Intersections between Education and Social Work in Working with Children at Risk: The Perspective of Pedagogical Specialists

Abstract

The article presents results from an empirical research study with 208 pedagogic specialists. Its main objective was to find teachers’ views about their cooperation with specialists from social work system regarding working with children at risk in Bulgaria, as well as to find the extend of such cooperation and its future perspectives. Children at risk learn, educate, and socialize in different types of educational institutions and they also receive support and protectio0n from different organizations for social protection at their residence territory. That is why the development of effective cooperation between those two systems is especially important. Empirical research was done with a survey questionnaire designed for the research itself. The questionnaire includes questions in three main areas: teachers’ evaluation about the challenges they face when working with children at risk; characteristics of their interaction with social protection system; changes which need to be made at both systems so work with children at risk to be more effective. Research results show that teachers are mainly dissatisfied with their interaction with social work system due to lack of information, additional workload, and lack of effective support for those working at school level. More and more teachers state that children at risk create new challenges in their work and teachers face unusual requirements when they interact with social workers. In addition, teachers are not familiar with institutions for social work and social services, and they contact them only in severe cases of family dysfunction and aggression, while expecting social workers to practically solve the problem of the child. They want to transfer all this type of work to social services and outside of educational institutions. Teachers also state that there is a lot of documentation which complicates the interaction between the two systems (educational and social work). They think that there is a need of change in social workers’ work, while work of teachers should not be changed.