Legal, Social and Attitudinal Changes: An Exploration of Lesbian and Gay Issues in a Training Programme for Social Workers in Fostering and Adoption

Abstract

Within a widely evolving political, social and legal climate, significant changes have taken place in the last 10 years in relation to lesbians and gay men. This has presented social workers and social work teams with new challenges in ensuring their practice adheres to recent legislation, government policy and guidance. In order to address these issues a local authority approached the authors to commission a training programme to increase awareness of lesbian and gay issues in a fostering and adoption context for social work practitioners and managers. This paper presents an outline of this one‐day training programme and considers how effective one‐day training courses can be in bringing about changes in attitudes and skills in relation to this complex area of practice.

Keywords:

• Sexuality
• Fostering
• Adoption
• Training
• Evaluation
• Lesbian
• Gay
• Homophobia

Acknowledgements

The authors would like to thank the reviewers for their helpful comments on an earlier draft. An earlier version of this article first appeared in Community Care on 16–22 November 2006 (Cocker & Dugmore, 2006).

Notes

1. ‘Index of Attitudes towards Homosexuals’ (IAH), adapted from Hudson & Ricketts (1980). This instrument has been used in a number of studies undertaken with social workers and social work students in other countries and is widely held to be both reliable and valid as a research tool (e.g. Wisniewski & Tooney, 1987; Berkman & Zingberg, 1997; Lim & Johnson, 2001; Brownlee et al., 2005; Camilleri & Ryan, 2006). As a result of undertaking this study, the authors intend replicating this with social work degree students on a much larger scale, tracking attitudinal change towards lesbian and gay issues in social work. Some work in this area has taken place in other countries but not within the UK. Undertaking such a study would contribute to the emerging research evidence concerning how the social work profession works effectively with lesbians and gay men.