Does reflective supervision have a future in English local authority child and family social work?

Introduction

Supervision is fundamental to the social work profession. Good supervision is said to be one of the most important factors in achieving positive outcomes for children and families, and plays a key role in development and retention. And yet, despite the high value placed upon it, the debate around local authority supervision has for many years been characterised in England by a sense of pessimism. Through surveys and other methods, researchers have repeatedly found either that local authority social workers do not receive supervision regularly enough or the supervision they do receive is dominated by management accountability to the exclusion of almost everything else. It has been suggested that reflective supervision can provide a solution to these problems, offering a better approach for managers, practitioners and people who use services alike. If true, this places a serious and significant responsibility on managers – and others – to ensure the conditions for reflective supervision are developed and sustained. On the other hand, perhaps by focussing on reflective supervision, we place too much pressure on managers, miss opportunities to explore how best to support good practice in other ways and mistake cultural and organisational problems for individual ones? Either way, this raises the question – does reflective supervision have a future in local authority child and family social work?

Given the importance of reflective supervision and its conceptual bedfellow, reflective practice, the answer to this question may seem obvious. Of course it does! “Reflective practice is one of the core tenets of the professional social work role” (Houston, 2015, p. 4). And yet, in recent years, many academics and practitioners have expressed concern about the managerial takeover of professional supervision and how this reduces the possibility and potential for more reflective supervision and practice (Beddoe, 2010). These concerns have led to a growing number of arguments being made about the importance of reflective supervision, to push back the creeping tide of managerialism (Rankine et al., 2017).

Davys and Beddoe (2010) have argued that supervision needs to be a forum for reflection and learning, Munro (2011) argued that supervisors should enable social workers to “explore and reflect” (p. 108), and Fook and Gardner (2007) argued that supervisors should adopt “a reflective approach […] [focussing on] feelings,...