ABSTRACT
TRAINING for social work, after a period of relative neglect from 1910 until towards the end of the Second World War, has become a topic of general importance to social workers and some interest for those outside the profession. It has been a continuing and critical concern of the Association of Psychiatric Social Workers since its foundation. The Association has always based membership on a training qualification and is in this unlike other professional social work associations, with the exception of the Institute of Almoners. Unlike all the other Associations it has attempted to maintain the quality of training both in regard to the selection of entrants to the profession and also to the standards of the university courses they followed. Indeed it is largely in terms of a training policy that the Association is judged by critics and friends alike. How has the Association defined its training problems and what has it done about them ? An answer to this question has obvious importance for a study of psychiatric social work, but its significance is much wider. Social workers and others are still asking what should be the content, methods and objectives of training, whilst those outside social work still wish to know what distinguishes the trained from the untrained, in theory and in practice.
