Practice education for the most part is a rewarding and positive experience. In a former role as a practice educator, students were often the ‘nice’ part of my job, given that my social work role often involved undertaking complex parenting assessments for the family courts. The students I worked with in that particular agency were highly motivated, enthusiastic, had up-to-date knowledge, lacked cynicism and offered in return a critical but constructive view of the agency, its policies and procedures. Most importantly, they also provided a much-needed reminder of why I had entered social work in the first place. It is inevitable, however, that some students will not live up to expectations for a variety of reasons. There is also a minority of students who will not be able to meet the requirements of the profession, and so during placement it will fall to practice educators first, to do all they can to support those students to make the necessary development and second, if required, to fail students, following due process. This is the practice educator's ultimate role – to act as a gatekeeper to the profession – and, as the book goes on to document, the gatekeeper role is not without its inherent tensions.

The genesis of the book

This book has emerged from a number of professional experiences spanning almost 20 years. As a social work practitioner working in London in the late 1990s, I was concerned about the competence, conduct and behaviour displayed by some social workers, as well as other professionals. I often thought, ‘Who let that one through?’. There is one case I vividly recall, when I was working for a charity that undertook, among other things, assessments of parents for court proceedings. The local authority social worker in this case was facilitating overnight unsupervised contact for three children placed in voluntary care (Section 20 of the Children Act 1989) with their mother. It was clear that the mother was unable to provide the most basic physical care and there were significant risks in this arrangement that the social worker seemed unable to acknowledge.