Social Work Students Attitudes towards Deservingness of Social Help : (Results of Research in Five European Schools of Social Work)

Welfare systems in Europe have fundamentally changed in recent decades: The care paradigm was replaced by a neoliberal one in which social services are increasingly linked to individual behaviour as well as to criteria of belonging or not belonging. Students of Social work grow up in these systems and studies (e.g. Fenton 2020, 2021a) raised the concern that students of social work already internalized the neoliberal narrative of self-responsibility and self-sufficiency. This was the starting point of a European research project, including five Schools of Social Work from Austria, Denmark, England, Germany, and Spain. A survey with over 400 first year students raised the question, what influence do neoliberal narratives have on students’ conceptions of deservingness. This article presents some results of the research project focusing on the following questions: How do students perceive social problems and who do they perceive as deserving and undeserving groups? How authoritarian are the students’ attitudes and to what extent do they affect the explanation of social problems? The results show that the neoliberal narrative seems to have little influence on social work students’ attitudes: They link receiving help less to conditions and are less discriminating between target groups, more likely to hold society responsible for social problems and less authoritarian in their attitudes. Although this alleviates the concerns that students have already internalized the neoliberal narrative, it does not mean that social work education can and should neglect addressing social change processes.