Values and Ethics in Social Work - Brossura

"This book is a worthy addition to the literature, and anyone who is engaged in educating students regarding values and ethics would likely find it useful. This text is successful at "starting where the student is" when entering into the often charged territory of values. Backett and Maynard have understood clearly that students often need more guidance in examining their own values and assumptions, and how these lead us to very different ways of thinking about ethical dilemmas. It would be a helpful resource in approaching the teaching of values and ethics in social work." (Suzanne Bushfield The Journal of Contemporary Social Services 2006-08-07) --Review

Chris Beckett qualified as a social worker in the 1980s, and worked in the field for 18 years, first as a social worker and then as a manager, latterly as the manager of a children and families social work team. Like most social workers who qualified at that time, he started out as a generic social worker, working with a range of service users including children and families, old people, and people with mental health problems and disabilities, but his predominant area of work was with children and families.

He moved into academic social work in 2000, working first at Anglia Ruskin University in Cambridge and then at the University of East Anglia in Norwich. In addition to his social work text books, he has published academic articles on a variety of topics including the use of military language in social work, the importance of realism as an ethical principle, and statistics from Sweden about child abuse, following the legal ban there on corporal punishment. His main research area, however, has been decision-making in court proceedings about children, and decision-making about children more generally.

Chris has a parallel career as a writer of literary science fiction. (More information about his fiction can be found at www.chris-beckett.com.) He won the Edge Hill Short Fiction prize for his story collection, The Turing Test, and the Arthur C. Clarke award for his novel Dark Eden. He is now a full-time writer. His view is that academic and creative writing have more in common than might at first sight appear: in both cases the author begins with a jumble of ideas that seem to him to be in some way linked together, and attempts, in large part by a combination of intuition and trial and error, to impose some shape and structure.

Chris has three adult children, and lives in Cambridge with his wife Maggie and sundry animals.

Peter Jordan qualified as a social worker and worked with children and families in a variety of settings, including a Children s Centre. He has been involved with teaching in Higher Education since 2006, first with the Open University and, since 2009, as a fulltime lecturer at the University of East Anglia. He has been involved in research about children s views and experiences of the child protection process. His main research interests are in ethics in professional life and interprofessional working, but he is also interested in the ways that newly qualified workers manage their entry into the profession.

Peter has a daughter and lives with her and her mum in Norwich.