Probation placements and social work education: Questions of quality

Abstract

Using student placement evaluations this article examines the apparent paradox that the Probation Service is able to provide some of the best social work placements, despite the widely held belief that the Service may be losing its social work identity by developing a punitive orientation. The article locates and explores this issue of placement quality in a wider discourse around ‘relevance’ and ‘focus’ which has come to dominate Probation practice. The prescriptive, ‘technocratic’ tendency emerging from this discourse, is argued to partly explain the success of placements in Probation. However, in the view of the authors, it poses a deeper threat which is of relevance not only to the social work identity of the Probation Service, but to social work in general.