SASW Hosts Annual Conference

Members and stakeholders in Scottish social work gathered online this week for SASW’s annual conference.

The two-day event featured a variety of keynote addresses and interactive workshops based around the theme of upholding, protecting and advancing rights during challenging times.

Keynote speakers included the Minister for Wellbeing and Social Care, Kevin Stewart MSP and Iona Colvin, the Chief Social Work Adviser to the Scottish Government. They spoke about their vision for social work in a National Care Service and with a National Social Work Agency overseeing the profession in Scotland. We also heard from SWU General Secretary, John McGowan who highlighted many of the challenges facing the profession now and how SWU is working to support social workers to fight for better working conditions.

Day one also featured a presentation from Jeremy Balfour MSP, who talked about his proposed Bill to establish a Disability Commissioner for Scotland the how he hoped this will give better representation to disabled people. Finally, Deputy CEO of Edinburgh based charity, Multi-Cultural Family Base, Deyna Mehrdad led a powerful discussion on protecting people’s rights against racial prejudice.

The first workshop was delivered by the Scottish Commission for Learning Disability who highlighted their report on Relationships Matter, exploring how we can tackle loneliness and isolation and promote connections for people with learning disabilities. Meanwhile, our second workshop focused on upholding and protecting human rights in the addiction recovery process. We heard from the CEO of Stirling Community Enterprise, Tracey McFall and author, Aazar Faver who shared their first-hand experiences of this area from both an organisation-led perspective and person of lived experience.

The conference concluded with a final keynote speech from author and journalist, Polly Curtis who explained the context to her book: “Why we break up families and how to mend them.” Polly talked about the vital role social workers have in supporting families but how the system and lack of resources makes the role even more challenging and demanding.

We then joined activists Angi Naylor and Dr Pete Unwin who led us in poetry and song in a call to social justice and fighting back against the unfairness of austerity. Angi and Pete gave an insight into their campaign to ‘boot out austerity’ and posed a question to delegates about how we can use social work to be a political force that stands against inequality and poverty.

Thank you to all the speakers, presenters, staff and attendees who contributed to an inspiring conference. All sessions were recorded and will be uploaded to the BASW Youtube channel shortly.