Social pedagogy is the discipline underpinning work with children and youth across most of Europe. The concept has struggled to find a place within social work in the English-speaking world, partly because of difficulties in translation and partly as a result of different welfare traditions. In particular there is a limited conception of education within the Anglo American Saxon tradition and a consequent bifurcation of education and care. This article argues that ideas enshrined within social pedagogy have a resonance with Scottish approaches to social welfare, which culminate in the Kilbrandon Report of 1964. We argue that there are recurrent themes in the Scottish tradition with roots in the Reformation and the Scottish Enlightenment. Foremost amongst these is the focus on education as a vehicle for both individual improvement and social cohesion. Social pedagogy or social education offers an integrating conceptual base from which to develop models of social work practice which promote social wellbeing through socio-educational strategies. The current review of social work in Scotland offers opportunities to reclaim a socio-educational tradition.

Attachment theory has, over the last half-century, offered important insights into the nature of early experience and into human relationships more generally. These lessons have been influential in improving child-care attitudes and provision. While acknowledging such advances, our argument in this article is that the dominance accorded attachment theory in policy and professional discourse has reached a point where understandings of human relationships have become totalised within an attachment paradigm; it has become the ‘master theory’ to which other ways of conceiving of childcare and of relationships more generally become subordinated. Yet, many of the assumptions underlying attachment theory, and the claims made for it, are contestable. We trace the growing prominence of attachment theory in childcare, proceeding to critique the provenance of many claims made for it and the implications of these for practice. At the heart of the critique is a concern that an overreliance on attachment contributes to the biologisation of how we bring up children to the detriment of socio-cultural perspectives. We go on to offer one suggestive alternative way through which we might conceive of child-care relationships, drawing on Axel Honneth’s theory of recognition.

The participation of service users in the planning and delivery of social work services has become a familiar objective in the UK. Policy injunctions, however, mask a lack of clarity around what is meant by terms such as ‘participation’ and ‘engagement’. Moreover, since many service users do not engage with social workers voluntarily, the expectation that they become centrally involved in the planning and delivery of services highlights tensions and contradictions. This article explores social work engagement with involuntary clients, drawing on findings from a knowledge exchange project involving academics and local authority social workers. A review of the literature traces the background to user involvement and identifies its different stages and types. Data from small-scale practitioner research projects undertaken within the project is then drawn on to illuminate how social workers and clients negotiate mutual engagement in their everyday encounters. It is suggested that the ‘roll out’ of the user engagement agenda may be understood as an exercise in the problematics of government. More optimistically, the work of Michel De Certeau is drawn on to propose that a practice of the everyday in such encounters rescues them from an ill-defined, abstract and undifferentiated policy agenda.

In a context of austerity, governments are reducing spending on care and welfare. Yet, little is known about how this is experienced and enacted on the ground. In this article, we employ a case-study approach in a Scottish local authority children and families social work team to consider how social workers deal with the tensions of working in times of austerity. We draw on the literature on the sociology of emotions to explore the impact on practitioners of working within a context of diminishing services and resources. This is experienced as conflicting with the professional, ‘caring’ values of social work. Such emotional dissonance, though, is dealt with in varied ways, each pointing to different moral pathways. Responses tend to be individual—there is no concerted social work response to austerity. We argue that it is vital to consider the emotional dimensions of austerity, to comprehend variations in individual acceptance or rejection of cuts to social work, but also to explore future ethical directions of social work.