Identifying communicative expertise in child and family social work supervision: interdisciplinary and international perspectives

At their best, social workers support children and their families to overcome the biggest challenges in their lives, but in order to do this, social workers need to be effectively supported by their organisation, for example through supervision. Our understanding of what makes a good supervision meeting is still underdeveloped and is rarely based on real examples of what actually happens.

This Ideas Exchange will develop an international and interdisciplinary network, focusing on identifying communicative expertise in supervision meetings between children’s social workers and their managers.

We will host a one-day workshop at Bristol which brings together senior social workers from local authority practice with early career and senior academics from conversation analysis, education and drama. The workshop will have the following objectives:

•To share different perspectives on audio recordings of real supervision meetings
•To explore methods of using anonymised recorded materials for training social workers
•To assess potential for collaboration across the group

At the end of the workshop, we aim to have identified plans for future collaborations such as writing plans, developing training materials and grant applications for future research.