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Preparation

What educational and employment programs and practices best prepare staff for work in child welfare agencies? What can agencies and universities do to enhance the knowledge, skills, and attitudes of future workers? These questions are addressed and examples of efforts to enhance worker/staff preparation are included in the following resources.

• Worker/staff preparation
• Educational preparation

A Competency Model for Licensing Staff and Out-of-Home Abuse Investigators (PDF - 56 KB)
Bernotavicz & Floyd (1997)
Provides an outline of a holistic competency model for child welfare licensing and out-of-home investigation staff. It identifies five general categories of competencies, emphasizing self-responsibility and initiative, quality orientation, appreciation of diversity, a systems perspective, teamwork, and modeling positive attitudes and behaviors.

Aligning Education and Practice: Challenges and Opportunities in Social Work Education for Community-Centered Practice (PDF - 536 KB)
Alliance for Children and Families (2000)
Discusses findings of a study that investigated the difficulty in recruiting social workers with education and training suitable for community-centered work and strategies that schools of social work can implement to increase the number of graduates prepared for community-centered work.

Assuring the Sufficiency of a Frontline Workforce: A National Study of Licensed Social Workers: Special Report: Social Work Services for Children and Families (PDF - 702 KB)
National Association of Social Workers Center for Workforce Studies (2006)
Summarizes and interprets the responses of social workers serving children and their families obtained through a national sample survey of licensed social workers in the United States conducted in 2004.

Reprofessionalizing Child Welfare Services: An Evaluation of a Title IV-E Training Program
Jones & Okamura
Research on Social Work Practice, 10, 2000
View Abstract
Tests the effectiveness of a title IV-E training program for preparing practitioners for public child welfare employment.

Updated on November 19, 2008