One of the things that has fascinated me for decades now is the relationship between theory and practice. It has been sad over the years to encounter so many people who seem content to drive a wedge between the two of them - whether (a small but significant minority of) academics who are happy to explore theory without any consideration for its relevance to practice or the breed of practitioner who largely dismisses theory and prefers to just 'get on with the job' (totally oblivious to the fact that our practice is necesssarily premised on a knowledge base - a mixture of formal and informal theory). Perhaps one day our profession will have a much firmer grip on the idea that theory and practice are two sides of the same coin and that it is counterproductive to drive them apart. For me the key is to 'theorise practice' - that is, to start with practice and then draw on our theoretical understandings to make sense of the complex situations we need to wrestle with in social work, hence my latest book: Theorizing Social Work Practice http://astore.amazon.co.uk/neilthomp-21/.

The announcement that Birmingham City Council have sacked six social workers will no doubt cause considerable consternation among the social work practitioner populace. I would agree that people who do not achieve an acceptable level of practice and do not show any interest in doing so have no place in professional social work. However, the anxieties that are in abundance in modern-day social work (in the UK at least) will presumably be even greater now for many people if they come to fear that sacking social workers is to become the order of the day. This situation also raises the question of how much support social workers can expect in carrying out their duties, how much their well-being is an issue for their employers (see www.well-beingzone.com).

In an earlier post on this blog I argued that it is dangerous for overloaded social workers to try to do the impossible. Work overload needs to be raised as a situation that has the potential to lead to professionally dangerous practice. If it is not, then there will continue to be the very worrying risk that social workers who allow themselves to be overloaded without trying to do something about it (personally and collectively) could face paying the price for this with their jobs, and ultimately with their careers.