YESTERDAY, TODAY AND TOMORROW: IS SOCIAL WORK SUPERVISION IN SOUTH AFRICA KEEPING UP?

The recruitment and retention strategy of the Department of Social Development (2006:23) postulates that there is a “lack of structured supervision and poor quality supervisors, who themselves also lack capacity to conduct professional supervision” in South Africa. Pieterse (1961), one of the first authors on supervision in South Africa, made similar claims close to five decades ago. These two comments give rise to the question: has social work in South Africa been practising supervision over the past five decades beyond historical bureaucratic discourses, and has it engaged with changing global, local and personal contexts to develop and sustain critically responsive practices? In other words: is social work supervision in South Africa keeping up with the times? By addressing this question, this paper seeks to respond to the call of the recruitment and retention strategy document (Department of Social Development, 2006) to evaluate current supervision practices. In this attempt the paper reports on research, drawing on an historical analysis of the international and local development of social work supervision and on a case study of current supervision practices in an NGO environment, in order to recommend a context-specific conceptual framework for future supervision practices. This paper thus aims to examine the interplay between the historical development, current practices and future challenges of social work supervision