Text 4. Social Work Training and Social Services

In the United States, the United Kingdom, Canada, Australia, New Zealand, Japan, and India the bulk of social work training is provided in the higher-education system, whereas in France, Germany, Norway, and Sweden it is conducted mainly in separate institutions. Most social workers are employed in either statutory or voluntary agencies; outside the United States very few are engaged in private practice. There is much diversity in their training and deployment, but the role of social workers has broadened, making them individually responsible for a wide range of methods and client groups. In some cases specialized social workers are deployed in teams. Opinions differ on the relative effectiveness of the alternative methods of intervention—direct casework, or counseling, on the one hand and indirect social-care planning on the other. Voluntary and private agencies tend to perform more specialized roles, centred on particular client groups and age groups requiring special methods of care and service delivery.

The paid staff of statutory personal social services includes social workers, community workers, social care assistants, home-helps (homemakers), workers who supply mobile meals, occupational therapists, and psychologists working in a variety of field, day-care, and residential settings. Although social workers account for a small proportion of the social service workforce, they constitute the majority of its professional staff. Their job is to provide casework, or counseling, services in cooperation with individuals and families and to engage in tasks of social-care planning, such as seeing to the delivery of direct services in kind and fostering the involvement and support of informal care providers and volunteers. In most industrial societies social workers have more or less exclusive responsibility for mandatory duties related to fostering, adoption, and other work affecting parental rights as well as for the management of substitute home care or residential care for the main client groups. Probation officers act as social workers with a special attachment to the courts, the administration of probation usually being separate from that of other statutory personal social services.

The increasing orientation toward community care calls for social policies that strengthen the association between formal personal social services and informal networks of social care without losing sight of their differences. The formal public, or statutory, sector and the voluntary and private sectors all have paid career staffs whose objectives and management are bound by explicit rules. The primary tasks of the public sector are laid down by statute; most voluntary and private organizations are registered, respectively, as charities and companies. In countries such as the United States, the United Kingdom, Germany, The Netherlands, and Japan formal voluntary and private agencies receive direct or indirect grants from the statutory sector in return for agreed amounts of contracted work. In the developing countries many welfare agencies are internationally organized and jointly financed by charitable donations and government grants.

Informal care is spontaneously provided in the context of families, neighbourhoods, and other loosely structured community-based associations. Without these supporting networks the personal social services would be overwhelmed by demand. Consequently they often make small grants to informal self-help groups and supplement the unpaid services provided to dependents by their relatives and friends. Professional social workers and community workers are increasingly deployed in the recruitment, training, and general assistance of informal care providers. Payment for fostering is a long-established practice in many countries, and this policy has spread to the care of other groups such as the handicapped and the infirm elderly.

(3362)

Notes:

caseworker - служащий, изучающий условия жизни неблагополучных семей и лиц, нуждающихся в материальной или моральной поддержке.