Our Centre for Social Work and Social Justice looks to the future

Professor Vasilios Ioakimidos, who is leading our Centre for Social Work and Social Justice, looks at the exciting future ahead.

At times of broader economic and societal change, well-educated and confident social work graduates are in great demand.  To meet contemporary challenges, we have evolved our Centre for Social Work to become the Centre for Social Work and Social Justice (CfSWJ) with a new vision.

CfSWJ is committed to training social workers to be equipped to deal with the developing demands, driven by rising inequality, increased workload pressures and the escalating complex needs of people using services.

To achieve this, CfSWJ places particular emphasis on creating an outstanding educational experience for all of our undergraduate and postgraduate students, and aspires to be centrally involved in conducting innovative research and influencing social work agendas nationally and internationally.

The CfSWJ will work closely with the Essex Law Clinic and the Human Rights Centre to allow our students to study inter-professionally, and tap into a wealth of academic resources.

The International Federation of Social Workers has identified that there is a significant gap in social work education that is truly global and internationalist in its outlook. Our vision is to position the Centre as a ‘global provider of social work education’ with a postgraduate curriculum that has relevance to the international workforce and strengthens the capacity of the profession.

We are currently developing MA Social Work and Human Rights with an anticipated launch date of autumn 2019.

Employability has been and will continue to be at the epicentre of our Centre. Our focus will be on maintaining and nurturing further links and reputation with external partners to ensure continuation of very high employability scores.

We look forward to creating meaningful and innovative partnerships with Local Authorities, service user organisations and global social work initiatives.