Aim

This two-year project started in July 2004. The key objective of the project is to work with stakeholders (including social work educators and educators in health, education, police, care and housing professions, the Scottish Social Services Council and employers) to establish a consistent approach to the content, teaching and learning of child protection issues for students in the new social work Honours degree and postgraduate routes.

The project aims to achieve the following outcomes:

• To produce an evaluative report on an audit of current social work degree curricular content in child protection;
• To publicise the audit outcomes;
• To report on areas of child protection-related specialist knowledge and skills developed in the Centres for Excellence;
• To put arrangements in place to ensure that specialist inputs from the Centres for Excellence feed into all child protection teaching and learning within social work degree programmes;
• To publish an agreed set of key capabilities in child protection, identifying the knowledge and skills to be achieved by all graduating students;
• To document the alignment of the new key capabilities with the Scottish Credit and Qualifications Framework;
• To document the mapping of the new key capabilities to the Standards in Social Work Education;
• To make recommendations on approaches to the assessment of the new key capabilities within social work programmes;
• To embed the new key capabilities in social work programmes, including practice learning;
• In partnership with the SSSC, to establish a mechanism for the ongoing monitoring of programmes in relation to key capabilities in Child Protection;
• To produce an initial evaluative report on the impact of the project on curricula and practice;
• To make proposals for the further evaluation of progress towards the embedding of child protection training within programmes.

The project is due to end in July 2006.

Who's involved ?

The project is overseen by a reference group consisting of representatives from the range of professional groups involved in child protection. The reference group members are:

Aberlour Child Care Trust

Mr Adrian Snowball (Chair)

Scottish Training on Drugs and Alcohol (STRADA)

Ms Joy Barlow

NHS Education for Scotland

Ms Jane Cantrell

Association of Directors of Social Work (ADSW)

Ms Irene Cavanagh

University of Dundee

Professor Brigid Daniel

Aberdeenshire Council

Mr Robert Driscoll

Ninewells Hospital, Dundee

Professor Stewart Forsyth, Medical Director Designate

Dumfries and Galloway Constabulary

Mr Bob Ovens, Deputy Chief Constable

Scottish Social Services Council

Mr Brian Smith

NCH Scotland

Ms Frances Tran

Scottish Institute for Excellence in Social Work Education

Professor Bryan Williams