Placement ending and interesting learnings

I haven’t posted for quite some time. I am now almost at the end of my placement; about 10 days left. I’ve just finished my portfolio, got my last exam this week and then it’s preparing for my first job alongside dissertation writing.

It’s been a pretty intense time and I’m glad to be making the transition shortly to paid employment! Its also satisfying to know that I gained interviews at all bar one of the other Local Authorities I applied to before I knew this job was confirmed. It’s reassuring because the role I am starting was a bursary process, so it was not quite the standard recruitment process, and it’s valuable to at least know my applications were in the right direction!

 This placement has been such a huge learning curve and I can’t pretend that self doubt hasn’t reared its ugly head at times. I absolutely love the role and working with young people in general, but sometimes it’s hard not to focus on the responsibility you hold for the decisions you make and worry that you didn’t act as well as you could have done. However, I like to think that’s all part of reflecting and considering how you can handle things better next time.

One recent example was a teenager I have been working with since the beginning of placement and who I will continue to work with in my new role. I have built up a really great relationship with this young person, although recently have become concerned that they might become slightly dependent on me and I have sought advice from our resident psychotherapist as to how I can support the YP to build more effective relationships with their foster carer and other key figures who can support them on a more regular basis, between my visits.

The young person has told me how much they trust me and that they’ve told me things that they haven’t felt able to tell anyone else. In some ways, this is good and a sign of a positive relationship but it obviously has drawbacks and it was the dynamic at their recent PEP (personal educational plan) meeting that this was most noticeably seen. I chaired the meeting and had to discuss a range of factors in the young person’s educational life-  including recent poor behaviour. I tried to involve the YP in the meeting as much as possible, asking their views and their thoughts on possible goals. However, at the next visit the YP told me that they had called me two faced later that day and had not enjoyed the meeting. The YP said that they could now see I was actually trying to help and that they had gone to all their classes that day in line with what I had suggested during the meeting and apologised for the names they had called me behind my back. I wasn’t worried about the names, but I was worried about the YP’s feelings and thought about this for a long time, trying to work out if I had handled the meeting badly or if there was a reason that they might feel unhappy about it, as they had found it difficult to explain to me when asked.

One of the insights I had was that the young person had become used to our relationship as a 1:1 trusted relationship and I had not successfully prepared them enough or managed their expectations as to how the PEP would go – what we might discuss, that I would be sharing some views with other professionals, which is something that the YP is not used to hearing me do and in turn felt as if I was being two faced. Even though the YP had changed their mind by my visit the next day and already told me that they realised I had tried to help, it did knock me back as I feel that this is something many young people talk about – going to meetings and hearing professionals talk about them and make assumptions without considering their view, and it was quite disheartening to think that I might have fallen into the same box. In honesty, I’m still trying to separate out the aspect that was my mistake, alongside appreciating that I won’t always agree with what my young person says and they might get angry sometimes, even if the situation could not have been prevented, in the same way a teen says ‘I hate you’ to their parent for a punishment that may well be fair. I felt the most important part was having the conversation with the YP and making it clear that I felt it was really important to acknowledge and discuss how they felt in the meeting so that we could improve it next time.

Anyway…! I have a week of farewell visits as I’m only keeping one case as I move across to my new team.

I am a mixture of excited and apprehensive about moving teams, getting new cases and the quantity of cases and support I will receive but I am looking forward to the challenge of getting to know more young people and building up new relationships!

A job, a job, a job!!

I have a job!!

Not that I’m ridiculously excited or anything….

….I’m almost at the end of a chapter.

By the end of May, I will have finished my final year placement, handed in my portfolio and taken my exams. The only thing remaining is my dissertation (which is slightly stressing me out, as I’m yet to receive details for any young people I’ll be interviewing but that’s another story!)

Most excitingly, I have a job and not just any job but a job in a Children in Care team, which is exactly what I wanted and what I have been doing on placement. It’s been a nightmare recruitment process, one minute thinking I have a job, the next minute receiving an email that contradicts the prior one but finally I have been allocated my team and start dates are being discussed.

Social work has quite a strict career development path if you want to stay in a local authority, something I find a bit frustrating. For one thing, everyone assumes you’ll want to start in Child Protection and yet I admit to have very little interest in working in a  child protection team. I guess the only thing I’ve known since changing career is that I want a role where I spend as much time as possible working with young people. While I understand there will always be bureaucracy, I have loved the direct work I have carried out in the Children in Care team and I knew that I only really wanted roles in a team like that, or Youth Offending or 16+ - none of which seem to do that much recruitment for NQSW compared to child protection.

I had also looked at some other roles – for example, I’d seen an advert within another local authority, for a young person’s worker. It sounded fantastic – working with a range of young people who are referred from many different settings and one of the qualifications they wanted prospective candidates to have, was a social work one. However the more I thought about it, the more I realised that if I applied and if I ever got the job, and then in 2 years time I wanted to go back into a local authority – they wouldn’t value my experience in the way they should, because I hadn’t strictly worked as a ‘social worker’ nor done the AYSE or the Post Qualification awards and would therefore be starting near the bottom again. It might be different in other local authorities but certainly this is what I am picking up from mine.

I would like the freedom to be able to move around from setting to setting doing different roles, whether ‘social worker’ or not, and certainly this is how I imagine my future to look. The strict path that can be set out for you of Child Protection experience for the first 2 years, then onto another team and upwards to DTM etc doesn’t really appeal to me – but then who knows, maybe I’ll change my mind, or maybe I’ll end up in a charity or a social enterprise or somewhere entirely different.

All I know is that for now, I’m ridiculously excited to be so close to starting as a real life social worker and hoping I can make a real difference to the lives of young people. I’ll be interested to see quite how the transition from student to newly qualified will pan out, whether the protected case load will really be protected!

And outside of the role, to meeting lots of new and interesting people who are equally passionate about social justice. Whether that be my recent catch up with a participation worker at a London Local Authority, to discuss their thoughts on the emotional support network for care leavers, or my chat with two new friends who I met through volunteering at a charity for kids in care, or my trip next week to chat with an MP in parliament about the care system.

One thing I won’t miss is essay writing! I can’t pretend to have much motivation left for my studies, so here’s to the next month or so going pretty quickly!

Lets see what the next chapter brings!

Emotional support for care leavers

I read this article recently on a Labour blog:

http://labourlist.org/2013/03/we-need-to-talk-about-children-in-care/

And sent the following email to the author of the article, MP Bill Esterson. I have since been invited to come and discuss the subject with him in Parliament. Would love to hear further views about the emotional support needed for care leavers to add to the discussion!

Dear Mr Esterson,

I enjoyed reading your article for the Labour List blog.

It is particularly relevant to me as having spent five years as a strategist in the advertising industry, I have recently made a big career change and  am currently finishing my training to be a social worker and am placed within a Children in Care team. I have been offered a job to continue in this team when I qualify in a few months.

My dissertation is going to be exploring the role of the emotional support network for care leavers, through their eyes. I’m teaming up with a Local Authority to carry out focus groups and interviews with young people who have recently made the transition out of care to look at how social workers can improve their practice in further supporting care leavers during this transition to avoid issues like those you write about, young people ending up in prison, homeless or with teenage pregnancies.

It’s not simple though. Many of these young people turn down the support they are offered. But I believe part of this, is because of the coping mechanisms they have had to build during their pre care experiences meaning that they often don’t know how to accept help. Similarly, they are trying to find the balance between becoming fully independent, which they have been desiring for so long, but also knowing how to be interdependent and call on people when they need help. These young people don’t get second chances. They leave care, they perhaps refuse support, but then they don’t get a chance to say they were wrong, that they want to go back into care, or get the mentor or the therapeutic support they didn’t think they needed.

I’m passionate about exploring this area further and if I can help in any way please do let me know.

Yours sincerely,

.....

Social Work themed books….

Social Work themed books….

I have read a few books over the last few years that I guess are related to themes from social work or issues that we, as social workers, might engage with; including homelessness, substance misuse and addiction.

I thought I’d write a couple of lines about these books and please do add any recommendations if you have them.

1. No and Me by Delphine de Vigan

It’s not quite boasting when I say I read this book in 24 hours. It’s a small book, with large writing and I loved it. It tells the story of a child who meets a homeless girl, No, at a station while doing a school project on homelessness. She brings No to live with her own family, who themselves have family problems of their own. Without going into detail, what I loved was the charm and innocence of the story; homelessness through the eyes of a child, who asks so many of the questions, we as adults often take for granted. Strongly recommend.

2. Wasted by Mark Johnson

Many of you may have read Mark Johnson’s book. He’s now the found of the charity User Voice and often writes for the Guardian. This is his tale of his descent into addiction, criminality and homelessness – all the more astonishing when you know where he is in his life now.

3. Stuart: a life backwards by Alexander Masters

Another story of homeless life, this book is written by a writer who becomes friends with Stuart, a homeless man and tells his story backwards, from the present day, back to his life when he was 12.

4. A million little pieces by James Frey

Another account of the rehabilitation process after drug and alcohol addiction. There was a big controversy over whether this was really autobiographical or not, but personally I don’t think it matters at all.

5. All in a Day's Work: One Woman's Story from the Front Line of Child Protection By Becky Hope

This is not the real name of the author, who uses a pseudonym to write her account of life as a child protection social worker. I read this before I made my career change and I just felt that it gave me quite a good depiction of the detail of the job and also a non judgemental understanding of how the situations can arise; the cycles of abuse and deprivation that go through generations.

Social workers can make a difference.

There’s always a lot of doom and gloom floating around the social work profession, sadly not only from those outside of it, but from plenty of social workers on Community Care, overworked, burnt out and cynical.

Most social workers, I think, enter the profession because they want to make a difference. I know that the impetus for my career change was to move to a more rewarding career, to make a difference, to work in the name of social justice and more specifically to engage with young people, who I think are always given a particularly bad name, not least since the riots.

When I first started conducting research into the career, I came up against lots of comments about the frustrations that social workers face every day, particularly when working in such a bureaucratic setting as a local authority and it caused me to question if it was the right career change and whether I really would be able to make a difference, however small.

Halfway through my final year placement, I can safely say that Social Workers can make a difference.

We can’t change lives overnight perhaps (although getting an Emergency Protection Order to remove a child might count!) but I believe in the long term, in my role in the Children in Care team, I really can help.

I have been working with one teenager. They have been failed by the system in a number of ways and for obvious reasons I won’t be going into too much detail. But they were left in their birth family for too long, they are not getting the educational support they should be getting, nor the emotional support, they are fairly isolated and find it difficult to make friends etc.

In the short time I have been working with them, I feel that there have been some changes, no miracles but some steps in the right direction. Through advocacy I fast tracked a CAMHS (child and adolescent mental health services) referral – something that was on this young person’s care plan for the last two years but for some reason had fallen through the gaps, partly due to the perceived difficulty of out of borough referrals. (I say perceived, as I called up the borough, asked them to send me out a form, and wrote the referral…but the perception is probably what sends it further down the to do list.) The young person has now started therapy, just a month after the matter arose during my first LAC review.

I have done lots of research into the local area calling up different youth clubs and found one that matched the young person’s needs particularly well, a single gender youth club. I chatted to the foster carer about it. She had never heard of it before but was excited by the prospect and the young person has now attended two sessions.

I’ve had regular conversations with our education team who are now putting a huge amount of pressure on the out of borough education team to make sure there are no more suitable provisions for this young person and I have spent a lot of time building a relationship, to the point where for the first time, they felt able to talk about many deep seated issues and cry, while telling me they had never been able to cry with a social worker before.

I realise these are all tiny steps, nothing groundbreaking. I also realise that as a student I have a protected caseload, so I am fortunate that I’m able to spend a day during the upcoming half term, making sure I can spend extra time with the young person, going out for an afternoon rather than the ‘tired, after school slot’ and that I have the luxury to leave the office for a half day to attend a therapy session with the young person when the therapist invited me.

I also have faced the frustrations and the bureaucracy that has driven me close to tears as I desperately try to advocate for permanency for a young person, whose permanency meetings keep getting cancelled as Ofsted reviews and the like take priority or as the price of the more expensive foster agency placements take precedence over making a child-centred decision.

But, for anyone wondering whether to make the change to social work, or for those fed up with the public attacks, for me this is just revelling in the feel good moments that come with the role. And they might be the naïve enthusiasm of someone yet to even finish their MA. But after having spent the year before I changed career, helping to advertise beer (!), I can tell you that the joy of finding out your CAMHS referral was fasttracked, or your young person attended the youth group you really weren’t sure they’d go to, is second to none.

Lets make sure we appreciate and celebrate the little successes, because if we don’t, no-one else will!

A short outline of my dissertation proposal: understanding the emotional support network for care leavers

In 2001, The Leaving Care Act (2000) came into force. It stipulated that local authorities (LAs) have a duty to assess and meet the needs of young people aged 16 and 17 who are in care or care leavers. It also set out that every eligible young person in care should receive a comprehensive pathway plan when they turn 16. The Act stipulates that each young person covered by the act will have a personal adviser.

The Personal Adviser will be involved in:

·                                 Providing advice and support

·                                 Drawing up the pathway plan and ensuring it addresses any changing needs

·                                 Keeping in touch with the young person

·                                 Co-ordinating services, linking in with other agencies

However, despite the fact that ‘the role of family and social relationships’ and ‘emotional and behavioural support’ are both in the pathway plan, the focus remains on offering financial and practical support, with elements such as accommodation, education and training. Whilst these are clearly vital areas in supporting young people to live independently, there remains a gap in the offering of emotional support, which is vital so that young people are prepared not only for independence, but interdependence. Interdependent living occurs when an individual depends upon others in areas in which he/she lacks the capacity to function on his/her own.  Robson (2008: 165) found that of the leaving care professionals and personal advisers he interviewed, 71 per cent felt there was insufficient attention paid to emotional support for young care leavers.

The Gap in research:

The focus both of research and legislation for care leavers tends to be on the practical issues highlighted above.

Within the research that exists on emotional support, there is much to highlight this support as being critical for care leavers, spanning UK, USA and Romania (Massinga & Pecora, 2004; Stein, 2005; Duncalf, 2010; Dima, 2011), yet there tends to be very little research specifically looking to understand the entire support network. When young people leave care, it is vital they have an entire support network in order to develop the interdependence mentioned earlier. This support network might not be limited to just one relationship but might be a mixture of relationships; whether it be friends, family, informal mentors or professionals.

The research that comes closest is conducted by Biehal et al (1995), over 17 years ago and before the introduction of the Leaving Care Act 2000, and the role of the Personal Adviser. Biehal et al (1995) found that very few professionals attempted to work with young people on widening their support network and less than 1/3 worked with them on family issues.

There has also been research into specific relationships, such as Marsh and Peel (1999) looking at the role of the extended family, Wade (2008) focusing on the relationships with birth parents and foster carers, Florris (2002) looking at support groups and Cathcart (2002) at mentoring. However there appears to be a gap in understanding the support network in its entirety as viewed by the care leaver. It is particularly important to understand this from the care leaver’s point of view. This is partly because research has shown that professionals choice of ‘people important to the young person’ are often not the same as those that are chosen by the young person themselves. In addition, it might help professionals to understand better ways of engaging with young people to offer support, if perhaps the current process is not working as well as it could be. This might be in relationship to the young person’s early experience with support or lack of support and their need to form their own coping strategies.

Objectives:

The objectives for this research will be to understand:

·         How important care leavers believe an ‘emotional support’ network to be

·         Who is in their network to give them this ‘emotional support’

·         How their support network was developed / How much help they got from their social worker/personal adviser to develop this support network

·         Whether they feel support is in place both for everyday emotional needs and for crisis situations

·         What (if anything) they believe can be done to further help them develop their network

Sexting: Children, Young People and Child Pornography

Sexting: Children, young people and child pornography

I’m crediting this blog to Dr Thomas Crofts and Dr Laura Harvey and Dr Jessica Ringrose whose talks I went to this evening.

The first one was particularly interesting and about the legislative framework surrounding child pornography. The research that he was talking about was all in Australia but I’m sure has similar legal implications here.

He discussed the concept and definitions surrounding pornography, about possessing or distributing sexual material of a child – child being defined as someone who is 18 or under. However he went onto explain, that although laws have really toughened around child pornography, and there are things such as the UN conventions for the rights of the child (Art 34)  in place to prevent adults distributing this material,  they are not set up to handle the subleties of ‘sexting’ – that is, young people who are sending each other sexual images or films i.e via text. (Sexting is not a word young people use themselves, it seems to have come from the media – they are using terms such as naked selfies and nudies).

And in Australia, young people, are being arrested over possessing this material – although there have been no prosecutions yet. The only thing in place to protect them is if they are below the age of criminal responsibility – but in the UK, that’s as young as 10, so unlikely to form any protection.

This all comes down to the perceptions of this material and whether it’s offensive. The law in Australia explores whether its offensive to the reasonable person- but the reasonable person would be an adult – and young people might perceive it differently.

So there is a question about this balance – we don’t want to sanction young people and turn them into criminals (and in Australia this can go as far as being on the sexual offenders register!) but equally we want to protect our young people, and make sure victims who are being bullied are given a voice.

However there is clearly wide spectrum of sexting – some can be clearly exploitative, but others can be two mutually consenting 16 year olds, taking images of each other and keeping them on their phone alone.

The pros – for criminal sanctions – are long lasting ‘haunting harm’ it can cause young people, the digital footprint, that it might encourage deviant sexual behaviour, might whet the appetite of adults and it challenges idealiased notions of childhood innocence.

The outlined cons were that sexting does not fit the rationale driving severe responses to child pornography. In addition repression might incite more sexting, in line with Foucault, perhaps by criminalising, it would actually normalise sexting, does it deny young people their sexual citizenship and the severe sanctions can have long term consequences eg on jobs.

The researcher supported Diane Abbott’s recent message on Women’s Hour – that the ideal is about support and education about sex and relationships, not about sanctions and censorship.  http://www.bbc.co.uk/news/uk-politics-21127073

The second talk followed on from this and was based on research conducted in two schools in inner city London, talking to teenagers and exploring their social media habits.

They found a lot of talk about the idea of getting ‘ratings’ – ie social currency through the way you dress, the girls you get, potentially violence…and a lot of male teens were putting on facebook images of girls’ cleavage, sometimes with their own names written across it. The less ‘easy’ the girl, the more ratings they get. As well as putting up images of girls, they were also putting up images of their six packs – but there was a lot of pressure on them, and they had to negotiate whether it’s the right image to put up  - that enhances their masculinity and doesn’t make them look gay. However if they put the right images up, it’s valuable to them.

On the flip side, the comments under the girls’ pictures tend to discuss how the girls are ‘skets’ and sluts – and it’s much harder for them to get ratings in this way.

The teens were saying, having porn on your phone is for the kids, the year 7s, whereas they have photos of real girls.

A lot of this information is not that new but it just reinforces the notions of gender inequality and the pressures that each gender have to face – the constant negotiations they are working through. Some of the boys are under pressure that if they don’t’ ask a girl for an image, they might be seen as gay – equally girls feel it’s nice to be asked to give an image – but want to balance being a ‘sket’ and being frigid. It’s important to note the pressure on each gender as the media and policy discourse tends to frame boys as problematic and risky, and often demonises this gender.

Interesting insight into this world – although clearly a small sample.