Introduction

Given the potentially ambitious scope of the title, this is essentially a personal perspective. It draws on my experiences as: a student on a postgraduate child care officer course in 1962; a child and family and then a generalist ‘patch’ social worker; a social work lecturer and researcher; a board member of the General Social Care Council (GSCC); and in the voluntary sector. References to key texts are woven into a commentary on the changing views between the 1950s and the late 2010s about necessary knowledge for social workers in the early stages of their career. Detailed knowledge needed for more specialist and supervisory roles is beyond the scope of this chapter.

In academic curriculum terms, social work, like public and social policy, law and education, is an applied social science discipline that, over time, has developed its own knowledge base, adding in insights from economics, social history, ethics, sociology, medicine and health sciences, psychology, criminology, demography and management. In broad terms, the areas of knowledge come under the overlapping areas of:

• social science disciplines (the socio-political/legal context);

• understanding human development and relationships (the internal/ relational world);

• theories, approaches and methods for social work practice.

These have to be brought together in response to the social worker's need for an understanding of relationships (within families and communities, with adults and children in need of services and with professionals). In one of the first UK articles addressing this question the founding editor of the British Journal of Social Work, Olive Stevenson (1971, pp 225–37), invited the reader ‘to think in terms of “frames of reference” for understanding and helping people in difficulty. Such frames of reference overlap, complement each other and, at times, conflict.’

At the start of the period explored in this volume, knowledge for practice came mainly from the first two areas, but over time the research base and published literature on the third has greatly expanded. This chapter summarises the early social sciences-dominated phase up to the 1960s before exploring these three ‘frames of reference’ after 1970, when, with the expansion of schools of social work, the balance shifted.