What is the role of social workers in schools?
Some school social work services can get structured in very problematic ways. Schools are really good at segregating children who are perceived as “challenging” in some way from the general population. That can be very negative for students. Unfortunately, I dont think social work has really grappled with this issue, and, often can inadvertently align with such school-based sorting mechanisms The focus has been on getting mental health services for students into the schools. I don’t disagree that this is important, but the way schools structure these services is to segregate children from their natural class based settings. The lens of the school social worker may sometimes be too narrowly fixed on pupil-environment fit. I often think our lens should be slightly adjusted to focus on classroom and school contextual features and the practices of teachers. My goal is to rethink professional social work education. I think we have to prepare a new generation of practitioners to do these job
