Equity and Inclusion for Social Work Students with Disabilities: A Scoping Review

ABSTRACT

Social work programs have progressed in ensuring equal access for qualified students with disabilities. Yet, schools of social work and their faculty have often struggled to fully include and comfortably balance the rights of students with disabilities and the gate-keeping role that rests with them to ensure that trained social workers are suitable for professional practice. In this scoping review we identify and synthesize research regarding social work education’s proposed and implemented response to students with disabilities. We examine, within 34 published papers from 1990 to the present, the opportunities and challenges of both proactive and reactive responses for accessibility; identify theories, frameworks and tools developed as guidance to program support and gatekeeping; and provide a report of students with disabilities about the experience of social work education. Addressing disability frequently seems to be a low program priority, and the literature suggests that neither students nor faculty feel fully confident of program capacity to meet the inherent challenges.

KEYWORDS:

• Social work education
• disabilities
• inclusion
• student experiences
• gatekeeping

Disclosure statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the author(s).