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Reflective practice is often positioned as central to social work, yet in reality it is frequently reduced to a procedural task lacking both a critical and transformative potential. Within systems shaped by managerialism, resource constraints and risk-driven priorities, opportunities for meaningful reflection are limited. This poses a risk of reproducing the very inequalities and power imbalances social work seeks to challenge. To be meaningful, reflection must be understood as an explicitly critical and anti-oppressive process, requiring practitioners to engage with how power, emotion, and structural inequality shape their decisions and relationships. In facilitating a recent workshop, these tensions became profoundly visible, highlighting the urgent need to better support social workers in navigating issues of power and ethical complexity and understand the challenges they experience in their everyday practice.

As an educator and researcher in social work, I am particularly interested in how reflective practice can act as a form of professional and moral agency. Facilitating a CPD workshop for Social Work practitioners on this topic was a powerful reminder that reflective practice is fundamental to ethical, relational, and socially just practice. Throughout the session, we engaged deeply with the realities of practice: the emotional labour that often goes unspoken, the persistent presence of power in our interactions, and the ethical dilemmas that rarely have clear or comfortable answers. What emerged was a shared recognition that these challenges are central to what it means to practise social work with integrity. This space enabled the development of useful ways of thinking about and engaging with reflective practice in a context of ongoing uncertainty and unprecedented changes.

Importantly, this experience has also deepened my commitment to doing more grounded, practice-lead, collaborative and co-produced work with social workers across different services. What became clear in this space was that when reflection is intentional, supported, and critically engaged, it enables practitioners to do more than just cope with difficult realities and unresolved challenges. It equips them to question dominant narratives, challenge structural inequities, and remain grounded in values of justice, compassion, and relational care—even within highly constrained systems. Reflection, in this sense, is not just about looking back, but about shaping who we are in practice and who we are striving to become. Being a part of this space has inspired me to want to support practitioners not only in developing reflective skills, but in their ongoing journey of being and becoming the kind of professionals service users and communities need—practitioners who are attuned, ethically aware, and able to work in genuinely relational and empowering ways.

This has led to the design of a pilot study through which social work practitioners across different sectors are invited to share their lived experiences of reflective practice, and the current challenges that may form barriers to becoming reflective practitioners. The study Reimagining Reflective Practice in Social Work will begin this summer. If you would like to learn more about the study and be notified when the recruitment for participants starts, please get in touch.

Written by Dr May Nasrawy Assistant professor in Social Work and Social Care in the School of Education and Social Work.