Context
The social work professions are in crisis. More and more higher education programs are having difficulty recruiting candidates. The situation is critical, warn social work professionals. In France, 71% of establishments in the private nonprofit health, social and medico-social sector are experiencing recruitment difficulties and more than 65,000 positions remain unfilled, according to a study conducted in 2020 for the employer Nexem.
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This situation is due to several factors that are not only a question of salary. Social action is increasingly complex. The public that uses social services is more and more precarious and the loss of the quality of the relationship weakens future social workers. The crisis situations, the cultural differences, the social dropout of many people who become invisible to the educational, health and social action institutions make the job more difficult and less satisfying.
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In Europe, if the fields of intervention are relatively homogeneous, the modalities and tools of action are very disparate. However, the increase in the number of poor workers, the aging of the population and the issues related to ethnocultural diversity are challenges shared by European social workers. There is therefore an urgent need for training institutions to reform their teaching and to deal with social crisis situations in order to equip future professionals.
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European social workers are facing a number of common challenges at the moment. Indeed, in all European countries, the world of social work is highly permeable to the socio-political context, where two trends can now be read, which are contradictory in some respects. Embodied by new categories of excluded people such as the "long-term unemployed" and, increasingly, the "working poor" (who have to combine several "odd jobs" in order to achieve a barely decent income), these forms of vulnerability contribute to the multiplication and complexity of the problems that social workers must now face.
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This trend towards greater complexity is also fuelled by two other major developments that concern all European countries: the ageing and the ethnocultural diversification of the population. On the other hand, the social policies that have been the basis of social intervention practices since the rise of the welfare state have undergone profound transformations over the last two decades.
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The SISWEC project is a project for the improvement of professional university training in the field of social work. These training courses, which respond to the implementation of public policies of reception, education and inclusion of people in need of help, are today struggling to adapt to the new situations resulting from the crises that Europe has had to face. The situations of precarious people (unemployment, displacement, social dropout) are more and more numerous.
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The pandemic of COVID, climatic migrations, wars and the massive arrival of refugees are creating new professional problems for social workers, which the European Social Network is detecting in all European social institutions. Students enrolled in social work courses are nowadays asking for a better articulation between the theoretical contents of the training and the professional situations.
The increasing importance of violence, precariousness, disintegration of social ties and the breakdown of family ties make training more and more demanding for social efficiency. The SISWEC project is therefore clearly situated in a clear priority of recomposition of university systems in an approach of academic but also professional excellence. By bringing together social institutions and university trainers, it is a question of developing training methods and contents to adapt to a social evolution that no longer aims at supporting people but at empowering and self-determining subjects.
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