ABSTRACT
In Chapter 2 the pre-business era was explored as a precursor to considering the establishing of the social work business under Conservative governments in the 1980s and 1990s (see Chs 3 and 4), before moving on to the modernisation of the business under New Labour (see Ch. 5). In the pre-business era, the emergence of the bureauprofessional regime, following the implementation of the Seebohm Report (Cmnd. 3703 1968), was accompanied by the placement of social work education within a validation framework. A quango, the Central Council for the Education and Training of Social Workers (CCETSW), developed this framework following its founding in 1971. For much of the 1970s and 1980s, the framework that was in place was by today’s standards permissive, with social work education enjoying an academic variant of ‘professional self-regulation’ (Jones 1999:37). CCETSW accredited educational programmes, and reviewed them every five years on the basis of their academic and practice coherence, but there was wide variation in the orientations of particular courses, from the most traditional psychodynamic casework to radical social work. However, in the 1980s and 1990s, in parallel with the establishing of the social work business, CCETSW instituted a process of reform in social work education, which culminated in the restructuring of the arrangements for providing social work programmes and the reshaping of their content. As a result of the reform process, a significant measure of academic self-regulation was replaced by external regulation. This consolidation of external authority over social work education reinforced, and served as another avenue for, the establishment of the social work business. The process was extended following the election in 1997 of the New Labour government which, as part of its modernisation agenda, charged the Training Organisation for the Personal Social Services and the General Social Care Council with the responsibility for setting standards and monitoring the
arrangements for providing social work education (see Ch. 5). This chapter analyses this series of changes in the context of their contribution to the consolidation of the social work business.
