Social Work Teaching Partnerships: Changing Landscapes in Social Work Education

Social Work Teaching Partnerships (SWTPs) were developed by central government (Department for Education and Department of Health and Social Care) to transform the quality of education and experience received by social work students and practitioners in England. The principal aim of the programme was to, ‘formalise collaborative working to raise the quality of social work, by attracting high quality students into the profession and ensuring students and existing social workers have the necessary knowledge, skills and values to practice effectively – and to improve workforce planning and development to address retention and recruitment issues.’ (Interface Associates 2019, p4). The programme, which began in 2015, now includes 113 local authorities, 54 higher education institutes (HEIs), and 32 private, voluntary and independent partners, which affects 70% of all HEIs offering social work education. Early findings reported positive stakeholder engagement with SWTPs. However, there has been relatively little else published in addition to the evaluation studies (Berry-Lound, Tate, and Greatbatch 2016; Interface Associates 2019, 2020). One notable exception is the paper by Baginsky, Manthorpe, and Hickman (2019). The purpose of this Special Issue is to showcase some of the work that has been done by Teaching Partnerships up and down the country to enable further discussions about the impact of SWTPs on social work education in England that are much broader in content than the Department for Education sponsored evaluation report. Following a call for papers, I received a large number of abstracts from many different Teaching Partnerships. There were too many to include in this Special Issue, but they did show the richness of partnership working in social work education that Teaching Partnerships were keen to capture. In order to showcase as much work as possible, I made the decision to limit the wordcount for the substantive articles I commissioned, and to commission a number of smaller articles that demonstrated specific knowledge and skills developed