Studying our Advanced Social Work Practice MA course will equip you with the knowledge and expertise in contemporary issues, strategies and professional skills in social work practice. The flexible and adaptable nature of this course will allow you to undertake a combination of optional units to tailor your study into specialised areas of social work, and as a result, this will open doors to a range of career pathways. The flexible structure of this course also aims to support students who may be working alongside their studies, which we know a majority of our students will be. Our unit in Adult Exploitation and Safeguarding will allow you to address the serious issue of adult exploitation while exploring the implications for policy and practice in the UK. You can develop your understanding of Sexual Abuse and Exploitation by examining how it occurs, the types of sexual harm and the impact it has on an individual.

In Safeguarding Young People: Contextual Safeguarding and Other Approaches to Extra-Familial Harm, you will examine new and emerging approaches to safeguarding alongside developing a critical understanding of debates in the field of child protection and adolescent development. As a social worker, you may commonly come across individuals or families that have experienced some form of trauma in their lives. This is where A Trauma Informed Approach to Relationship Based Social Work will enable you to support such individuals suffering from trauma with a relationship-based approach. This means that you will learn to actively consider the repercussions of trauma experienced in childhood that may persist through to adolescence and adulthood. Furthermore, our unit in Complex Assessments, Decision Making, Analysis and Risk will teach you to incorporate a diverse, reflective, ethical and unbiased approach to your practice by learning to effectively plan assessments, assess risk and make analytical decisions to ensure the best outcomes for service users.

In areas of strategic social work, Mentoring and Coaching in Social Work will introduce you to the concepts of coaching and mentoring while allowing you to experiment with coaching and mentoring models in an organisational context. This will develop your communication, enquiry and reflective skills for your professional practice and to better support service users. Similarly, Leading and Managing in Social Work will provide you with an understanding of effective leadership and management in social work services while prompting you to critically reflect on your own possession of these qualities. You will also consider the importance of Reflective Supervision for Health and Social Care Professionals, and this unit will enable you to promote a positive culture of supervision that will shape practice and provide the best possible support to service users. As a result, you will reflect on your role as a supervisor by considering your ethics, values and decision-making skills.

You may also choose to undertake our Practice Educator Training units that will equip you with the knowledge and skills to design practice learning curriculum by integrating theories of adult learning and subsequently learning to apply this to practice. In the second part of this unit, you will learn to deliver excellent practice education in collaboration with a community of practice, which upon completion, will mean that you meet the Practice Educator Professional Standards (PEPS). Finally, once you have attained 90 credits, you can complete Applied Research Skills in Social Work which will prepare you to conduct your own research in your area of interest by allowing you to engage with current research and methodology to form an evidence-based approach to your work. This will prepare you for the final aspect of the Master’s. The Dissertation for Social Workers will allow you to conduct in-depth, practice-based research by developing critical responses to your findings and examining ways to improve practice.