Rethinking social work supervision: is a ‘radical supervision’ model possible?

Abstract

Professional supervision is considered a key aspect of effective social work practice. In much of the world, front-line social work practitioners prioritise social work supervision as essential to ensuring a supportive working environment. This is crucially the case while working in ethically and politically contentious environments (such as working with refugees). Despite its centrality to effective practice, access to professionally meaningful supervision is nowadays seen by employers as a ‘luxury’, rather than as an integral part of front-line practice. On many occasions, the responsibility for accessing and paying for supervision is delegated to practitioners. Different models of supervision have been proposed over the years. This article provides a unique reflection on the creation and function of a ‘radical supervision’ approach, developed by practitioners and academics in Greece to deal with the complex professional and emotional dilemmas that emerged in the context of working with refugees. By ‘radical supervision’, the participants and authors refer to a non-hierarchical, peer-support supervision model that also prioritises collective action and mobilisation as regards structural challenges, thus departing from than the traditional individualistic approach to supervision. The group consisted of seven front-line practitioners and two academics. All practitioners worked in the field of refugee services. The supervisory group met regularly over a period of eight months from December 2020 to July 2021. The group followed the principles of participatory action research to analyse and report findings and reflections, while the analysis, as well the procedure of the supervision per se, were based on the liberation health model.