Abstract
This study sets out the development process of Educational Welfare Services in the U. K. post World War II. It asserts that the UK's Educational Welfare Services developed in the 1950s and 1960s in response to the increasing seriousness of problems concerning the education of maladjusted children and immigrant children in regular schools.
Education Welfare Officers (EWOs) had an important role in the 1960s because they dealt with many cases of truancy and juvenile delinquency among school children. Prior to the publication of the Seebohm Report, EWOs had held administrative responsibilities on student's attendance in primary and secondary schools. With the reports publication, however, they took on the role of school social workers. This development led local governments to create training courses for EWOs in response to the emerging issue of how to train them with expertise in social work.
In the mid 1980s, there was an expansion in the number of EWOs, and at the same time Education Welfare departments were established in most Local Education Authorities. Yet despite this, the number of EWOs qualified as social workers failed to increase sufficiently, and as a result, problems arising from the shortage of expertise in social work among EWOs were left unresolved.
