Introduction

The mandatory requirement for service-user and carer involvement in social work education with government funding to support this involvement for qualifying and post qualifying training, established an international precedent in 2002 (Branfield, 2009). Shaping Our Lives, a national service-user led organisation that has undertaken a wide range of research to promote the meaningful involvement of people in very diverse contexts, became a key partner in establishing the PowerUs network (see Chapter 2 – Heule, Knutagård and Arne Kristiansen) and initiating gap-mending practices in the UK. This chapter explores how PowerUs, in partnership with Shaping Our Lives, created a new direction for service users and carers to positively and critically impact social work education.

For a long time, the UK was the leader in service-user and carer involvement in professional social work education. Also, for a long time in the UK there seemed to be only one model for such involvement. More recently what we have learned is that, as is so often the case, it is only by combining the best of different international experience and learning that we are likely to develop the most effective approaches to this involvement. For this reason, the UK is a helpful, if sometimes uneven, case study of and starting point for understanding user involvement in professional learning and qualification.

There was talk of ‘listening’ to service users in UK social work from the 1970s onwards. The statutory reforms that took place and led to the creation of social services departments in 1971 made reference to participation: involving and including the perspectives of service users. The well-known text The Client Speaks, published in 1970 (Mayer and Timms, 1970), has often been taken to represent the real beginnings of such interest in user involvement, but in fact it was more concerned with using service users as a data source in research rather than listening to or involving them, and then it chose arbitrarily to leave out BAME (Black, Asian and Minority Ethnic) service users as ‘immigrants’ (Beresford and Croft, 1987).

It was really from the 1980s, with the emergence of the disabled people’s, psychiatric system survivors’ (the term ‘survivors’ is commonly used in the UK by people who have used psychiatry or mental health services) and other service-user movements, that pressure began to develop for user (and carer) involvement in social work education.