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The impact of COVID-19 restrictions and the shift to online teaching has contributed to a growing interest in distance learning across social work education. The authors of this paper are from the Open University, which has over 50 years of experience in distance learning and over the past 30 years e-learning through blended and fully online methods. The paper shares insights from teaching a social work law module to nearly 400 students across the UK. This paper addresses the challenges of integrating social work values and human rights into teaching asylum and immigration law amidst a UK legal discourse that often creates a ‘hostile environment’ for people with precarious immigration status. It explores teaching from a social justice perspective in the context of restrictive domestic laws. Highlighting the co-production of learning materials with civil society groups through videos and podcasts, the paper emphasizes the importance of including practitioner and migrant, asylum seeker or refugee voices to enrich content. Insights into the practicalities of incorporating these elements into e-learning, along with reflections on the challenges and opportunities, are discussed. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

An introduction is presented in which the editor discusses the various articles published within the issue on such topics as distance learning in social work, the development of social work education in Australian universities, and the teaching of social work supervision.

Recent policy documents have highlighted the importance of developing interprofessional education to support interprofessional practice. In particular improving communication between health and social care agencies has been highlighted as an educational and practice priority. This study set out to explore the interprofessional training needs of social work practitioners with social work agencies in North East London to ensure that the interprofessional courses were relevant to social work. Findings from 15 qualitative interviews with key health and social care professionals in eight London boroughs will be presented. The findings suggest that there is great diversity in the budgets, resources and approaches taken to post qualifying training across the boroughs and between agencies and that training needs analysis for experienced practitioners is at an early stage of development workforce planning to the commissioning of education. Social work services identified bespoke training and the accreditation of their existing programmes as important. Responding to rapid organizational change and immediate training needs was a key priority in the services interviewed. However, limited funding to release social workers to take up interprofessional post-qualifying training remains a constraint for training officers, and how training was planned and organized by both practitioners and providers was considered important. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The article presents recent policy drivers in health and social care that have emphasized the importance of integrating the work of public services. Interprofessional education and training has been invoked ever more frequently during the past years to encourage collaboration in health and social care to help improve services, effect change and implement effective workforce strategies. The findings in this work suggest in spite of the policy drivers there is still great diversity in the organization, budgeting, resources and approaches taken to interprofessional postqualifying training across the boroughs interviewed, both between agencies and in the priority accorded to training within different services.