Social policy for social work: A teaching agenda

Though social justice is a central goal of the social work profession, the actual involvement of social workers in social change is very limited. Moreover, training in social policy and policy practice in schools of social work is minimal. As such, practitioners lack the tools needed to analyse existing social problems and policies and to enable them to intervene in the policy process in order to better serve the needs of service users. This article seeks to further social policy teaching within social work education by engaging in a survey of the existing literature on the subject and by offering a detailed programme for integrating this subject into the social work training system. The literature survey that serves as a basis for this programme includes a review of studies on the dilemmas linked to social policy teaching, on the goals and content of social policy courses in social work and on preferred teaching methods in this field.