European Perspectives on Social Work: Models of Education and Professional Roles. A Briefing Paper
Comparative research undertaken by the Thomas Coram Research Unit found that social workers in England have more responsibility and a wider remit than many of their continental European counterparts. 
 
Social workers in England have responsibility for all aspects of case management and direct contact with families, but in much of continental Europe these responsibilities are split between several different highly-trained professionals. 
 
In England, most direct work with children and families is undertaken by support staff, many of whom have no specialist qualifications. In Denmark, Germany and France, most of this work is undertaken by professionals highly qualified in therapeutic and direct work, working alongside social workers. 
 
The report’s authors, Dr Janet Boddy and Professor June Statham, called for a fundamental reassessment of what social workers can and should be expected to do.
A Phenomenological Study into the Place of Consultation in the Work of Staff in Children’s Homes: How much is it an organisational construction?
Residential work with young people is a complex and difficult job. CAMHS practitioners provide consultation support to staff teams in children’s homes. The study investigated the phenomenon of CAMHS consultation to residential staff within the context of a local authority setting. Focus groups were convened to gather data regarding how staff members understood consultation in the context of a local authority setting from four hierarchical levels within residential services. Interpretative Phenomenological Analysis was utilised to analyse the data into themes. A number of significant contextual themes emerged: the importance that staff members attach to maintaining and preserving relationships with their colleagues; the unclear and complex context of the work; and the sense of powerlessness that they experience. It is argued that these themes represent a culture that makes it difficult for members of staff to engage in the process of consultation, especially when focussed on staff relationships. The likely impact on the consultation process is discussed and some considerations for the clinical implications are suggested.
Strategy and Manipulation in Medieval Elections
There are many goals in developing electoral protocols, including a desire for a system which is transparent, in that it is clear what the rule or procedure to follow is; nonmanipulable, in that it is not in a person’s best interest to misrepresent their preferences; honest, in the sense that it elects the ‘right’ candidate; and not open to strategizing, i.e., bribery or collusion. However, these desiderata are in tension with each other: Often, transparent electoral procedures are the least strategy resistant, and many honest procedures encourage manipulation. Thus a balance between these different goals must be sought. In modern times, since the seminal result on vote manipulation, the Gibbard-Satterthwaite Theorem [5, 6], much attention has been devoted to developing voting rules where manipulation is never in the best interest of the voters [4] or which are computationally too complex for the average bounded agent to be able to manipulate [1]. This focus on computational aspects of electoral methods is one of the hallmarks of modern studies on voting. But pursuit of these goals is not restricted to modern times: Those participating in elections in the Middle Ages also sought transparency, non-manipulability, honesty, and strategyproofness in so far as these properties can be consistently expressed in a single procedure. However, given the lack of computational sophistication in the Middle Ages, alternate approaches were needed in order to promote honesty, discourage strategizing, etc. These approaches can be classified as either external (constraints introduced outside of the electoral procedure, such as incentives for coming to consensus quickly) or internal (constraints introduced within the electoral procedure, such as voting rules which cannot be manipulated without adverse effects, or which are too difficult for the average bounded agent to manipulate). Surveying examples of both approaches in the context of medieval ecclesiastical and secular elections provides an interesting comparison to modern electoral procedures. Elections in the Middle Ages were used for the same reasons that they are today: To select suitable candidate(s) for a particular office, duty, or obligation. However, it is important to note that the term electio was used in the Middle Ages in a broader sense than our modern ‘election’. Its primary sense was ‘selection’ or ‘choice’, and only secondarily ‘election’ in the modern sense. Thus, many records which purportedly discuss elections are not discussing elections of the type which interests us. We can identify four categories of medieval electoral processes: (1) Election by an external authority having no direct interest in the election; (2) Indirect election, where electors name other electors who then select or elect the officials; (3) Election by lot; and (4) Election by ballot. Elections of the first and third types are generally computationally uninteresting; the first type corresponds to dictatorial voting rules, and the third type collapses to probability theory. In general, interesting voting methods are found only in the fourth type, election by ballot, though they can also occur in indirect election.