprised me. Yeah.

That's wonderful. Can you tell me a bit about what your research suggests for social workers needing to engage in difficult conversations? So when they're wanting to make a difference, but likely needing to make someone unhappy in the process? Yes. Well, more than my research, I can tell you things I've learned, a lot of which have been from reading other people's research. and my initial studies found there was what would call resistance from parents when there were drugs or alcohol was almost a ubiquitous feature, almost all the families had it, or rather all the social workers experienced it. And looking around for a way to help social workers with that, I came across motivational interviewing.

And I suppose the first insight from motivational interviewing was that resistance, any form of non-cooperation, whether that's sort of minimizing your drug use, saying something hadn't happened, saying you don't have a problem, don't need a social worker, through to actively being aggressive, or all sorts of things. It's all kind of an understandable response to the situation people find themselves in. So that operates on multiple levels. The motivational interviewing, they demonstrate that even in a counselling situation, if I suggest you, you've got a problem, the most likely response will be that you say,

know I haven't or it's not as big or you don't understand or something. And that's in a counselling situation where people have actually come for help. So there's something about the dynamics of when we confront people, anybody about anything, the most common responses are pushed back. And then on top of that, or underneath that, maybe, you have layered the sort of context of child protection where there are very real consequences and very real fears. you know, if you step back for a moment and put yourself in the position of a parent

where there's a child protection social worker in your life, who would not be afraid, who would not feel worried and anxious. And there's an exercise we do in training, and I'm sure many people do it, where we get groups to think about their deepest, darkest fear, and then in different ways you can explore if you had to talk to someone about it. And usually people say, well, I wouldn't really tell you the whole, I don't want to tell people my deepest darkest fear. My deepest darkness fear is too horrible.

And yet, as social workers, we kind of are going in to talk to people about things that are something that may be very ashamed of, feel very bad about. I suppose that insight is the first thing, that resistance to non-cooperation is not pathological. It is completely understandable and normal. So then how can you work with it? I think, so obviously listening skills, so really deep listening. type skills, which I think are often taught on social work courses, but my research fan maybe not used as much as they're taught for reasons we could come to. So listening, but the second thing I

sort of learned from motivational interviewing was showing people that you are listening. So not just asking questions and listening to the answers, but actually offering back your understanding of what's happened, which they are called reflective statements or reflections in motivational interviewing. And I think they serve a really useful function for at least two things. One is, and the most important one, is showing people they're heard. And I think often a dynamic we get into social workers, a parent is saying, I don't trust social workers. And the social worker will be going, but you can trust me.

I'm very trustworthy or something like that. Whereas often what somebody needs is not to be persuaded, it's to be heard. And reflections can offer that. So it may be a reflection in the situation like that might be something like you've had several social workers and you feel they just didn't listen to you and they didn't put your side. You understand there were problems, but they didn't see the positives. I don't know, whatever it is. So that's one element of offering reflective statements. And then the other one is sometimes we're wrong.

So offering a reflective statement means that you're sort of telling people what you think is going on for them. And it can be great if they say, yeah, that's right. but it's almost even more important if they say, no, that isn't the problem of social workers. The problem of social workers is you're all bloody middle class or whatever it is. And then that's not a failure if you haven't understood. It's an opportunity to really understand. And I found that type of reflective, listening, transformative in the work I've done. And then a lot of my research has been trying to train social workers around that type of practice.

and we have found relationships between those types of skills and some positive outcomes for parents and families. Yeah, so a lot of mine is just really standing on the shoulders of giants like Bill Miller and Steve Rolnik who came up with motivational interviewing. And to be honest, also other therapeutic approaches, there's a lot of similarities in systemic practice and in restrictive approaches and things like that. A lot of them have similar principles,

even if they used sort of different words. How do you feel that motivational interviewing might be used outside of the clinical context? I'm thinking, yes, for clients, but maybe for colleagues, for stakeholders, how do you see that as being a social work skill set or a social work tool, maybe? Yeah. So I suppose I've increasingly thought of it as kind of fundamental to effective communication and ethical communication in most contexts, not quite. all but the reason I think that is it's not really a bunch of skills the skills are the servant of the values they're just ways of expressing the values so I was talking about reflective statements the reason reflective statements are really important is because we value the opinion of the other person and I suppose really what I think motivational interviewing is good

at is creating a dialogue so in the sort of classic regurian formulating of listening skills. It's all about listening and reflecting back to the person. Motivational interviewing is more directive and so it has much more to say about how I listen to you and show that you're heard, but also introduce things that I think are important into the conversation. And dialogue is pretty important to most forms of communication, I'd say. So in supervision or when I'm working with a PhD student or someone, I use a lot of the skills of motivation interviewing. Some contexts are different. So if I'm talking to a PhD student and they want to know about a methodology that I know about, I can tell them. And sometimes I think people think you

can't with these approaches, you can. But even then, it's at teaching and learning as much better done as a dialogue. So if I spend a long time talking about, I don't know, regression analysis, I may feel I've taught you, but whether you've learned or not, who knows? Whereas if we have a dialogue, you're able to go, is that because of this or is it because of that? So dialogue, I think, is, yeah, dialogues at the heart of it, creating respectful dialogues. Yeah, that all makes sense. That's fantastic. How would you then suggest students could best be supported on placement? So you mentioned earlier your desire to help raise the next generation of professionals,

but also wanting to avoid the baptism of fire that you went through while you were on placement. Yeah. Well, I've got a number of elements to this. I suppose looking back at my course, it was very academic and not terribly focused on practice, and I was fortunate to have a good practice placement in the second year. But I think whatever the nature of the course, most students kind of learn how to be a social worker in placement or on placement. And therefore, it's crucially important that we shape the quality of that practice learning opportunity. So one of the reasons I've set up, was involved in setting up the frontline course,

as the academic director, was it was a practice-based course. But what was unusual is we were able to have a high degree of control over the quality of that practice experience. And I think the frontline course is a very good course. I think 10% of English social workers are coming through it now. But it does rely on getting really good practice educators, having a small unit or group of students, then working very close. with them together. It's more difficult in a lot of other social work education because it's difficult to get placements for students, so you're not picking and choosing as much. But I think there has been a shift,

and I think this is a really good shift, towards much more practice-based education. So there's a place for lectures, etc. But when I was setting up front line, as someone who just come off a social work course, came off and told me that in the two years of the master's course, they'd just done, they did one role play and that's to me utterly unacceptable not least because so academics will sometimes say well you know it's very important social workers have a critical appreciation of theory of structural stuff all these things absolutely true 100% true but if you don't help them kind of put that into practice then it'll just stay on the shelf so role plays and other sort of practical activities are not just about learning practical skills they're the bridge by which you begin

to think about, well, how could some of these theories or values actually be put into the reality of practice? What does it mean to be a critical social worker in a situation like this? And if we don't help students and social workers to make those links, some of them will just leave it. They'll just get on with whatever the agency wants. And often what the agencies want, I would say, I think there's been a really positive set of changes in the UK that last sort of 10 years or so, but there's still a very procedural tendency, a very sort of, and a very child protection focused perspective. Yeah. And I think a lot of younger or early career social workers go into placement offers, wanting to do the right thing. And perhaps, you know, like myself, I had two very wonderful

placement opportunities and I wanted to be a supervisor as soon as I could so that I could hopefully help foster the next generation. But I didn't know what I was doing. I was going in sort of blind. I think what would be really helpful is if there was some sort of process or support for early career social workers to be supervisors, to help people with role plays on their practice because you can't rely on that happening at university, obviously. But on placement, you've got actual examples to work with. You've got people who can support you on the ground and even be there with a clinical situation in the room with you, supporting you through that process.

So, yeah, I definitely think there needs to be some sort of systematic, I don't know, training or just an integrated course as you're getting towards the end of your training as a social worker and how we do this, how can you best support a student on placement? Because that's something that I definitely just had to pick up along the way. Absolutely. I mean, in fact, I think it's almost broader than that, that in the UK at least, the career progression ladder is, you're a social worker, perhaps you're a senior scientist. social worker, and then you become a manager and you start doing managerial stuff, I think as any profession worth its soul, values the people who are really good at their job and don't want to be a manager, and as part of that, are able and willing to share it with other people, students and less qualified, less experienced workers. So really we need a professional structure

that, as they have in medicine. I mean, consultants are not primarily managers. they're primarily experts are what they do in medicine. And it's the same in some other professions. I think we need to have much more value for the quality and nature of professional practice. I also realize I haven't asked you to talk much about the history of social work or social work activism in the UK context. I'm wondering if you know much about that and how that has sort of progressed to what social work is now and how it's seen.

Well, I'm not an expert on that, but I'm an academic who's willing to talk about anything. I mean, I can give you a little bit of a broad brushstroke introduction. I think social work in the UK is widely perceived to have grown from two traditions that were, there was a tension between the two of them. Probably the strongest was a group of professionals who used to have different names who did essentially forms of casework like Lady Arminus, who helped people move out of hospital and charity organisation society, who would work as we'd go and make decisions about whether people were deserving or undeserving poor.

And other related professions was one and probably the biggest part of the origins of social work. But there was a more radical tradition, which was associated with, in particular, settlements and other forms of sort of radical community activism, which involved people from universities going and living in poor communities and doing community work and was very influential on things like the creation of the welfare state. So Clement Attlee, our great post-second World War, Prime Minister, was a social worker and worked in settlements in the East End of London. And that's always had a much more critical view that

a lot of the problems we deal with are structural in origin and that we are at risk of, at the least, not seeing the whole picture and at the most becoming just tools of the state. if we don't have that more critical view. I'm not going to give you the whole history, not at least because I'm not an expert on it, but I think there's been a tension between those two broad contradictions that continues into the present day between sort of working with individuals and families

and a more social structural sort of approach. But I would say that the individualised approach has become very dominant because local government and central government have, but because they employ social workers to a large degree, dominated the agenda. But I think in recent years there's been more development of more critical perspectives. And I suppose my position is neither an individualised nor an entirely sort of social perspective is right and that we should be a profession that can, whether this tension between

the two is constructive, that we can try to understand there are both social factors and individuals and we're trying to help individuals or work with individual issues, but also address broader social factors. I think there's been more recognition of that in Britain. There's been what's called the rediscovery of poverty in relation to children and care and children's services. And then there's been the attempt to develop less individualised approaches like family group conferences or contextual safeguarding,

which have been, I think, really positive developments over the last 10, 20 years in particular. That is along the same lines as social work in Australia as it was taught to us in terms of armines and the deserving poor. And what I think I've realized as I progressed in my career is that what we don't learn, we learn less about the indigenous processes and less about the practices. It's very much that colonial approach, which makes sense because a lot of our early social workers were from the UK and from Ireland and brought those practices with them and just translated it to our. our context, but I think what we were missing and maybe, I don't know, 20, 30 years later, maybe it is a little bit more inclusive in terms of what students are taught, I hope so. But yeah, that sounds very similar to our context.

So thank you for clarifying. pleasure. You, Donald, as a social worker, as a person, as a human, doing this work, what support do you need now? How do you share the burden, given that you're at a high professional level, who is left to supervise you? who supports you? Well, that is a really tricky question because I do think, and I've become increasingly aware, you don't get as much support when you are in leadership positions, I think.

I'm very, very fortunate that I have a very good, my centre is an extremely welcoming, supportive place, and I've got some colleagues, peers, sort of similar age and stage to me, who are extremely supportive. And, you know, in theory, I've got a line manager as well. But in fact, line management in the academic world is a once a year annual review. I'm sure if I had a problem, I could go and say whatever. But it's not formalised. No. So in fact, recently I've arranged to see a career coach to provide some of this, someone who can listen and then help to sort of form plans and things.

I think there is a lack of support or structures of support. So you have to seek out what you can. Yeah. What was your thinking about that question? I guess I was just hoping that I have the impression that you would kind of be left to your own devices, which it sounds in some degree you might be, but it's not as though you'd require any less support than someone else. You know, you're dealing with the pressures of a significant number of higher degree research students. You've still got responsibilities.

You still have a personal life and you need to marry those two. So that was kind of my thinking of who supports the supporter, basically. I think that's right. I think it is partly I've chosen roles where I get a high degree of autonomy. So the plus side is there's no one breathing down my neck. You know, I will sometimes joke with my family about how long, if I stopped working, how long before somebody noticed. So it's kind of other than the people who work for me,

but above me, I don't know if anyone would notice very quickly. And that's kind of nice. It's very different from being a local authority where you have demand-led service and people have to be delivering and things like that. Mine's much more, you know, what do I want to do? I have a lot of autonomy. Autonomy is great. But the downside is, as you've said, that there isn't necessarily the same support.

Sure. And I think maybe there's a misunderstanding that the more experience you have, the less support you need, which is absolutely not the case. Yeah, yeah, absolutely. Do you miss working on the front line, though? So are there any other areas of social work if you had the opportunity to do any frontline work, step away from research for a bit, what would you do? Yes, I do miss it.

And I periodically have tried to get back part-time or for a period of time, or I've talked about going back if I semi-retire or something. And I miss quite a lot of things about it. Some of the top things are that direct relationship with children and families, I really loved that. I loved the fact that you often felt you were making a difference, helping or at least understanding where people were at. Whereas a lot of what I do now,

you sort of hope it's making a difference, but you don't really know whether people are reading things or acting on things or what have you. So, yeah, I really miss it. I miss the child protection work I used to do. However, what I don't miss is the, unpredictability of it, the often long hours and the high level of stress. So, you know, I talked to my friends who are still social workers about, you know, wanted to go back and some

of them laugh in my face and say, this is just the sort of delusion that you have. But I didn't leave social work frontline because I no longer enjoyed it. I left it because I was excited about new things. So it would be something I'd enjoy going back to. Yeah. You mentioned your sister as a social worker. What kind of work is she doing? She was working in a residential unit with families where there were serious concerns and they were doing assessments for the court but she's just moved from that back into local authority practice

any day now or I guess next week she's going to start back in her. So maybe I can sort of secondhand get some... Well I feel I get secondhand quite a lot particularly with listening to recordings of practice. That's the other thing is listening to record as a practice I quite often think, oh I'd really like to be trying to have this conversation not necessarily because it would go better, but just to see how whether it might.

Yeah, for sure. You want to keep those skills alive. Yeah, exactly. Can we talk about resources if people wanted to know a little bit more about the work that you are doing, have done? You mentioned your work on supervision and emotion in social work. Was it David Wilkins, you said, has done some work around this? Yeah, David Wilkins is a colleague and friend and a brilliant researcher. He'd be someone you could get on. I think he'd be really good.

He'd be a brilliant book about social worker decision making at the moment and how to do it well. So the Cascade Centre that I'm director of has lots of reports about our different projects. And I mean, if you just look up me on the internet at Cardiff University, you'll find my webpage and my email. People want to get in touch. I regularly have people email about work I're doing

or about research I've done, and I like it when people do that. Because as I was saying, you don't know if people are actually reading of stuff. So if someone sends an email saying, I'm thinking about this or that, I'm always pleased to hear from them. And you've got your publication, The Enlightened Social Worker. Any other books or anything else you're working on? The worst selling book on Amazon or whatever it is. Despite being, well, I liked it, but I'm biased.

Yes, that's available on reputable booksellers everywhere. And any more in the works? I'm writing a lot of articles at the moment. I slightly got discouraged. So the previous one, the one on motivational interviewing, I think quite a lot of people read that. But this one, not many people seem to be buying it. And someone did tell me people are just not buying books as much.

Kind of an anti-climax, though, isn't it? You go to all this effort. You get a book deal, you publish, and then you wait. And there's probably a big rush at the start because you're doing promotional stuff and then crickets. Yeah, exactly. Yeah, it's really sad. Wow.

Yeah, no, it is disappointing. so. So if any of the listeners to this wants to take pity on me and read it, that would be great. Yeah, I'm trying to take some of the ideas and put them into my other work in various ways, so they're informing current projects and some articles I'm trying to write. And then you sort of hope that some of the ideas will resonate with some of the people who've read it, but the nature of research is you don't necessarily know what sort of impact you're going to have on people. So you're just part of the dialogue or a debate about children's social care. So hopefully some people will find it useful.

Maybe it's quality, not quantity, the mantas I tell myself. Is there anything before we finish up? I'm so grateful for your time and all the practice, wisdom and research insights you've provided. Anything else that you wished I'd asked or anything you haven't had a chance to talk about? I don't think so. You've been a very perceptive interview. asking some very interesting questions. I hope my answers have been of some interest as well.

And I'm definitely sure they will be, but I think what you've been able to do through this discussion is provide an idea of how you got to where you are. So right from the early days of volunteering and having the family background, I guess, of strong values and your sister as a social worker, so you had the opportunity as you were learning to talk with her about what she was doing

and get an idea of what kind of social work you might want to be doing. and the work you were doing created developing concerns for the existence of limited evidence for practice. So you were able to, through your research, look to improve practice and affect policy and really all the way through focusing on the rights of children and families, that social work support, minimizing the gap between research and practice and those theories and the frameworks and contributing hopefully to improvements in how social work research is viewed and fun. but you've talked a bit about also how do we measure the effectiveness of the work that we do

and how do we reduce burnout and how do we build the profession as a whole? So I think it's really insightful to have that perspective, not just from someone who's had the practice experience, but someone who's then been able to build the understanding of how things work on a higher level and then hopefully influence the next generations of social work. And you still got time. You've still got maybe another nine years. So, you know, there's potential for either one. Yeah, some academics don't really retire. They just fade away. I call those ones who, health-allowing him around Peru, a long time. Well, I was saying earlier how powerful it is to be heard, and you've just done a wonderful summary of some of the things I said, and I feel

very heard by that. So I'm glad. Thank you very much. No worries. Thank you again so much for this. I've really enjoyed having a chat with you, and I'm sure other people will. And as you said, people can find you on the internet. They can reach out but I'll pop some of those resources you mentioned in the show notes so people can go off and do some viewing or reading or whatever they want to do and get to know a little bit more about it. Brilliant. Well, thank you for making the time in your holiday schedule to see. My pleasure. Thanks again.

Thanks for joining me this week. If you'd like to continue this discussion or ask anything of either myself or Donald, please visit my anchor page at anchor.fm.fm slash social work spotlight. You can find me on Facebook, Instagram and Blue Sky. or you can email SW Spotlight Podcast at gmail.com. I'd love to hear from you. Next episode's guest is Komozzo, a social worker from Botswana,

currently residing in Germany, with qualifications in both social work and African studies. She has experience working as a project support officer focused on orphans and vulnerable children-related policies and programs, working to strengthen social protection systems, and improved service provision by social workers in Botswana, and has interests in social policy reforms, informal social protection, and inclusive development.

I release a new episode every two weeks. Please subscribe to my podcast so you'll notify when this next episode is available. See you then.