Solidarity with Social Work Educators: Support the campaign and take the survey

As educators preparing the next generation of social workers, academics in university-based social work programmes have a collective responsibility not only to uphold the values of social justice, dignity, and human rights in teaching but also to defend the working conditions that make ethical, reflective, and relationship-based education possible.

Supporting the Social Workers Union (SWU) 2025 Motion for secure employment, manageable expectations, and adequate resources for social work lecturers is not separate from our professional social work ethics; it is an extension of them. The conditions under which lecturers teach directly affect the quality of learning, student well-being, research capacity, placement support, and the profession’s future resilience.

Social work education cannot thrive in environments marked by burnout, precarity, excessive administrative pressures, and diminishing professional autonomy. When lecturers are overstretched, the opportunities needed for critical reflection, anti-oppressive practice, culturally responsive teaching, and meaningful student support are inevitably compromised. This has long-term consequences for the profession and the communities social workers serve.

Academics are often the first point of contact for modeling the social work profession’s core values for students. This includes demonstrating advocacy, collective action, ethical resistance to harmful systems, and a commitment to dignity and well-being in the workplace. When social work educators are expected to work under conditions that compromise their well-being, suppress professional challenge, or normalize exhaustion and job insecurity, the profession’s stated values risk becoming rhetorical rather than lived. Students cannot be meaningfully taught about rights, empowerment, and anti-oppressive practice while witnessing the erosion of those very principles in their own learning environments.

We therefore encourage academics across social work programmes to stand in solidarity with efforts to improve working conditions within higher education and social work education.  A profession that teaches advocacy, social justice, and anti-oppressive practice must also be willing to advocate for those who educate its future workforce.

Support the campaign – take the survey

Thank you to all who attended the initial planning webinars in January and February 2026, our campaign of solidarity with social work academics continues to progress. This is real grassroots activism in action!

What we need now is for social work academics working on university-based programmes in the UK to help SWU create an evidence base for this campaign of solidarity.

This short survey will help SWU create a rapid sector snapshot of social work programmes and their staff. The more UK social work academics that answer these questions the better a view we will have of issues including redundancies, funding, loss of support roles, vacancies, student attrition, placement pressures, and workplace wellbeing.

We have also issued a call for evidence: Tell us about issues you and your colleagues have encountered.

Let us know about concrete examples of issues caused by redundancies, course closures, department restructures, or other examples of cuts and growing pressures. These examples can be provided anonymously to be used on background. Please email them to: campaigns@swu-union.org.uk SWU will continue to work with academics and students to develop key campaign asks, build this coalition, and organise parliamentary and media tactics for the campaign.