Article Review

The following article reviews the Chapter ‘The Role of School Social Worker’ by Robert Constable in the book School Social Work
Practice, Policy, and Research (7^th Ed). 2009. Lyceum Books

The teachers should learn, unlearn and reproduce themselves as teachers are the future society builders (Thulasidasan, 2011). If this fails then there is a need for someone to intervene. Is it the Social Workers?

School Social Work Association of America (2005) defines School Social Work as the specialized area of Practice within the Social Work profession. This could be linked to the Cognitive development proposed by Jean Piaget as children’s pre-operational and concrete operational phases play a very crucial role and school is their second home.

National Association of Social Workers (2002) defines it as the Social work services provided in the setting of an educational agency by credentialed or licensed school social workers. This specialty in social work is oriented toward helping students make satisfactory adjustments and coordinating and influencing the efforts of the school, the family, and the community to achieve this goal.

Constable says Schools are becoming the main public institution for social development. Schools are working to include those previously excluded from the opportunity of education. This argument suits to the present condition after the implementation of RTE in India.

Constable argues that School social workers practice in the most vulnerable parts of the educational process, and so their roles can be as complex as the worlds they deal with. The SSW helps the students in the domains of dropout; psychological issues, attendance, bullying and school violence and they also help them to improve their skills and capabilities.

Social work in simple terms is helping oneself to help themselves and it also empowers the individual per se. Hence it can’t be seen as a different entity in the education realm.

The basic focus of the school social worker is the constellation of teacher, parent, and child. The social worker relates to and work with all aspects of the child’s situation, but the basic skill underlying all of this is assessment, a systematic way of understanding and communicating what is happening and what is possible the author asserts.

SSW cannot work as a single entity but needs the support of head teacher, class teacher and parents to resolve an issue of a child. The knowledge of Child Psychology helps a SSW a lot.

The school also brings in lot of crisis as it involves multitude of problems coupled with diversity. Hence there is an opportunity under the wraps of the crisis!

The chapter also outlines the Historical evolution of School Social Work accompanied with few case studies. The author has given a glimpse on the issues of Children with Special Needs (Children with Disabilities)

As the world is moving towards the inclusion, rights based approach the role of SSW is indispensible as it is quite impossible for a teacher to attend all issues of the class.

More over the blogger feels a Government initiative to place social workers in schools will also give employment opportunities to social workers.

Education had moved from a status of necessity to commodity in the order of the day and the schools must appoint SSW and the assassination of Ms.Uma Maheswari, a school teacher in a School in Chennai by 9^th standard student warrants immediate action.