Supervision: A contested space for learning and decision making

Abstract

Supervision is a core activity in social work in the UK and elsewhere, widely associated with a range of positive outcomes for service users and professionals, while Public Inquiries and Serious Case Reviews have identified poor supervision as a factor in some child deaths. While there is agreement on the nature and value of ‘good’ supervision there are debates on the possibilities of delivering it in today’s pressured, poorly resourced working environments and a lack of data on what actually happens in supervision. This article presents some findings from interviews with social workers and their managers drawn from a wider study on how social workers make decisions in child protection work. They suggest that supervision is an important site for evaluating practitioner accounts and thereby constructing knowledge and making decisions about cases against a background of uncertainty and complexity. However, the ways in which these processes were negotiated shed light on supervision as a complex social process with a range of unofficial, tacit functions, embedded in the webs of social actions and exchanges that created and sustained the identities of the practitioners and their teams. What also emerged were the complex skills experienced supervisors developed in challenging and refining practitioner accounts, skills which novice supervisors struggled to acquire.