Teaching Partnerships
What are Teaching Partnerships?
The Department for Education introduced Teaching Partnerships to help improve the overall quality of practice, learning and Continuing Professional Development (CPD) amongst trainee and practicing social workers.
Funded by the government, Teaching Partnerships have been created to develop and support high standards of work and education by building stronger links between Higher Education Institutions (HEIs) and employers (Local Authorities). The Partnerships involve a highly collaborative relationship, with the curriculum being jointly developed, delivered and owned.
Students within the partnerships benefit from a curriculum that is relevant to and informed by social work practice. This equips them to be good social workers going forward. They also benefit from practical statutory placements.
Meanwhile, fully qualified social workers get access to many more CPD opportunities and have the opportunity to share best practice via the Partnership structure.
In Yorkshire and Humber there are now four Teaching Partnerships, making us the largest region of Teaching Partnerships nationally.
The Humber Social Work Teaching Partnership brings together North Lincolnshire Council, Hull City Council, East Riding of Yorkshire Council, North East Lincolnshire Council, University of Hull, NAViGO, Focus and the University of Lincoln.
Whilst the partnership is not currently a DfE funded teaching partnership we are working together to ensure that students:
- Choose to have a long term career in social work
- Choose to study and then stay in the Humber area; and
- Develop the skills and attributes to deliver an outstanding service to children, adults and families.
You can follow them on Twitter.
The Leeds and Wakefield Teaching Partnership has been set up to build on strong partnerships and promote excellence in the collaborative delivery of social work education between Universities and their partners. This new approach will lead the way for social work education and guarantee high quality statutory placements for students. The TP comprises six organisations:
- Leeds City Council children’s social work service
- Leeds City Council adult’s social work service
- Wakefield Council children’s social work service
- Wakefield Council adult’s social work service
- The University of Leeds
- Leeds Beckett University
Its aims are to:
- Improve recruitment, selection and training of student social workers.
- Ensure social work graduates are ready for employment, with the skills and experience needed to contribute to a more stable and resilient workforce.
- Develop enhanced and formalised opportunities for academics and practitioners to work together and learn from each other.
- Improve retention of social work staff within the field locally.
More information can be found on their dedicated website, or by following them on Twitter.
The Yorkshire Urban and Rural Teaching Partnership bring together four Yorkshire local authorities and two universities; Calderdale Council, Kirklees Council, City of York Council and North Yorkshire County Council are working closely with the University of Huddersfield and the University of York to deliver ambitious plans for the education and ongoing development of the Social Work workforce.
The Teaching Partnership’s plans includes
- Ensuring that people with lived experience and social work practitioners have a greater role in shaping and influencing social work education and training;
- Delivering high quality practice learning placements for all students with opportunities to undertake statutory social work with local employers;
- Delivering a CPD programme that offers practitioners opportunities to develop leadership an management competencies and the skills required for research informed practice;
- Aligning academic research with the needs faced by frontline practitioners;
- Supporting academics to spend time in practice; and
- Developing new approaches to workforce planning to help improve recruitment and retention.
For more information about the partnership go to their website www.inspiringsocialwork.org and you can follow them on Twitter.
The South Yorkshire Teaching Partnership (SYTP) brings together the University of Sheffield, Sheffield City Council, Barnsley Metropolitan Borough Council, Rotherham Metropolitan Borough Council, Doncaster Council, Doncaster Children’s Services Trust and Lincolnshire County Council.
Now in its third year of delivery, SYTP is testing and refining new and innovative approaches to delivering high quality training for social work students and qualified practitioners. Working together, SYTP deliver high quality training for social work students and qualified social workers in order to help them to develop the skills they need to work effectively in front line statutory services.
More information can be found on their dedicated website. You can also follow them on Twitter.