Post-Qualifying Social Work Practice

This core textbook provides an authoritative overview of the post qualifying awards in social work. Written in response to recent policy and training guidelines, the book will help social workers enhance their post qualifying knowledge, skills and values within specialist areas of practice.

The book will:

" Increase social workers′ knowledge for practice

" Help social workers to explore values dilemmas

" Encourage reflection on their practice

" Use critical self-appraisal to construct different ways of thinking about and doing social work

" Enable social workers to build confidence in their professional identity

" Move from competence to increased capability and to expertise

" Promote learning and career development.

This book examines core assumptions about post qualifying practice - that values and relationships (including partnerships with service users) are essential to good practice, that social workers will work in diverse organisational structures and that social workers in the United Kingdom should become aware of European models of social work.

Patricia Higham is a registered social worker and an independent social work consultant. She is a non-executive director of an NHS primary care trust and emeritus professor at Nottingham Trent University. She has been appointed Visiting Professor of Social Work at the University of Northampton.

She has written Social Work: Introducing Professional Practice (SAGE, 2006).