Registration and social work education: A golden opportunity or a Trojan horse?

Abstract

• Summary: The Social Workers Registration Act (2003) introduced a system of voluntary statutory registration of the social work occupation in Aotearoa New Zealand. This was hailed as a measure that would protect the public from unsafe practices, and enhance the status of the profession. More recently, however, commentators have noted that these positive effects may not necessarily be forthcoming. This article explores the impact of registration on educational programmes, by placing regulation of the occupation in the context of hegemonic neoliberalism.

• Findings: Neoliberal approaches to social care not only constrain the delivery of services, but attempt to shape the perspectives of the social care workforce. Education is a potentially powerful tool for achieving that shaping. Where statutory regulation of social work is in force, competency based training threatens to supplant critical analysis, which is a hallmark of higher education. To retain viability as an academic discipline, social work educators must champion social work’s continuing role in analysing and theorizing the distribution of power in social welfare and social care.

• Application: Social work educators have a role in supporting practitioners, who struggle to maintain disciplinary integrity whilst employed within 21st-century human services, by continuing to engage in critical debates, and advancing knowledge about the theory—practice nexus. In advancing such knowledge, they also have much to offer other disciplines in institutions of higher education that are looking to explicate their utility in the ‘real world’.