´óÏó´«Ã½

This specialised MSc pathway caters to certified social workers, providing a flexible, streamlined path to enhancing your knowledge and practice. It equips you to undertake supervisory and leadership roles, supporting team members to work on issues related to risk and safeguarding. You enrol in individual units, progressing towards the full Masters degree at your own pace. The pathway units aim to build on your existing professional knowledge while covering practice education leadership and management and the development of specialisms.

What will you study?

Studying our Advanced Social Work Practice MA course will equip you with the knowledge and expertise in contemporary issues, strategies and professional skills in social work practice. The flexible and adaptable nature of this course will allow you to undertake a combination of optional units to tailor your study into specialised areas of social work, and as a result, this will open doors to a range of career pathways. The flexible structure of this course also aims to support students who may be working alongside their studies, which we know a majority of our students will be. Our unit in Adult Exploitation and Safeguarding will allow you to address the serious issue of adult exploitation while exploring the implications for policy and practice in the UK.

In Safeguarding Young People: Contextual Safeguarding and Other Approaches to Extra-Familial Harm, you will examine new and emerging approaches to safeguarding alongside developing a critical understanding of debates in the field of child protection and adolescent development. This is where A Trauma Informed Approach to Relationship Based Social Work will enable you to support such individuals suffering from trauma with a relationship-based approach. This means that you will learn to actively consider the repercussions of trauma experienced in childhood that may persist through to adolescence and adulthood. Furthermore, our unit in Complex Assessments, Decision Making, Analysis and Risk will teach you to incorporate a diverse, reflective, ethical and unbiased approach to your practice by learning to effectively plan assessments, assess risk and make analytical decisions to ensure the best outcomes for service users.

In areas of strategic social work, Mentoring and Coaching in Social Work will introduce you to the concepts of coaching and mentoring while allowing you to experiment with coaching and mentoring models in an organisational context. This will develop your communication, enquiry and reflective skills for your professional practice and to better support service users. Similarly, Leading and Managing in Social Work will provide you with an understanding of effective leadership and management in social work services while prompting you to critically reflect on your own possession of these qualities. You will also consider the importance of Reflective Supervision for Health and Social Care Professionals, and this unit will enable you to promote a positive culture of supervision that will shape practice and provide the best possible support to service users. As a result, you will reflect on your role as a supervisor by considering your ethics, values and decision-making skills.

Careers

The units on this course are designed to help you develop your career or change direction within social work. You can use the specialist expertise you gain to take on a leading role in practice development within your workplace. You can also seek leadership or management opportunities in social work or social care as the course proceeds or upon graduation.

You may also like to continue your development by progressing to a Professional Doctorate programme.

Mode(s) and length of study: The programme is designed as a part-time course and normally takes 36 months to complete (45 months for those who start in January). Blended Learning – Campus Focused approach.