As a school welfare officer you are often alone of having your perspective and must struggle to preserve that perspective. At the same time, there are very little defined what role a social worker should have in a school. This makes it nessesary to form and develop your role of profession independently. According to the Swedish school law, the schools are not required to employ a welfare officer. This makes the school welfare officer inferior to the other branches of occupation in school. In this background, the aim of this essay is to investigate how social workers in schools feel about their role of profession, and what factors forces and developes that role. Furthermore, the school welfare officers view on the importance of preventive healthwork and taking part in preventive social work is discussed. By experience, there are many different views on what role the social welfare worker should have in this work. In order to say something general about the process of professionalizing among school welfare officers, the purpouse is to study a small but as wide and representative group as possible. Semi-structured qualitative interviews and litterature are used as a method to accomplish this study. Five social workers are interviewed, of which four are social workers in schools, and one a social secretary working parttime in a school. They are employed by two different communitys and all work in community-schools. Three are active in the nine-year compulsory school and two in the upper secondery school. In the analysis some suitable theorethical notions from the science of profession and also what has been discovered in previous studies, was used. The result shows that the social workers experience that their perspectives are important and different from other perspectives. A school welfare officer's most important role is to focus on the positive sides of the pupils, to be an emotionally strong person that really sees the pupils without judging or demanding anything. The differences between those who successfully manage to practice the social welfare work the way that they want, and those who don't, is to have principal leaders who support the social welfare worker when the perspectives colide with other interests in the school. The examination also shows that preventive social work is important according to the respondents. Both because it prevents poor health and costs in the future, but also because the social welfare officer becomes known among the pupils. The mayor problem when working with preventive health is competition with time in school. Ones working-hours also regulates the possibilities of working preventive. It is, in other words, a question of resources. The school welfare officer has a unique competence that can?t be replaced by other acteurs in the school. That makes it necessary t...
