Seven Principles of Effective Supervision for Child and Family Social Work

Abstract

Supervision is widely regarded as an essential component of social work practice. Yet the gap between the ‘rhetoric’ of supervision (what it should be) and the ‘reality’ (what it is) is often significant. In this article, based on my own reflections on a decade spent researching the topic, I propose seven principles of effective supervision for child and family social work – (i) collaboration, (ii) thinking aloud, (iii) emotional reflection in relation to casework, (iv) explicit identification of need, risk, harm and strengths (v) a focus on parent and child-defined ideas of helping and outcomes, (vi) exploring multiple perspectives, and (vii) planning for the whys and hows of practice. The aim is to provide supervisors (and organisations) with a framework for thinking about how they provide supervision. These principles are not unique, and I did not ‘discover’ them. Yet I hope that by presenting them as a collective, they may offer a useful basis for reflecting on the provision of effective supervision in all the various contexts of statutory children’s services.