The overarching themes of the conference are innovation, resilience and preparedness of social work education (SWE) to learn from times of uncertainty and build on these lessons for the future. Social cohesion has been challenged in the past decades through ongoing human rights abuse, challenges in human service delivery and human crises. At the same time, European societies have been immensely challenged as a result of the recent socio-economic and public health crises. These have resulted in challenges for social welfare systems, social organisation and individual lifestyles. Therefore, issues and questions are rising on the preparedness of SWE to respond to new demands for students, practitioners and service users, including new forms of liaising within and between these groups of people, new ways of making sense of SW practice and its impact on peoples’ lives as well as how this can make a difference and new pedagogical approaches to trigger the transformation of SW students’ worldview. This conference aims to address such issues through rigorous and challenging discussions.

We hope to able to address and find answers to a rather crucial a question – that of re-examining the skills and knowledge applied by professional social workers and, consequently, the development of innovative SW curriculum and training to respond to these new challenges. Consequently, SWE must critically reflect on methods, theories and practices that have been developed thus far, to be a lead actor in addressing current crises in a meaningful way. Lessons must be learnt to build new solutions, which enhance collaboration between disciplines and fields of study that share common values. The task must be none other than to increase resilience and maintain social cohesion, social justice and human dignity.

Concepts of social innovation comprise of normative viewpoints, which focus on changing social structures to increase social justice and ensure resilience. This is often done by empowering disadvantaged groups of people (social intrapreneurship) and pragmatic approaches that highlight feasible (often technical) and novel solutions (social entrepreneurship and digital technologies) for social problems. Thus, social innovations do not remain at the level of abstract goals or plans but imply the intentional restructuring of social practices. Routine-based practices in general, along with pedagogical and organisational practices, are also considered important resources for social innovation. Hence, social innovation in education implies changes in knowledge resources, actor constellations, social practices and discourses of education.

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