World-wide beginnings of social work education

This paper records the evolution of social work education from the efforts of Victorian reformers in the last decades of the nineteenth century to remodel charity work as scientific philanthropy. To the extent possible, the story is told in the welds of all the people involved. The very first school of social work, with a two-year full-time programme, was established in Amsterdam in 1899, but the rea beginnings of social work education are found in Octavia Hill's training of volunteers in housing management and 'friendly visiting' in the 1870s. Expansion of this training in the 1880s, in cooperation with he Women's University Settlement, led in 1890 to an organised one-year programme of courses and field practice which evolved, under the direction of the Charity Organization Society, into the London School of Sociology, launched in 1903. In addition to the school already established in The Netherlands, the early 1900s saw a blossoming of, schools or programmes of social work in the United States, throughout the United Kingdom, and in Germany. The 'first' in Asia, Africa, and South America, which came later, are also described along with the legacies of these many beginnings.