BJSW Advance Access originally published online on July 31, 2007
British Journal of Social Work 2008 38(5):936-952; doi:10.1093/bjsw/bcm070
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Learning from Experience: Developing a Research Strategy for Social Work in the UK
Paul Bywaters is Emeritus Professor of Social Work at Coventry University and Honorary Professor at the University of Warwick.
Correspondence to Paul Bywaters, Faculty of Health and Life Sciences, Coventry University, Priory Street, Coventry CV1 5FB, UK. E-mail: P.Bywaters{at}coventry.ac.uk
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Summary |
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This article discusses the development of a strategy for securing a step change in social work research in higher education in the UK. This project, undertaken by the Joint University Council Social Work Education Committee (SWEC), aimed to give direction to the constituency, address complex and potentially conflictual issues across the four countries of the UK and promote social work research both internally and to external stakeholders. The obstacles and opportunities for advancing social work research are discussed, as are the processes by which consensus was secured across higher education institutions. Key issues debated at length included how to define social work research, whether to set priorities for research themes, whether research should be promoted in all academic departments or concentrated on centres of excellence and how to identify and begin to challenge the gross funding shortfall. Lessons from the process are identified, including the need for social work to develop stronger international collaborations.
Keywords: research, development, strategy, social work, higher education
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Introduction |
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The purpose of this article is to describe and discuss the development of a strategy for social work research in higher education institutions (HEIs) in the UK (for the full document, see Joint University Council Social Work Education Committee, 2006). It also provides the background to other articles in this issue, which discuss some aspects of the content of the Strategy in greater depth. It would be premature to expect a major substantive change in the resourcing, quality, volume or status of social work research in the UK at this stage, but the intention is to identify lessons that can be learnt from the process of development. Such a reflection may help the direction of strategic efforts in the UK and may be of benefit in other countries where similar issues are under consideration.
This is a personal account, and others would give different emphases or perceive the process differently. As a member of SWEC, my involvement included writing the initial proposal, chairing the working group that produced the Strategy, taking a substantial role in the drafting of the Strategy, steering it through the approval processes and convening the subsequent implementation group.
SWEC is the national body which represents the social work as an academic discipline in the UK through the membership of individual HEIs. The core objective of SWEC is to promote and develop the discipline of social work on behalf of the universities which are its members. It does this by representing social work in higher education in a variety of external fora, responding to consultations on relevant issues, the exchange of information and discussion of issues between members and holding events of various kinds.
SWEC has a number of sub-committees of which the two most central are concerned with ‘Learning and teaching’ and ‘Research’. Partly because of the work involved in the new qualifying programmes, learning and teaching has formed the central focus of SWEC’s agendas for a number of years. However, academics in SWEC and the UK Association of Professors of Social Work were also being active in promoting social work research. For example, SWEC members were instrumental in securing Economic and Social Research Council1 (ESRC) funding for a research seminar series entitled ‘Theorising social work research’ (see www.scie.org.uk/publications/misc/tswr/index.asp) leading, amongst other things, to the production of a Code of Ethics for Social Work Research (Butler, 2002). Academics who were on successive Research Assessment Exercise2 (RAE) panels for social work and social policy reported outcomes and implications to fellow members of SWEC; and they and others were active within the ESRC working to secure recognition for social work as a separate discipline, for example, for the award of post-graduate research studentships. Nevertheless, the quantity, quality and resourcing of social work research activity across universities in the UK remained limited by comparison with other social science disciplines such as social policy or sociology, and even more limited by comparison with social work’s professional partners in health.
Despite, or perhaps because of, these initiatives, which were raising the profile of social work research in certain important institutional settings, the Research Sub-committee decided in 2004/05 that it would be valuable to produce an overall strategy for the development of social work research in higher education in the UK. It was believed that, if successful, the process of producing the Strategy would have a number of potential benefits in addition to any direct outcomes of the Strategy itself:
- It would give direction to the work of the Sub-committee and enable it to move from being largely reactive to being pro-active.
- It would enable the committee to address some potential conflicts of interest, for example, between more established and recently formed universities.
- It would enable the committee to continue to promote a UK-wide approach to social work research despite the different directions which social work legislation and practice were taking in the four countries of England, Northern Ireland, Scotland and Wales.
- In itself, it would help to raise the profile of social work research in the UK.
In doing so, SWEC aimed not only to benefit social work as an academic discipline but also, through improving the effectiveness and efficiency of social work and social care practice, the interests of social work and social care service users and practitioners. It believed that practice and the experience of service provision would also benefit if the public reporting of social work and social care research drew positive attention to this relatively neglected aspect of the welfare system.
Developing research strategies is not a new activity; it is normal for universities and for individual university departments to have written strategies in the context of an increasingly competitive and outcome-focused approach to research management (Kirkland, 2005). However, it is less common for disciplines at a national level, at least within the UK, to have research strategies which represent an agreed position for HEIs as a group. Some individuals, particularly those who have been working at a national level within a discipline, have been active in proposing a strategic approach to discipline development. For example, Murphy (2006) recently published a call to geographers to engage more directly and visibly in public debate about major social issues in order both to protect the academic discipline of geography and for the benefit of human understanding of key social issues. Other individuals have reviewed or proposed the development of particular forms or aspects of research as a contribution to their discipline (e.g. Taylor-Gooby and Zinn, 2006). At a national level, research strategies have sometimes been developed by governments either within or across disciplines. For example, the Department of Health (2006) published Best Research For Best Health: A New National Health Research Strategy and, at the time of writing, the Welsh Assembly Government is developing a social care research strategy for Wales.
Across Europe, the promotion of research as a key element in the development of social work’s wider status has been argued in several countries, such as in Finland (Karvinen et al., 1999; Mantysaari, 2005) and in Estonia (Kiik, 2005). In others, there are associations of social work researchers, such as in Sweden (www.forsa.nu/). The issue of the place of social work research within and outside the academy is being grappled with in many countries. But, in none has the production of a national strategy for social work research yet been part of the process.
In the USA, where the history of research promotion may be longer (Graham et al., 2000), several specific mechanisms for promoting social work research have emerged from within the social work constituency during the last decade or so. The Institute for the Advancement of Social Work Research (IASWR) brings together the efforts of six constituent national social work, social work education and social work research organizations to advocate for social work research. Its purpose is ‘to advance the scientific knowledge base of social work practice by building the research capacity of the profession, by increasing support and opportunities for social work research, and by promoting linkages among the social work practice, research, and education communities’ (www.iaswresearch.org/, accessed November 2006). IASWR works alongside ANSWER—The Action Network for Social Work Education and Research (www.socialworkers.org/advocacy/answer/default.asp)—a parallel national coalition which focuses on advocacy for social work research at a federal level. In addition, the Society for Social Work Research (www.sswr.org/aboutus.php) works to advance social work research as an individual membership organization. IASWR has a comprehensive strategy, last updated in 2003, for action on structures, funding, dissemination, collaboration and capacity building. However, when we set out to develop the SWEC social work research strategy, we were not aware of any other examples of what we were attempting: a national strategic research plan for a single discipline in HEIs.
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Context and background |
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In the UK and, I suspect, in many other countries, social work has struggled to achieve recognition by and equality of status with other social science disciplines. In the UK, this is reflected in a number of ways. Some are relatively trivial, including the absence of social work degree or post-graduate-level education programmes in either Oxford or Cambridge Universities. Others mirror a more profound insecurity, such as the diversity of the structural arrangements in which social work in universities finds itself—linked sometimes to a variety of other social science disciplines (sociology, social policy or law, for example) but increasingly often separated from social science and identified instead with health professions because of social work’s characteristic as a practice-focused discipline. Its disciplinary location is not well established. Its position in national academic institutions is also rather marginal. For example, social work did not have a separate identity in the set of Subject Benchmark statements for UK degrees produced by the Quality Assurance Agency (www.qaa.ac.uk) over the past ten years and has been similarly joined with social policy and administration in the series of RAEs conducted by the Higher Education Funding Councils.
This matters because of the consequences of that lack of status for the development of social work both as an academic discipline and as a form of practice reflecting a set of important human values. As a result, social work is less in control of its own destiny than other disciplines in the social sciences or in health because its voice is often heard in amalgamation with others rather than in its own right and, most importantly, because social work is less able to secure the resources that are required to build the discipline. Central to a discipline’s strength is an extensive knowledge base resting on a substantial body of research evidence. The production of such a body of evidence requires resources both to develop research skills and knowledge in the academic community and to fund research programmes and projects. In practical terms, it requires the whole panoply of academic infrastructure including journals, conferences and seminars, Masters programmes, Ph.D. studentships and bursaries and research grants. However, the systems of allocation of resources in HEIs in the UK tend to be self-reinforcing, both for established disciplines and for universities with a research reputation. For example, as social work was not identified as a separate discipline by the Economic and Social Research Council until recently and is still not recognized by the British Academy, the allocation of funds for social work research has been less likely than for other disciplines. This is partly because such allocations are usually based upon peer review processes. As social work was not recognized, social work academics were less well represented in these review processes and so social work proposals were frequently judged by colleagues in other disciplines who may have been unfamiliar with the issues or methods suggested or with the individual proposers’ reputations. Moreover, because of the absence of recognition, it was not possible even to measure the outcomes of these processes such as the numbers of applications and the number of awards, which could provide the basis of a case for better treatment, as their status as social work applications could not be established.
A second problem for social work as a discipline, alongside the problem of recognition, was that the majority of social work departments were in universities established in or after 1992—ex-polytechnics in the main, often with limited track records of securing research grants from the major institutional funders and, in some cases, with a limited commitment to research. This, too, tends to be a circular process, as the RAE exemplifies. Departments and disciplines which were well established have received the majority of funds from each successive running of the RAE. Departments trying to develop their research capacity and expertise have always received much less because funding is awarded on the basis of past performance. So, a well funded department can invest in the staff and other resources to produce substantial outputs of research students and publications and to underpin further applications for research grants. Newer departments do not have such funds and so, as well as their lack of experience, they lack the resources to fund a major investment in research. As a result, successive rounds of the RAE have tended to institutionalize and, indeed, increase the gap both between established and newer universities and between established and newer departments within universities. Indeed, such a restructuring towards a two-tier division between research and teaching universities was one of the intentions of the policy (Stiles, 2002; Willmott, 2003). Both of these tendencies work against social work (Fisher and Marsh, 2003).
While social work has faced these major institutional difficulties, there were also, when the Strategy was being considered, a number of important foundation blocks for this next stage of development. First, as has been described, social work academics linked through SWEC had already been actively promoting social work research. The ESRC, following a strategic use of the findings of the ‘Theorising social work research’ seminar series, had already (by 2004) been persuaded of the need to examine the position of social work research and to support its growing identity in relation to both research grants and, more particularly, doctoral research training (Orme, 2003; Shaw et al., 2006).
Second, social work academics had key institutional support outside universities, particularly from the relatively newly established Social Care Institute for Excellence3 (SCIE), which had a core interest in developing the evidence base for social work and social care across the UK as a whole. SCIE had commissioned a review of the scope and support of social work and social care research funded by the ESRC (Shaw et al., 2004) and was funding a series of research reviews which highlighted the lack of available good-quality evidence for social work and social care practice. The support of SCIE was reinforced in Scotland by the Scottish Institute for Excellence in Social Work Education (SIESWE), which was also urging the case for social work to develop the knowledge on which better practice could be founded. Social work academics were key managers in both organizations. No equivalent bodies existed in Northern Ireland or Wales, but the Strategy was presented to and welcomed by the Social Care Research Advisory Group in Wales.
Third, the establishment of the new degree was raising the expectations of the quality of qualified social workers and bringing with it new discussions about the place of research and research literacy in social work education (Lyons, 2000). Fourth, the work undertaken by SWEC in the development of the new degree, including holding together the entire constituency of university departments across different interests and countries, had given SWEC both legitimacy and confidence to undertake a parallel piece of work in relation to social work research.
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Process |
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The process for producing the Strategy was discussed and debated at the Research Sub-committee. Certain elements were vital. The initial proposal not only laid out a process and a timescale, but also a number of key principles. These were stated at the outset in order to establish certain underlying values or to tackle head-on potential areas of conflict. Two crucial principles were agreed. First, it was agreed that the Strategy would be designed to support research in all HEIs and would seek to identify common interests as a basis for collaboration between universities rather than support an elitist approach based only on a small number of ‘centres of excellence’. The core argument in favour of this inclusive approach was that social work education should be strongly informed by evidence and that this would be best achieved by social work academics in all HEIs being close to, and preferably actively engaged in, applied research.
A second central principle was that the Strategy should be designed to operate across the four countries of the UK rather than being separately developed in each nation. While recognizing the reality of devolution within the UK and the importance of responding to the different context of the constituent countries, SWEC has taken the view that there are benefits in acting as a UK-wide body representing social work academics, such as in working to ensure at least the comparability and compatibility of qualifications in social work despite the different systems for qualifying and registration which have emerged. Similarly, SWEC agreed that the issues relating to research agendas would be best tackled on a UK-wide basis, allowing for comparison, learning from the experience of different countries and integration, where appropriate.
Another important element in the initial proposal was allowing a substantial period of time for the Strategy to emerge (see Table 1). The time taken between agreeing the process and the production of the Strategy was a year. There were two central reasons for this. The first was to ensure that the Strategy was soundly based on a review of the existing state of social work research. Three background papers (which form the basis for other articles in this issue of the British Journal of Social Work) were commissioned from members of the Sub-committee: on the nature and quality of social work research; on the capacity for social work research; and on governance and ethics. A fourth paper on resources for research was being written for another organization (Marsh et al., 2005) and its authors agreed that its findings could be used in the SWEC process. The second central reason for the length of time taken was to allow for sufficient consultation to secure widespread ownership of the Strategy within social work academic departments. A series of consultation events were held with all members of the Research Sub-committee, with a number of external stakeholders (interested government departments, other research funders including charities, employers, service users and carers, SCIE and SIESWE), and with the wider membership of SWEC through a day conference. The final document was also discussed and agreed by the full SWEC Committee. These consultations were held at different stages in the overall process to allow the development of ideas between stages.
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The process was managed by a small sub-group of the Research Sub-committee, comprising primarily the authors of the background papers, and chaired by the author of this article. Key contacts from SCIE and SIESWE were participating observers in this development group. Vital, if limited, funds were made available to support the consultation and production process by SWEC, SCIE and SWAP but much depended on the willingness of SWEC members’ individual HEIs to support their travel and other costs and to allow them the time to participate, particularly in the case of the development group. The real costs were usually borne by the individual academics working longer hours. None of the external organizations placed any unwelcome conditions on SWEC in return for providing financial and other support. SWAP provided administrative support for the consultation conference, Kings College London managed the printing process, Kings and SCIE helped to distribute hard copies of the Strategy and SWAP placed an electronic copy of the Strategy on their website to make it widely available. In most cases, this support was a product of overlapping interests.
The issue of the extent to which the development group should consult with and involve other interests was one that exercised us considerably. With limited funding and time being key factors, the decision taken was that ‘external’ consultation would be tightly focused and that no interest groups or interested organizations other than those of SCIE, SIESWE and SWAP would be actively involved in the development group’s work. After all, this was, we decided, a strategy for social work research in HEIs, and not for social work generally, social work employers, policy makers, service users or carers, or allied academic disciplines. Hence, we made the choice to hold limited consultations only but to attempt to take into account as we wrote the Strategy what we knew of the interests and perspectives of other parties as well as the shifting political context in which the Strategy was being written. Similarly, the document was written to our own constituency but with a wider audience in mind. We were aware that this decision to limit external involvement would be controversial and that it would have been desirable in some respects to be able to engage other stakeholders much more substantially in the development work.
What we did not know when we established the project was the extent to which parallel initiatives were also taking place which—fortuitously—strengthened our own work. Three key developments have been significant. First, the Department of Health in England had become conscious of the inadequacy of social care research capacity. This was partly because of the almost total absence of consideration of social care research in the Department’s strategy paper, Best Research for Best Health (Department of Health, 2006), despite its claim to be concerned with health and social care research. Partly as a consequence, the Department instigated a national seminar on ‘Social care research capacity’ in December 2005 (Department of Health and King’s College London, 2006), at which the findings of the SCIE-funded examination of the resourcing of social care research (Marsh et al., 2005) was reported. Subsequently, the Department commissioned SCIE to carry out a consultation on social care research capacity, the results of which are awaited as this is written. Second, the Scottish 21st Century Review of Social Work (Scottish Executive, 2005) placed significant emphasis on raising the quality of service provision through the development of a substantial evidence base and enhancing the capacity of staff to make critical use of it. Third, the ESRC (2006) was about to receive the Demographic Review of the UK Social Sciences, which highlighted the obstacles to developing research capacity faced by all applied subjects, and the particular problems facing the social work academy as a consequence of its size, age structure and patchy track record in research activity. This gave further impetus to the ESRC’s interest in supporting the development of social work research indicated above. These parallel developments gave evidence that our own initiative was timely, while our work meant that we were able to feed into these wider discussions a coherent view from the social work academic community.
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Key issues and resolutions |
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In preparing early drafts, a number of contentious matters emerged. Three particular areas caused substantial debate. First, there were some issues of definition, language and boundaries. Perhaps the most difficult issue to resolve was whether the focus of our paper was on social work or social care research. In policy developments in the UK, there have been divergent forces at work. In England, Wales and Northern Ireland, social work is usually perceived in social policy terms as a central element within the broader category of social care, although ‘social care’ here does not include substantial aspects of work with offenders, such as probation work. In Scotland, what are described as social work services include a wide range of provisions, including child and adult care, criminal justice and community work. In HEIs, there are few, if any, departments of social care, because social work is the recognized academic discipline. As social work academics, then, the majority instinct was to focus on social work, but it was recognized that writing exclusively about social work research would have political disadvantages in England, Wales and Northern Ireland. Moreover, central to the case we wanted to make for substantially increased funding was the argument that (except in Scotland) the evidence base gained through social work research underpinned the work of the much larger social care sector and that, therefore, investing in social work research would have much wider benefits for improving services. We settled finally on a formula that moved between talking about social work research, when the focus was on the activity of university social work departments, such as in the title of the Strategy, and social work and social care research, when we were focusing on the Strategy’s wider purpose.
We also had extended discussions about whether and how to define social work research in the Strategy. Defining the boundaries of any discipline is problematic, as there are always grey areas in which different disciplines overlap in focus, method and insight. In the UK, the debate about whether social work research was distinctive or unique in its subject matter, its values or its methods had been running for some years. It had been a central issue in the ‘Theorising social work research’ ESRC seminar series, referred to earlier, and it was currently the subject of a paper being prepared by Shaw (forthcoming) on the nature of social work research. Unless the discipline could make a convincing claim to uniqueness, it was argued, it would not be possible to establish social work research as an independent entity attracting its own funding for projects and students. It would also remain subject to the views of academics in other disciplines about how its quality and value should be judged when research proposals were reviewed or outputs assessed. However, to claim uniqueness without an adequate case could undermine our whole argument. An alternative strategy was adopted based on the assumption that a successful claim for independent status as a discipline did not depend so much on an unanswerable case for uniqueness as on the acceptance of the claim by other key players, both individual academics and academic institutions. Traditional disciplines had not had to argue their case for being unique but became established by custom and practice. We chose to adopt this path for social work. This meant making some claims about some key characteristics of social work research (without suggesting that social work was the only discipline with these strengths) and reinforcing the institutional definition of social work research adopted for the HEFCE RAE papers.
A second major issue which exercised our thinking was whether we should set an agenda or suggest priorities for the content of social work research. While the Strategy was written to our own constituency—social work academics—a vital part of its success would depend upon convincing other stakeholders of the importance of our concerns. Without increased funding and institutional recognition, we could only make very limited progress. So the appeal of the document had to be to that wider audience, who had to be persuaded—we believed—of the benefits of supporting social work research because it would address their own concerns. Part of being able to assert this case could have been to argue for a set of research priorities that would be recognized by these other stakeholders. However, as a matter of fundamental values, we did not believe that social work researchers alone should determine this agenda, but rather that it should be the outcome of negotiations between all interested parties: policy makers and politicians, employers and practitioners and, in particular, service users and carers. We had neither the time nor the resources for such a process of negotiation. We, therefore, decided to assert the purpose of the Strategy in broad terms as being to bring about maximum benefits for service improvement and to indicate some examples of major social issues to which we believed social work research could make a contribution—examples, not a priority list.
The third major debate concerned the issue of how best to develop research expertise. It was resolved, in part, by the first principle established at the outset of the process and discussed above. While the value position of being anti-elitist was not difficult to agree, the implications of that principle and its potential clash with the perceptions of research funders had to be worked out. Government policy for research over the past twenty years, exemplified and reinforced through the funding mechanisms based around successive RAEs, has focused on supporting a relatively small number of excellent research centres in a minority of universities (Willmott, 2003). While, in principle, the RAE has been a mechanism to reward any university department that can demonstrate high quality outputs and a strong research culture, in practice, the RAE has been used to channel government research funds increasingly intensively towards a small elite. The classic example of this came with the 2001 RAE, when the very success of HEIs in demonstrating the quality of their research led directly to a retrospective decision to reduce the range of ‘scores’ that would lead to funding. As the 2008 RAE approached, there was increasing scepticism amongst academics and others about the methodology and its outcomes (through which twenty-five HEIs out of over 160 received over 75 per cent of research funds (Universities and Colleges Union, undated)). Such a concentration of funding, which might have justification in disciplines in which very large investments are needed to build and equip research laboratories, is less appropriate in other disciplines, such as the social sciences. Here, the justifications for concentration would come from the supposed benefits resulting from clusters of expertise. Medicine, which has dominated the Department of Health’s thinking about research, is a discipline in which research hardware plays a significant part. The health research strategy, Best Research for Best Health (Department of Health, 2006), explicitly discusses the development of national research schools, with a clear implication that these would be in the form of a small number of centres of excellence. Social work as a research discipline, even in the strongest universities, is in a different and substantially weaker position. It is absent from the leading research universities measured in terms of funding and achieved a very modest number of the highest scores in RAE 2001. The process through which funding is allocated following successive RAEs could hardly have been better designed to make the progress of such practice-based disciplines difficult to achieve (ESRC, 2006). This, coupled with the small size and dispersal of social work academic groups, meant that we chose to design a Strategy aimed both to build up a level of research expertise across the board, in all social work groups or departments, and to create excellence—hence the decision to adopt a twin strategy of ‘levelling up’ and the creation of ‘networks of excellence’. This model also depended upon another feature which went contrary to the mechanism of the RAE: the creation of collaborative research arrangements between universities rather than competition. We were subsequently advised that the ability of SWEC to secure the agreement of academics to a collaborative project was seen as a major positive factor, as it went against policy makers’ and funders’ experience of academics’ and HEIs’ individualistic and competitive tendencies.
The fourth major issue to emerge during the preparation of the Strategy was the result of the work undertaken by Marsh et al. (2005) to quantify the resources required to provide an adequate evidence base for social care policy and practice. While it was no surprise to find that the level of funding for social work and social care research was substantially less than that for medicine, no one had previously made the attempt to quantify this or to produce comparative figures. The level of inequality in research funding between two services (the NHS and social care) constantly exhorted to work together was demonstrated to be immense. Only about 0.3 per cent of the total social care budget is invested in research and development, while 5.4 per cent of health expenditure is spent on R&D. A specific comparison between GPs and social workers showed that the annual R&D spend on a GP stood at well over twenty times that for a social worker. Marsh et al. used evidence from successive RAEs to demonstrate the impact of a strategic investment in research in general practice on the quality and quantity of research outputs as a basis for the argument for a similar strategic investment in social work and social care research. Having this inequity quantified provided a powerful basis for arguing the resource case in the Strategy, and clear leverage in discussions with government, and with the Department of Health in England in particular.
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Key dimensions: actions and targets |
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Through the production of background papers and the consultative processes described above, early drafts were produced. Following sections of the Strategy which set out its key arguments and principles, background and context—broadly speaking, the issues addressed above and in other papers in this issue—we had to determine our concrete aims and objectives. We agreed certain over-arching principles. First, this needed to be a long-term strategy. Even if we were suddenly given the level of resources that we were seeking, there was insufficient capacity to make immediate use of it. A long lead time would be needed to build up the body of researchers with the levels of skill required. For example, given that doctoral training takes several years, even when full-time, this would not be quick. We argued for the steady build-up of funds within the context of a strategy which looked ten to fifteen years ahead. As we wished the Strategy to reflect core government policy rather based on pleading a special case for social work, we adopted the timescale of the UK-wide Science and Innovation Investment Framework (Department for Education and Skills (DfES) et al., 2004), which set targets for R&D funding up to 2014, as our benchmark for social work research resources. For arguments about developing research capacity, we set even longer timescales. Second, we wanted to set concrete, measurable, ambitious but achievable aims and create specific actions that would enable us to move in that direction. We did not want a list of vague statements which would not help us to know what to do or how we would know if we achieved our aims. On the other hand, as was apparent throughout the process, we could not set detailed actions that would give us an itemized programme lasting several years. The context in which we were operating was moving too fast for us to tie ourselves into specific actions, but we needed a roadmap which would give us a sense of direction as well as guidance about how to respond to others’ initiatives.
We grouped the actions we proposed under four headings:
- ‘Resources’;
- ‘Capacity and capability’;
- ‘Recognition and governance’;
- ‘Visibility and impact’.
The major debate about resources concerned the target we should set. Should we link our aims to the comparison with health research, explicitly developed by Marsh et al. (2005), or should we choose a different comparator? Here, the discussion focused on the problems of tying ourselves only to comparisons with health. For example, to do so might also tie us to models of research which operated within a medical paradigm, while closer comparisons might be with other disciplines identified as ‘applied’ in the ESRC’s (2006) Demographic Review, such as education or business. For social workers interested in child-care issues, in particular, the link with education was both practically and symbolically important. Adopting the Science and Innovation Investment Framework (DfES et al., 2004), which, applied to the UK economy as a whole, seemed to offer a neutral solution.
Numerous issues were identified as requiring action to increase the capacity (size) and capability (skills) of the social work research workforce, not least how to embed these skills in practitioners and managers as well as academics. Most of these were relatively uncontroversial, even if difficult to realize, but one or two issues caused debate. One major issue was whether we should adopt a model in which it was assumed that, over time, all social work academics should be expected to be actively engaged in research. We knew from direct experience that many academics were not involved in research and this raised the question of whether they should be, or whether expertise in teaching could be achieved without it, such as by direct involvement in practice. In the end, we decided that our assumption should be that academics should have a direct research engagement. The clinching argument, in addition to the importance of all academics using a critical approach to research evidence in their teaching, was that social work lecturers needed not only to be able to tell students about research, but to model the process of underpinning their practice with evidence, if we were to produce trained practitioners with the skills in the critical application of research.
Recognition and governance were issues which did not raise particular controversies within the development group. There is widespread concern amongst researchers generally about the dead hand of the research governance framework designed to protect lay people against certain kinds of medical research but applied with little apparent thought to a range of other kinds of research activity. Agreeing an approach that focused on securing greater degrees of self-management for social work and social care research was not difficult.
The issue of visibility and impact, which concerned the public profile of social work research and the importance of ensuring that research findings would be reflected in policy and practice, emerged as a result of our consultation processes. In these, it became increasingly clear that external support from stakeholders who held major budgets would depend upon their being convinced that increased research would result in more effective (and/or more efficient) services. This whole emphasis on the applicability and application of research led to some disquiet. We considered the views of those who were afraid that it would undermine either more fundamental research that had no immediate outcome or research which developed a fundamental critique of policy or practice rather than offering solutions within the broad parameters of current approaches (Letherby and Bywaters, 2007). However, the significance of a strong emphasis on impact was held to outweigh these doubts.
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Reflections |
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The objective of this article has been to provide details of the process of developing a research strategy for social work in HEIs in the UK, in the hope that it provides some lessons for social work in other countries and for other disciplines, as well as illuminating some of the reasons behind the Strategy’s content. Although it is too early to know whether substantive changes in social work research will be achieved through or in line with the Strategy, it is worth reflecting on possible gains from undertaking this time-consuming piece of work.
First, the process of producing the Strategy has forced the social work community in higher education to confront a number a critical issues and to decide whether it wants to adopt a common position. This has provided the opportunity for debating the kinds of issues raised above and for reaching resolutions. The consultation processes have also brought the social work research community in higher education into direct conversation with policy makers, research funders, research users and other interested stakeholders, thereby raising its profile and creating the basis for on-going discussions.
Second, the publication of the Strategy has already produced some concrete outcomes. Higher education social work has been able to articulate a consensus position in responding to government consultations, government-inspired consultations on social care research capacity and quangos’ concerns to improve their ability to build social work research capacity. The review of the social care workforce in England, reported as Options for Excellence (Department for Education and Skills and Department of Health, 2006), quoted verbatim the opening words of the Strategy as one of its longer-term aims. The Department of Health in England has commissioned the Social Care Institute for Excellence (working with SIESWE) to conduct a consultation on social care research capacity, with the Strategy being adopted as one of the three key background documents. The ESRC has consulted closely with the social work education community in the aftermath of the Strategy about how it can best support the development of social work research capacity and has discussed with SWEC representatives a set of promising proposals. It has also awarded a competitive research and development grant to applicants from the Strategy group, who used the analysis and prescription of the Strategy as a significant argument.
Some of these outcomes might have occurred without the Strategy but it has undoubtedly had an impact, strengthened our hand and provided a sense of direction to the constituency. Writing only six months into the implement after the Strategy was approved, these appear to be a positive set of outcomes. The hardest aspect to crack is the need for a very substantial increase in research funding and it remains to be seen—in a more difficult public expenditure climate than at any time in the last seven years—whether movement can be achieved on this. The outcomes of other proposals, such as the importance of social work academics taking a higher profile in public debate, the approval of appropriate national systems of ethical scrutiny for social work research and whether it will be possible to create effective and viable Networks of Excellence, remain to be seen.
Finally, the lack of explicit consideration of examples and ideas from other countries in the Strategy’s development is a significant weakness. While many, and probably increasing, individual connections are seen between social work researchers in different parts of the world, much remains to be done to create effective international collaborations or global institutions for social work research. The European Society of Cardiology (ESC) has recently negotiated with the European Commission to produce the ‘Heart plan for Europe’, based on proposals put forward by the ESC. A real marker of success for a strategy such as this would be when social workers, acting concertedly across national boundaries, are able to secure international action on substantial social issues, based on the evidence produced by social work research.
Accepted: May 1, 2007
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1. The Economic and Social Research Council funds research and training in social and economic issues. It is an independent organization, established by Royal Charter, but receives most of its funding through the Government’s Office of Science and Innovation. Its annual budget of more than £100 million funds over 2,500 researchers in academic institutions and policy research institutes throughout the UK, making it the largest single funder of social science research (www.esrcsocietytoday.ac.uk/ESRCInfoCentre/about/).
2. The Research Assessment Exercise is a national process for assessing the quality and quantity of research activity in higher education in the UK. The RAE website describes this as follows: ‘The main purpose of the Research Assessment Exercise (RAE) is to enable the higher education funding bodies to distribute public funds for research selectively on the basis of quality. Institutions conducting the best research receive a larger proportion of the available grant so that the infrastructure for the top level of research in the UK is protected and developed. The RAE assesses the quality of research in universities and colleges in the UK. It has take place every five years or so for the last two decades. Around £5 billion of research funds were distributed in response to the results of the 2001 RAE’ (http://195.194.167.103/AboutUs/).
3. The Social Care Institute for Excellence describes itself as ‘part of the Government’s drive to improve social care. We are an independent registered charity, governed by a board of 13 trustees. Our role is to develop and promote knowledge about good practice in social care. There are many examples of good practice in social care, but they are often localized and seldom widely applied. By making knowledge about good practice readily available to the sector, SCIE’s work will contribute to good service delivery and positive practice change’ (www.scie.org.uk/about/index.asp).
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