Hi Nick, I'm writing as an undergrad social policy student from University
of York. In our department social policy is taught to the different
disciplines of social policy and the social work students in the first year
to give everyone a grounding in the discipline. As memory serves the first
thing we did was a group task in which each discipline was split down and
everyone given the same brief. We were given an arbitrary amount (£10,000 I
believe) to distribute amongst different individual with different needs
(such as a disabled woman who needed adaptations to her house following a
smoking related illness wo refused to give up smoking, a teen from a
troubled background who needed an amount to do a training course, an ill
baby with a rare desease who needed pioneering surgery, a teen mum who
needed whatever it was, I forget). We were only permitted to give the full
amounts to the individuals and without enough cash to give to everyone it
was good for introducing the undeserving and deserving debate. Clearly
there were no right or wrong answers and opened up some interesting
debates. An exercise like this will also help highight where social policy
and the decision making in the discipline affects lives everyday. I should
add I thoroughly enjoyed this task for many reasons mainly it was a good
introduction to policy decision making and an icebreaker to my coursemates.
hope this helps Al Duffell
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