About Us

Now is the time for the profession to take control of its own destiny and by so doing, improve the lives of the people it exists to serve. We are The College of Social Work. Join us.

We are the professional College of Social Work

Like colleges for other professions, our role is to:

• Hold the standards for the profession and support and enable our members to meet those standards
• Be the voice of the profession to policy makers and the media, ensuring that our members speak up for the profession
• Be led by and accountable to our members – the profession
  We do this in order to improve the outcomes for the people served by our profession.

In our first year of operations, we will do this by:

• Developing the Professional Capabilities Framework and other agreed professional standards with our members
• Providing a range of services to enable our members to keep up to date and share knowledge and practice dilemmas (including knowledge at the college, mentoring, online cpd portfolio, access to online journals, communities of practice, magazine)
• Influencing the media and policy makers though the work done by our communities of interest and faculties and our policy development group, ensuring that it is our members who speak for the profession
• Having a democratically elected Board and Professional Assembly to lead and develop the College
• Supporting our members as professionals (professional indemnity insurance, and public liability insurance for self employed)

We are not a trade union or an association that provides representation and advice to members; that is a different role and we encourage our members to join a trade union or professional association of their choice to obtain this advice and representation.  By not providing this service, we have kept our membership subscriptions low. 

In most professions, the approach is to have a regulator (currently the GSCC and passing to the HPC in summer 2012), a College to uphold standards and an association and/or trade union(s) to provide advice and representation for the profession. Social work has developed rather differently, with the GSCC being both the regulator and holding some professionals standards. As a Government body the GSCC has been hugely influenced by the state. With the move to a separate regulator and College, the independence of professional standards from Government intervention is assured enabling the profession itself to develop and enforce its own standards.