360-Degree Immersive Video Training for Social Workers

A new training method that uses 360-degree immersive video is available for newly qualified social workers, allowing them to learn about the barriers and enablers to relationships in long-term child protection work by experiencing encounters with the family as a ‘fly on the wall’.

The method, detailed in a study published in the journal Social Work Education, follows a social worker’s engagement with a family over 11 months, and presents two versions of the same case to show how subtle differences in actions, body language, tone and approach can affect outcomes in child protection social work.

Focus groups held after the training suggested the trainees felt a sense of ‘presence’, as the 360-degree videos replaced their own senses, enabling them to feel the emotion and tone in the scenes and develop a level of empathy with both the social worker and the family in the videos.  Participants also reported using these sensory observations to feel, reflect on and change elements of their practice, and use role modelling in the enabler videos to improve their own practices.

Immersive learning is an emerging field in social work training.  It is based on the principles of process modelling*, which says that people can learn through imitating specific, observable behaviours through observing others.  Importantly, it does not require direct experience.

Associate Professor of Social Work Dr Tarsem Singh Cooner from the University of Birmingham’s Department of Social Work and Social Care co-authored the study, and co-created the videos with social workers, managers and young people at Sandwell Children’s Trust.

He said: “The project started with an ethnographic study that aimed to find out what encourages good practice in building long-term relationships with families.  Researchers shadowed social workers recording the tone and atmosphere in every family visit, including what the social workers were thinking, feeling, and seeing.  We then asked how we could get these findings out to practitioners and managers, to encourage the approaches that work, and stop doing the things that don’t work.”

The work on video scripting started in 2020, and over lockdown the team co-produced various scenarios which ended up as a seven module 2-day immersive training event.  Although the training videos use a fictional family, the actors in the immersive video were experienced social workers.

Dr Cooner said: “We took great care to ensure authenticity in the script, involving young people who had experience of social work involvement to ensure the voices of the service users were present. Experienced social workers were able to convey a level of realism that may not have been possible using other actors.”