The school attacks in Şanlıurfa Siverek and Kahramanmaraş Onikişubat have mobilized all sectors to take precautions.
The Ministry of National Education and the Ministry of Interior have announced solution packages that basically include security measures. Political parties and education unions, on the other hand, have announced a package of measures to address the issue from a pedagogical perspective.
One of the important concepts related to the subject is school social work. School social work is one of the important application areas of social work, which takes place in schools and works with an interdisciplinary approach in order to solve the problems that students experience due to their developmental period, family and living conditions, to benefit from the services they need and to ensure that they continue their educational life successfully.
If we look at the history of school-based social work, it started with compulsory education laws in most countries, such as the USA, Canada, Germany and the UK, where it was first implemented in the late 19th and early 20th centuries. It is currently practiced in 53 countries. Some of these countries are the USA, Germany, Bahamas, United Arab Emirates, China, Denmark, France, Ghana, Netherlands, India, England, Canada, North Africa, Luxembourg, Pakistan, Russia, Sri Lanka, Saudi Arabia and Greece.
School social work aims to ensure that all “students reach the highest level of their educational potential without discrimination. For this reason, school social workers provide services in a wide range of areas such as truancy, children at risk and their families, children living on the streets, students in need of special education, problems of LGBT students, problems of religious-ethnic minority and refugee students, problems of children under institutional care, children victims of abuse and their problems.
In our country, efforts to implement school social work are thought to have started with the establishment of a medico-social center at Istanbul University in 1961 to deal with students’ health, social, cultural, economic, etc. problems and the employment of a psychiatrist at this center in 1966, followed by psychologists and social workers in the following years; however, it is known that the first concrete initiative was the request for a social worker from Hacettepe University Social Work Academy to be assigned to the guidance service of Gazi High School Directorate in Ankara in 1968. Fifteen years after this step, in 1983, in the Special Specialization Commission Report of the V. Five-Year Development Plan, the importance of providing guidance and counseling services to students in order to prevent student problems was pointed out and it was foreseen that preparations for the establishment of a school social service team in our country should begin. However, it took more than fifteen years for social work to be included in education legislation. On 17.04.2001, the Regulation on Guidance and Psychological Counseling Services of the Ministry of National Education defined the concept of “social worker”, although social work units were not mentioned, and “social worker” (social service specialist) was listed among the specialists to be employed in the Guidance and Research Centers established in provinces and districts. However, social workers are still not included among those who will work in the guidance and psychological counseling services established in educational institutions (schools). Currently, there are 673 “social worker” positions in the Ministry of National Education and only 3 of these positions are filled. In this sense, the concept of school social work has never been realized.
Although the roles and duties of social workers vary according to the needs of the country, region, and school in which they work and vary depending on the context, some basic tasks and roles are defined depending on these tasks. The duties of school social workers can be defined as follows;
- Assessment to decide to apply one of the roles of direct intervention, consultation and program development
- As a member of a team, consulting/exchanging views/collaborating with other members of the school system.
- Direct intervention with children or families through methods of working with individuals, groups or families.
- Assistance in program development.
School social workers are needed in our schools, whether in extraordinary periods such as the current one as a result of school attacks or in normal periods. The necessary legislative work should be done and school social work should be put into practice as soon as possible.
Sources
Murat Çay. (2018) School Social Work Development and Turkey
Taner Artan School Social Work. Istanbul University.