The Prerequisites of Introducing School Social Workers in Romanian Educational System

Abstract

Worldwide professional agencies or associations define school social worker as the professional that assists students with socio-emotional challenges and makes a linkage between school, home, and community services. A school counsellor is different than a school social worker, by guiding students in academic, career, and personal development, supporting those in navigating school-related challenges, but also helps them planning their future. In Romanian school environment the school counsellor somehow supplies the school social worker’s attributes, as within the schooling institutions organizational chart there is no specific place for the school social worker’s job. In an attempt to diagnose a current situation of what the school social worker represents as a professional in connection with Romanian educational system, we developed a brief analysis of the professional grounding of the domain, starting from key concepts such as “school social work”, the “educational role of the social worker”. The results of the search for such keywords showed us that there is a lack of data on this subject in the Romanian background. What we identify at the level of schooling units is the school counsellor. The purpose of this work is to bring a better theoretical knowledge of the need for the professionalization of the school social worker in the Romanian public educational sphere. Moreover, the article may be the start of an empirical larger research on the topic, in order to bring to public awareness the usefulness of a social worker at the level of each educational institution. The analysis is of a theoretical nature and is based on the educational-welfare practice models from Romania and USA.