The school social worker as leader: Are master’s students prepared to take leadership roles in their future schools?

Abstract

Master of Social Work (MSW) programs are in a position to prepare school social workers to become leaders in their respective schools, allowing the social workers to provide both reactive and proactive solutions to situations in their environment. The purpose of this cross-sectional, exploratory study was to assess the attitudes of social work educators towards the inclusion of leadership skills within school social work curricula, to prepare those students for leadership roles. Social work administrators and educators were surveyed using an online survey distributed to all department chairs of MSW programs which received accreditation through the Council on Social Work Education (n = 75) and the resulting data was analyzed for significant relationships through Chi-square and Fisher exact tests as well as logistic regressions. While the research hypotheses analyzed were found to be non-significant, the resulting data serves as a foundation to more exploration of this topic and of leadership within host settings in general, as well as leadership in micro practice.