In my regular column this month I thought I might explore some of the achievements of our national Association for child and youth care educators here in Ireland called the Irish Association of Social Care Educators. Our Association was founded in the latter part of the 1990’s and has consistently provided a wonderful opportunity for us Educators to get together on a regular basis and network on best educational practice within our Institutions. We have grown to include eleven colleges around the country and we are negotiating access for other providers in the coming months. I am now in my fourth term of office as President of that Association and one of our stated agendas is to become more involved in political lobbying — hence this particular article.

In the Beginning
All of our work, development and planning in education and training is taking place in a period of unheralded change (and confusion) in the Irish social care landscape with many competing interests and agendas. Qualifications are being viewed closely and the Joint Committee (2003) notes, “It is recommended that initially the minimum standard for accreditation as a Social Care Professional be equivalent to HETAC/DIT Diploma level. All training for extant non professionally qualified staff should be benchmarked against this standard so that there is a consistent standard across all the professional membership”. Our Association will have a major part to play in this redevelopment as we provide third-level education for the field.

It is unfortunate that the last major national report by the National Council of Educational Awards was published over a decade ago in 1992 and a new report which many of us spent months preparing has yet to see the light of day despite the fact that we completed our input in 2001. In the absence of this crucial report, it has been noted that there is a demand for four main social care/child and youth care student pathways to become a Social Care Professional.  

• School leaver

• Other qualifications seeking credit for prior learning

• Experienced workers with no formal qualification

• Persons entering the profession as mature students with flexible training methods to accommodate same.

Thus, an agenda has been laid out for us.

One of our national reports, that of the Joint Committee (2003) viewed the North American landscape and has recommended that programmes include:

• Standards of knowledge

• Standards of skill and practice competence

• Standards of ethics and values and self-development

• Standards of integration of knowledge, skill and ethics to achieve professional status.

What the Association has achieved
The Irish are a nation that best celebrates our achievers when they have either left our country (I can think here immediately of James Joyce and Oscar Wilde) or are dead (Brendan Behan). So, let me mention positive developments whilst we are all around to enjoy them and point to some challenges for us.

1. The various Colleges have provided education and training of social care students from Certificate to now PhD status since the early 1980’s and there is very considerable expertise on our academic course boards with over 150 lecturers contributing on a daily basis. These course boards include practitioners and graduates with front line and supervisory experience.

2. The Colleges have been to the forefront in the politicisation of social care in this country hosting and co-hosting seminars, workshops and conferences on social care along with our colleagues in the Health Boards, the voluntary sector and the practitioner Associations. We have been involved on national committees planning in a co-operative and partnership model.

3. Publication of practicum guidelines for social care students across all the college sites which has proved invaluable. In particular, these guidelines are changed on an annual basis and we have established a sub group specifically to view practica.

4. Representation on national radio and tv airwaves and in quality broadsheets on a range of social care issues.

5. Arrangement of 3 national conferences with representation (workshops/papers) from students, lecturers, practitioners, managers, government Depts and policy persons.

6. Work in progress on the first textbook for Irish students with some twenty chapters from our partners in all of the college member sites (with a publication date of early 2005).

Challenges for the Association
We could look at the role of the IASCE in continued advocacy, promoting the field and the social care profession through more diverse means than in the past. We could further raise the profile of the Colleges and social care practice in a more general context. We should continue to explore opportunities for networking and relationship building with other national organizations and sectors. One of the two practice Associations, Irish Association of Care Workers, which has been a voice for practitioners since the early 1970’s has held a crisis meeting with its membership this week to discuss its very existence. In our own Association, there is no room for complacency.

I feel that the Irish Association of Social Care Educators could identify strengths and weaknesses of the various education and training models that are used in other systems (KSS, DACUM, UMBRELLA to name but a few), with a particular emphasis on the suitability and transferability of such models to the Irish social care experience. As I write this, Thom Garfat and I are putting the finishing touches to a model we are co-developing which we are calling the EirCan model.

The Irish Association of Social Care Educators could explore theories and concepts, then, that are unique to the Irish social care experience and derive core competencies for those areas that have yet to be explored in Irish contexts, e.g. standards of practice for social care supervisors, managers and academics.

The Irish Association of Social Care Educators could more forcefully demonstrate to our students that we, as Faculty, are prepared to examine ourselves and our capacity to change. We have noted that our students sometimes find the national Associations inaccessible and we need to remedy this. The development of an excellent website by Dr Perry Share of the Institute of Technology at Sligo will go a considerable distance to achieving this goal for us.

The Irish Association of Social Care Educators could create a positive and sustained environment to promote future voices and leaders for our field. I see this happening, for example, at our annual conference where we hold parallel sessions with students, practitioners and academics/lecturers and then we could come together in a main forum to discuss deliberations of the sub-groups.

Currently, neither supervisors nor our students receive formal payment whilst on practica which is not the case for social work supervisors of social work students. We rely on the goodwill of our graduates, but this will not continue forever and has been raised for discussion with me several times over the past couple of years. It is unclear whether our Association should take the lead on this or whether we should kick it back to the Departments of Education and Science and Health and Children.

What are we to do about generic versus specialised education/training (discussed in the 1992 NCEA Report). This is particularly thorny but will become a major focus of attention in the coming decade as student numbers start to fall from the record highs of the past three years where we now have over 2500 students registered on our courses and a sowing down of full-time employment opportunities.

Finally, Statutory registration (date and representation?) and Certification (IASCE involvement?) for social care practitioners are on the cards for the near future and it seems to me that the Association could have a great deal to contribute on this.

Concluding commentary
Our Association is one of the few examples of an established (but youthful) tradition of co-operation right across the educational sector. There are many members with seemingly unlimited energy and the Association is working in close partnership with our colleagues in practice and supervisory management. Because we live in the Internet age, our website and social care gateway have been redeveloped these past few months and crucially at our last meeting we agreed three decision making structures within the Association that members will follow to effect uniformity for our students and graduates. Now, that’s something to celebrate. Most of all, perhaps, to bring this back to child and youth care — there is a sense of relationship and meaning making between our members which makes attending and participating at our meetings an engaging experience.