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!
