An interview with a social work master - Professor Pamela Trevithick
Podcast Episode Show Notes
How to cite/reference this podcast episode: Fox, M. (Host & Producer), Trevithick, P. (Guest), Joseph, B. L. (Producer), Murphy, L. (Producer) & Stech, J. (Producer). (2026, March 31). Social Work Education (Season No. 1, Episode No. 2)[Audio podcast episode]. In Social Work Teach. Social Work Media. https://socialwork.media/socialworkteach/episode2
Episode Title: An interview with a social work master - Professor Pamela Trevithick
Release Date: 31 March 2026
Duration: 32 minutes
Music: ‘Mopeds’ by Beat Mekanik (Licence: CC 4.0 International)
Produced by: Dr Ben Joseph (Western Sydney University), Professor Mim Fox (University of Wollongong), Lis Murphy, and Justin Stech
Episode Host(s): Professor Mim Fox (University of Wollongong)
Episode Guest(s): Professor Pamela Trevithick (University of Gloucestershire)
Episode Overview: In this episode of Social Work Teach, Professor Mim Fox interviews Professor Pamela Trevethick about her journey and contributions to social work education. Prof Trevethick, a feminist and activist, emphasises the importance of social work skills, particularly communication and group work, and the need for educators to model these values. She discusses the challenges of teaching in a neoliberal environment, the significance of non-verbal communication, and the necessity for social workers to work in groups and strategise effectively. Prof Trevethick also highlights the importance of addressing poverty and discrimination, and the need for social workers to be skilled in articulating their knowledge and values.
About the Guest(s)
Name: Professor Pamela Trevithick
Position: Program Director/Field Chair for the BSc in Social Work
Institution/Organisation: University of Gloucestershire
Area of Expertise: Social work skills, knowledge and practice.
Key Contributions to Social Work Education: Prof. Trevithick is a highly influential scholar in social work known for strengthening the connection between theory, skills and practice. Prof. Trevithick’s most well-known book is Social Work Skills and Knowledge: A Practice Handbook (2000).
Implications for Social Work Educators
Social work educators must reflect on:
Skills practice and scenarios
Teacher engagement through demonstration
Opportunities to reflect on personal skills practice
Resources and Further Reading
Trevithick, P. (2011). Social Work Skills: A Practice Handbook. McGraw Hill Education: UK.
Podcast Episode Transcript
Dr Ben Joseph 00:14
You're listening to Social Work Teach. Social Work Teach dives into the pedagogy and practice that social work educators use to teach skills, knowledge and values, both in the classroom and in the field. This podcast aims to explore what, how and why we teach what we teach. Throughout these episodes, you'll hear from experienced educators, you'll hear from curious educators, and you'll hear from students in the midst of their studies. Once you listen to the episode, make sure you have a look at the episode show notes, where we identify a number of different resources to help you do your own deep dive into the topic and give you a way to start enacting the pedagogy that you've been hearing about Social Work Teach is a Social Work Media production. We acknowledge the traditional owners of the unceded lands these recordings have been made on and pay respects to elders past and present, and acknowledge ongoing First Nations.
Prof. Mim Fox 01:28
Welcome everyone to Social Work Teach. I'm Professor Mim Fox, and I'm back with you today to share a fascinating conversation I had with Professor Pamela Trevithick. Back when I started working in universities. I remember getting my hands on a copy of Social Work Skills and Knowledge: A Practice Handbook by Pamela or Pam Trevithick. It came out in 2012 and I remember so clearly discovering Trevithick's Lexicon of Skills, a diagram of how knowledge, skills and values comes together, with a list below it of 80 social work skills. Anyone who's seen it knows what I'm talking about. In my first few years in universities, I heard about Pam coming to visit Australia, and I was so sad I missed out on hearing her speak. Years later, I'd used her book repeatedly in my teaching, and so when she came out again in 2022 I jumped at the chance. On a sunny day, I headed out to where Pam was staying in Sydney and had a conversation about who she is as a social work educator, where her contribution has been most felt, and where she thinks we need to head as a profession. It's my pleasure to share a snippet of that conversation with you now.
Prof. Pam Trevithick 02:41
I would introduce myself as a trained social worker and a social work academic. I might sometimes introduce myself as a mother or grandmother. I would most often, introduce myself as a feminist and an activist, and I think that much of my life has been spent trying to do something around the wrongs I see of life. So I started early my political career at 14, agitating against the Vietnam War, and I feel I'm still doing exactly the same now as I was doing then, though I think the political situation has changed and become much more complicated and requires more than just marching up and down the road, though that's valuable, and I should be doing some more of that when I get back home, just to have a presence around some of the issues that are so crucial in our society, in England, particularly. And let me just differentiate here, because I'm English. Often people abroad talk about the UK. The UK is made up of four countries. I am of one of those born in England, but I'm born of an Irish background. My mother was Irish, and I was brought up in an Irish culture, and therefore I was brought up with the antagonism between Irish, English and and that's never quite left me. So I'm very sensitive about the situation in Northern Ireland right now. Okay, delighted by some of the progress that's occurred in Ireland in recent years, but still very troubled about the relationship of England to Ireland, and how Ireland is seen, both politically and in the street, in terms of its characteristics and nationhood and struggles. So that's an enduring situation, and having a very English name, my English name is Old English, meaning either son of or town of ithick. I'm privy to anti Irishism because people don't imagine that I'm actually from that culture. So I've listened to that at school with my cousins being kind of spoken in derogatory ways. So probably one of my earliest experiences is not knowing whether to stand up for them, even in, you know, at 5,6,7, you know, just listening to it, the anti Irish, anti Catholic rhetoric that runs through English life, or did when I was growing up. It's better now in some ways and more problematic in others.
Prof. Mim Fox 05:29
So I love how when I ask how you describe yourself, you're grounding yourself in that political history. And was that part of your decision then to go into social work?
Prof. Pam Trevithick 05:41
I'm sure it was because my my childhood was very troubled. The trouble of my childhood was that nobody wanted me, which was it was one level a tragedy, but it leaves me very sensitive to the exclusion of people I can walk down the street and I can pick you out people that I consider to be struggling with inclusion, being recognised for their humanity. I can do that very naturally. And so I think growing up with that kind of degree of sensitivity about trying to belong myself and trying to work out ways to find happiness within that kind of difficulty led me to want to redress some of the difficulties I was seeing other people struggling with, particularly around poverty. I think poverty is one of the greatest evils of our time, around alongside racism, but they go very much they do, sexism, follows and all the other oppressions gallop in because when people have no money and have no status and have no rights, as they see it, or they're told what is shockingly and disgracefully the vulnerable position they're in. And I think that's driven me from being very small to want to belong, but also to want to put things right.
Prof. Mim Fox 07:06
Yeah, yeah. So after in your career through practice, what was your practice field? Where did you actually start?
Prof. Pam Trevithick 07:16
My practice field was, was always social work skills. I was, I was recruited because I was working in practice with women struggling with depression from a project I'd set up myself with government funding. And was, it was, this was from Bristol University. It was felt that there was the academic director at the time was wanting to go half time, and they wanted to bring another person in, and they wanted a gender balance, and they wanted somebody, you know, that was already in the field and known in the field. And I was known because I was always a practitioner, practice teacher, so and I'd have placements in my organisation. Okay, so I was a recruiter to that job. But interestingly, when I got the job, I didn't get the room that went with the job, or any, indeed, any status, because I realised that there was an insider who was preferred to me, ah, and she got the room, and I didn't, so I was hopping between people's other people's sabbaticals to different rooms for a couple of years. But the other thing I realised was that there was no no real status to social skills teaching. It was considered to be the job that nobody wanted, and it was at a time when research was coming through as important, but not not really finding its way, but knowing that that was a promotion and a status opportunity that hadn't been there for my colleagues before who deserved that status and opportunity. And so Social Work Skills was very much neglected in terms of how it was held within the university, not necessarily as much within my particular sector, within the social work school. So that was interesting, but it gave me a lot of scope, and so we took I taught group work, which is fallen off for many of the agendas in social work, and it's that's tragic, because it means that many practitioners don't get the chance to learn the complexities of teamwork and how hard it is to sometimes work in a team, but also social work skills. We had communication skills as the primary skills, which, of course, is a catch all for anything. And so I started teaching half time there and still working as a practitioner, and to do that for much of my life, in fact, half time practitioner, half time social worker. I, realising that I would probably progress in neither if you do part time, half time in that kind of a way, yeah, but, but I was still fascinated by social work skills, but from one area really, which was, which is, what are the kind of skills that are most likely to facilitate facilitate change for individual that's in their interest, that's that's working in their favour. Yes, which is not what, of course, social work skills is necessarily about. It's about just an outcome. Yes, and increasingly, I think social work skills is falling off its mandate, which is its mandate, is about change, but changing the positive way, using the most positive process we can imagine, and that has to be about warmth, kindness, generosity, care, affection, concern, all the highest qualities that we as human beings can stretch to.
Prof. Mim Fox 11:11
So that speaks to how we what, what are the values that actually sit underneath our education in social work education, underneath our pedagogy and but it also speaks to relationship based practice, which we know so well from the practice sector, but which in social work, education we don't always automatically relate to. Are you saying that those, those areas, those values, actually underpin everything we do?
Prof. Pam Trevithick 11:43
Well, given the frailty of our humanness, they should we may fall down. How well we pick each other up is a huge problem, because if we can just see human frailty as as our humanness, rather than as an opportunity to have a dig at somebody or to look better than them, we would be better off. I'm always a bit worried about the word value, because it feels like it goes everywhere and nowhere. Some University, universities I know of teach almost entirely from a values point of view, in the sense of anti, anti pressing, anti oppressive, anti discriminatory practice has been the cornerstone of social work, and I think it is. But I also think knowledge and skills have to be a corner Cornerstone as well, and my worryings in that if universities over focus on one area, they don't bring the others in. So I say in my book to mean well, doesn't mean to do well. We may want to do well, but are we doing well? And are we doing well by others, and are we doing well by ourselves? And should there be, and would there be a conflict between the two? And so the idea of coming alongside people, being with people, is both desired but highly difficult and problematic, mainly because we work with people who for them, for the most part, who are deeply wounded by other human beings, and here we are another human being before them, trying our best or working from our best self, as I describe it, but that that need not be recognised by that individual, because it takes time for people who are wounded to Trust and one of the biggest robberies in social work in England has been the robbery of time, the fact that practitioners are not given the time to create the kind of relationship that they need to create, the honest, open, caring and all the qualities I've described, because they've been robbed of time, as well as resources as well as status, but fancy being robbed of time when you're arriving in with a with a kind of one size fit all piece of paper that you've only got to tick box the answers to yes. But even that can be done very humanely, yeah, and very effectively. So I think I learned from general practice, because my partner is a general practitioner, doctor by background, I learned the skills of the 10 minute interview now probably down to five in England, given the way that this government operates, and it's amazing how to do a focused interview in that way works. So I think even we have to learn new skills that are time restricted, in terms of social work skills I'm talking so that we can be effective in a very limited opportunity. Yes, and that's where I think we have to do. More thinking about how to do it, and I do think we can learn from others. Now, I know as soon as we do a focus, an overly focused interview, that we lose, but we have to then think about follow up. What we can do that helps to follow up like texts, letters, gestures, gestures, leaving behind something. I say, in my book, you know, if you're going to give a leaflet, and you should always try to get the leaflet. I don't believe in this paperless world, given that people, you know, whether you've got your name, that that person's names on it, that you've written, that name, that you've said, try to try to think of this bit. You know that you've taken the trouble to just hand something over. My experience is that people that can travel a long way. For some people, it can mean nothing to others, but it can travel a long way. So there's learning in this condensed experience that we need to unpack and to think, but just eye contact alone, the gesture of a smile that's genuine, and people do know the difference. This is one of the biggest messes we have in our class system. We keep thinking that working class people or poor people aren't bright. They are thoroughly bright, absolutely they know what's going on. Do not assume they're stupid. How dare you assume they're stupid. And if we can't manage that, we can apologise. Said, It's not my best day. I'm trying the best I can. It's not my best day. That's it. Too many other things have marched into my life, and I'm sorry.
Prof. Mim Fox 16:40
So everything you've just described, I feel like I can translate into the classroom setting, the neoliberal environment, the doing more with less, the needing to come back to relationship students as a commodity. I feel like all of that is the pressures that the higher education system is under currently. And I guess my question to you is, how in the classroom and in our interactions with students, as we shepherd them through their degrees, can we actually instil those skills, those and I take what you mean by the word values, but that ethical or moral base from which we then engage with each other?
Prof. Pam Trevithick 17:27
Well, it's almost saying, it's almost saying, in summary, how do we teach what we're trying to model? And that's the, that's the that's the crux, in a way, isn't it? Because if I think it was, if social work students are coming out with a sense of feeling valued, cared for, and I'm not wanting that to go overboard. I think social work students will take small gestures and use them in large ways, if they if they need to, if we can teach in ways that we bring in our own emotions, we bring in our own our own frailty, if necessary, appropriately. So it's not an opportunity for offloading of our own anguish, but but more to say that we're not perfect. There's no perfect person in this world, and the and teaching is in itself a complicated task. Standing in front of 50 strangers, up to 100 150 some sizes of classrooms are far too big, but they are. They are what they are in this neoliberal world. How to remain human in those situations, and it's difficult, particularly when you've got somebody on the front room that's frowning all the time. You know, to find the face that's smiling is useful. But so we are ourselves vulnerable to being what we call mobilised, you know, by by the mood of a group who want to display their own struggles, which may be to wanting to kind of disarm us. There's always the student who knows more than we do, and probably does and when well on them. But right now, it's not going to be helpful to let that be demonstrated too, too vastly. I Yeah, so to generate our own sense of warmth and concern and understanding about the complexity of learning, I think it was beyond one said that there should always be two people learning. We should be learning how to teach, and they should be learning how to enjoy the experience of being taught to now, whether students enjoy it, I don't know, some subjects really don't get the students don't get the enjoyment that they should get, because it's this killed off by the how they're taught.
Prof. Mim Fox 19:59
Absolutely, and I have heard it said that it is the skills subjects that students will always enjoy more, that always get the better teacher evaluations, because students feel that they are doing social work.
Prof. Mim Fox 20:13
Absolutely and students do always want a script, though, in my experience, they want you to provide that script so that they know what it is they have to achieve to be able to come through their studies. And when I resist that with them often, there's the anguish that comes from that uncertainty. So are you saying that the there's this key amount of learning that happens in that uncertainty?
Prof. Pam Trevithick 20:13
But also it's a much more collaborative endeavour, because they are often using each other. I always demonstrate the skill I'm going to teach because it feels that I need to start off for my own vulnerabilities, which is to try to capture this group of people who've got different needs and different desires in some ways. And from that, there's a chance that a student can can see the difficulties of it. And it's also to say, What did I do wrong? Because it will never be the perfect interview. And so the person I'm interviewing also has to say something. I remember once I was going to interview Philip, who was then my professor. And I said, she I just said, Just be bewildered. Just say you've lost your handbag. And she said, "No, I need a script. I need the script. I can't work from that. I can't work from nothing." And I said, "but if you meet the service user, you're not going to know anything. You know we have to start from nothing." Yeah, just something's gone wrong, and there's always this idea that there's a script somewhere, yeah, and if I could just follow the script, I'll be all right. And that's a form of education that is disastrous, absolutely disastrous. That's just thinking about the education of my young grandson and with my girl, my daughter, and thinking, are we going to do the they're definitely not going to allow this programming, this scripting of his education. It's going to be exploration and discovery. And I'm just so relieved, and I have to remember that we're all being scripted all the time, and the messages and the subliminal messages we get are so profound and ongoing and enduring that it's very hard to us to stay fresh to the moment that we're in and the vitality and opportunity of that moment, which is unending.
Prof. Pam Trevithick 22:39
Yes, I am. Yeah, I'm saying that. I mean, learning is an emotional experience. It has to be because that's how the brain becomes triggered, which is what we've learned from neuroscience, is that once these synapses start to come together, and the opportunity for that to happen most often and most profoundly is when it's emotionally driven. And so I think we just have to remind students that learning is an emotional experience, and every time we don't know something, you can feel like we're useless, worthless, hopeless, that we've wasted our lives, and it's partial, and it's momentary, and it's a small grief that everybody's got to learn. But imagine that for service users. Then, what does that like for them being told or being illuminated as to the fact that you know, they're part of a system that hasn't got their interest at heart? That's delivering really bad news. That's bad news. Now you might think that belongs to the realm of the loss of a baby or loss of a partner. That's the loss of their own humanity being brought in front of them for all the times that they've been told things in ways that are not digestible for want of a word. So how we actually approach the not knowing is crucial, and even then, I don't want to over theorise that. I don't want to find a category to put it into, to find another word that says we do know, and I also don't want us to get drowned in this word uncertainty. We've always lived on an uncertain world. It's not new, and the fact we've got some wonderful scholars who write about it is excellent. But it's not new, because if we go down down that road too much, we forget that we do know a lot. And in social work, we do gather massive amount of information that is vital to the political system that we're living in, and also to moving things forward in loads of different ways. And so I like. To think about knowledge, skills and values all together, but I don't want to over emphasise one aspect. I'm a skills teacher, but I decided for my third edition that I didn't know enough about knowledge, and I wrote to the editor and said, I need to hold this book back for at least a year because I don't understand knowledge. And I was, I was in Melbourne at the time as a visiting academic, and I I was amazed at what how people interpreted knowledge and and theory. I was gobsmacked.
Prof. Mim Fox 25:31
So how do we how do we educate a generation of social workers who will however many of them, whatever percentage of them will go into jobs where they don't necessarily feel that they have the power, the voice, the environment where they can resist or disrupt what's happening around them. How do we educate them alongside our value base, our social justice mandate,in the knowledge that those are the roles that they will end up in potentially?
Prof. Pam Trevithick 26:08
Well, I think we have to educate them to work in groups, quite honestly, because the biggest problem we have is that social workers feel so isolated. It and it is often just them. They're in, sometimes in a multidisciplinary context, and they there is only them. And as far as I know, in England, for example, we're the only one that carry the mandate to address discrimination. If you look at nursing medicine, it's not it's not there. So we are given a mandate that nobody else has got. And yet, when we operate that mandate, we're despised for it, or we have denigrated, or we're misunderstood. That's probably so. I think we have to be in groups. And when I speak to practitioners, they say, Yeah, I've got time. I'm so exhausted. The idea of being energised by certain things need to be brought into the what energises you? And the thing that energises me most is people, and it's people that being with, people that care about me. I also think it's very important that social workers know that we can't, we can't write everything all the time. We may have to choose which, which battles we can win, yes and where we can work under the radar as it were, or what I call between the cracks. Every pavements got cracks. We just got to work out where it is and and for the most part, people can't see the cracks in the way that we do. So we've just got to get strategies that allow us to do that. I think my greatest contribution has been to earmark the the vital place that social work skills plays in social work. I think if I had my way, I would, I would almost divide the course into half, skills half, and that would not necessarily mean you're focusing on skills performance, but just showing in other areas that it takes skill. So even to how we how we communicate, our value position is a skilled undertaking and or how we communicate what knowledge we have of a certain area is a skilled undertaking. So it would make skills much more dominant and say that really, if we can't articulate what we know, it isn't there, it isn't there. It's asking people too much to try to pick up what we can't say. And of course, we can say non verbally. That's the other thing I'd like to introduce more is the importance of nonverbal communication. It used to be very high on our agenda, and I'm interested to know that even attachment theory, new new research, and attachment theory and in and in neuroscience are highlighting the importance of nonverbal communication. And I thought we have been here. We were here 50 years ago. It's gone out of favour. It's gone out of favour, and it needs to come back,
Prof. Mim Fox 29:21
yeah, and it comes back to that relationship, doesn't it?
Prof. Pam Trevithick 29:24
It does. And how many things you can pick up by just being with somebody. It's a problem about distance learning, of course, and video conferencing, and all that we do is that you can miss a lot by not having the human being in front of you, and I'm really worried about it, because I think it suits neoliberalism that we don't meet each other, that we don't know each other, we don't know how to be with each other, because we're getting out of practice. And it's certainly the case in my experience, that the better we practice things, the better we do them. It, and the more we don't, the more we kind of easily lose our way. And that's understandable, because we are meant to lose our way. We are not meant to be purposeful people that can eradicate this absolutely atrocious economic stroke political system called neoliberalism, liberalism and its operating system, managerialism, they have nothing to offer. They have nothing to offer our humanity, because it's actually not based on any concern for it, and that's a big problem. So I think we have to get together in groups. We have to work together. And it won't be just with social workers, because all the professions now are affected.
Prof. Mim Fox 30:49
Thank you to Pam for sharing her time with us. It's through the stories of our great social work educators that we can keep learning as a community that's interested in the pedagogy that underlies working with people in all of their humanity. Thanks, Pam.
Dr Ben Joseph 31:12
You've been listening to the Social Work Teach podcast, a Social Work Media production. The Social Work Media team is made up of Professor Mim Fox, Dr Ben Joseph, Lis Murphy and Justin Stech. Special thanks goes to Maddy Stratton. This episode was hosted and produced by Professor Mim Fox from the University of Wollongong and Dr Ben Joseph from Western Sydney University. The special guest for this episode was Professor Pamela Trevithik. To get in contact with us at Social Work Media, please head to our website at www.Social Work.media, or connect with us via LinkedIn. Thanks for listening.