Making family therapy useful: The educator's task

The general lack of take up of family therapy ideas by social work practitioners is described and reasons for this discussed. In particular it is argued that social work students and newly qualified practitioners are often not given enough help to find ways of making the theory useful in practice. The authors believe that it is an important part of the job of a social work educator to facilitate this process of developing theories of practice into practice theory. An approach to teaching family therapy on a CQSW course based on this principle is described, as well as involvement with post qualified social work practitioners.