Abstract: School social work is one of the important practice areas of social work, and the less developed areas in the west of China are actively promoting social work to enter the school field, so how to give full play to the professional power of school social work is a topic of concern. Observing the professional practice of L-schools in Yunnan Province and adopting the social work systemic perspective, we analyze the practice dilemmas of changing the media system, the service object system, the target system, and the action system faced by school social work. Further to that, we explore the breakthrough strategies in social work professional practice. The study found that the development of school social work in the western less-developed regions faces greater challenges due to factors such as the scarcity of social work talents, the low awareness of social work, the limited environmental conditions for social work development, and the big difference in philosophies between social work and schools. Based on this, we adopt the approach of enhancing the capacity of the above four basic social work systems to break through the dilemmas by emphasizing the cultivation of local talents, raising the awareness of social work, improving the development environment of social work, and importing the value concepts of social work, so as to promote the landing and development of school social work in the western less-developed regions.

Key words: school social work, social workers, practice dilemma, breakthrough strategies