The Latest Bulletin

Now available! The Social Worker’s Practice Manual. Neil’s latest publication is not a textbook; it is a hands-on manual that distils his decades of experience in social work. Click here for more information and a link to order your copy. Are you a social worker who uses Facebook? If so, why not join Neil’s Social Work Focus group? A group for discussion, support, learning and sharing. Just click here.

Communication is such a central part of our lives that we tend to take it for granted, it fades into the background, like the wallpaper. That is perfectly normal, but it can also be problematic. Consider language, for example. We largely live our lives through language. Much of our work is through language; we form relationships through language; we fall out through language. Much of our leisure time is enjoyed through language. Imagine, for example, trying to go for, say, a week without using language. We wouldn’t get very far would we? (not least because we tend to think through the medium of language). But the way we use language can be problematic. Misunderstandings are very common, sometimes with minor…

By Gerry Skelton It has been a personal and professional contention for most of my social work career (as practitioner and lecturer) that homelessness has been something of a taboo in social work education, training and practice. Homelessness is an increasing problem, with an average of 18-19.000 households presenting as homeless annually in Northern Ireland and almost doubling in this millennium. So much of what causes or results from homelessness is obviously rooted in what is surely the general reason d’être of social work and what it seeks to alleviate. This includes interpersonal violence, abuse, relationship breakdown, mental illness, self-harm, addiction and leaving care. Unfortunately more often than not, any focus on homelessness is generally subsumed in academia within the…

In 2015, we (British Psychological Society) issued our Call to Action and Briefing Paper on Work Capability Assessment Reform. This was the start of a prolonged campaign to push for end to end reform and better use of psychological evidence to develop appropriate assessments and training for job coaches, as well as greater recognition that returning to work or gaining employment is not always an appropriate end goal for individuals with mental health conditions and disabilities.Clearly a one size fits all approach is not fit for purpose. This also resulted in a considerable amount of joint activity with the other main psychological therapy organisations (the British Association of Counselling and Psychotherapy, the UK Council for Psychotherapists, and the British Association for Behavioural…

Lenny takes his pop-up barbershop to dementia care homes, providing a much-needed service to the men who live there. But Lenny does more than cut their hair: he unlocks their emotional memories by recreating the barbershop experience of their youth, with Dean Martin on the jukebox and a spray of lemon cologne in the air. "He doesn't rush you and he makes you feel so at home," says Sidney, 92. Click here to read more

Tens of thousands of severely disabled and ill claimants are set to receive backdated payments of up to £20,000 after being wrongly underpaid for years by social security officials, the government spending watchdog has revealed. An estimated 70,000 claimants were underpaid about £340m between 2011 and 2014 after being transferred from older benefits on to employment and support allowance (ESA) during a government overhaul of incapacity benefits, the National Audit Office (NAO) said. The error occurred when officials at the Department for Work and Pensions (DWP) failed to follow their own legal guidelines governing the transfer process, meaning that in many cases they failed to properly check claimants’ full entitlements. Click here to read more