Developing Professional Standards for Social Services

This paper is about developing professional standards of personal social services. Professional standards are to serve as a basis for promoting quality of service provision. The experiences which will be shared in this article are coming from a nationwide project aimed at modernizing social services including development of professional standards. This project is undertaken by the Institute for Social Policy and Labour (a research and development organization which belongs to the Hungarian Ministry of National Resources) and financed partly by the European Social Fund under the Social Renewal Operative Program in Hungary. Modernising social services means emphasising the importance of collaboration, partnership with and participation of service users and communities in social services delivery on one hand, and seeking transparency and accountability on the other. In Hungarian social services system the third necessary aim is to further professionalization of social services. In our project we try to reach every one of these aims. This is not an easy task. In this paper some of the problems will be analysed which we have met in the course of development. Although developing professional standards for social services is not a cure-all initiative, it can promote constructive changes and contribute to the solution of several problems in social services field.

Keywords: social services, modernization, quality development