From July 20 to 21, Zhou Hong, Party Secretary of Ginling College, Yang Guangfei, Vice Dean of Ginling College and Liu An, Assistant to the Dean of Gingling College, led a team to Suzhou, Kunshan, Taicang and other regions. This visit aimed to research on the development of social work in local schools and expand employment channels by visiting relevant enterprises. Jin Dejiang, Deputy Director of the Family Education Psychology Special Committee of Jiangsu Psychological Society and Founder of Family Education Training Network, and his team joined the research.

School social work in Suzhou was launched in 2011 and has covered more than 90 junior and senior high schools across the city now with over 250 full-time school-based social workers, basically achieving full coverage of directly affiliated schools and pilot schools in all county-level cities. Among them, Taicang area took the lead in realizing the full coverage of “one social worker for each junior and senior high school” in Jiangsu Province and has established a service system of school social work featuring four categories: prevention-oriented, improvement-oriented, development-oriented and intervention-oriented through practice. In May 2025, the Central Social Work Department and the Ministry of Education jointly hosted a special training programme on school social work in Taicang. Relying on innovative platforms such as the “Home-School Direct Link”, Kunshan area has actively explored effective approaches to boost school-family-community collaboration and the all-round development of students through moral, intellectual, physical, aesthetic and labour education via school social work.

The research team visited government authorities, primary and secondary schools, and social work institutions. Through meetings and in-depth exchanges on professional difficulties in clinical practice and capacity-building requirements for school-based social workers with officials from competent authorities for local school social work, school principals and front-line school-based social workers, the team learned advanced experience in improving institutional mechanisms for school social work in each area, collected information on job demands for school-based social workers, and understood practical experience and challenges encountered by schools in service delivery.

The research team also held special forums with multiple social work enterprises in Suzhou After learning their demands of school-based social workers, the team help matched the requirements, including post setting, competency requirements and talent reserve, with the internship and employment of the postgraduate students majoring in social work in our college. When it comes to the problems and difficulties during service delivery, the team provided on-site feedback and professional suggestion to the schools and professional institutions as well.

Through this visit, our college reached preliminary cooperation intentions with education bureaus of Suzhou, Kunshan and Taicang, together with primary and secondary schools including Suzhou Tianjiabing High School, Changshu Haiyu Middle School, Kunshan Qingyanggang Experimental School and Taicang Liangfu Middle School. Cooperation covers multiple dimensions including joint training of Master of Social Work students, internship base construction and graduate employment.

Following the successful hosting of the First Jiangsu Forum on the Professional Development of School Social Work on May 30 this year, this visit represents another initiative of our college to continuously advance the disciplinary development of social work. In the future, our college will closely respond to actual job demands for school social workers, optimize talent training scheme accordingly, strengthen practical training and improve internship planning, aiming to offer solid theoretical support, practical experience and talent guarantee for the professional development of school social work in Jiangsu Province and across the country.