Children in Care team through the eyes of a newbie

I have been on my placement in a local authority Children in Care team (CiC) for ten days now. That’s obviously not a very long time and so this blog post comes from someone with limited experience. But one of the things I have been discussing with my fellow student is our lack of induction. The placement has been great so far, I’m loving it – but I do feel I’m asking a ridiculous amount of questions because we did, in many ways, get thrown into the deep end.

As such, I suppose this post is more for students or people wanting a basic insight into some of the things the team does on a day to day basis. Given that I’ve only been there for ten days, I will definitely leave lots out but I’ll come back to this at a later point.

So the basics:

Our CiC team handles a few child protection cases but mainly works with LAC or CLA (looked after children also known as children looked after…)

I have been allocated 3 ‘cases’ as well as co-working a CP case. 3 young people – all between the age of 10-15. However, our team can work with babies, from the moment of birth, up until 16 when the young people will be transferred to the 16+ team. I know this is different in some Local Authorities – for example some leaving care teams will meet the young person age 16 but not start formally taking over the case until they are 18.

On a basic level, in terms of statutory requirements:

-          I need to visit each young person every 4 weeks minimum (stat requirements are 6 weeks, in our LA it’s 4 weeks.)

-          I need to plan for and prepare for LAC reviews. They tend to happen every 6 months and involve writing a report, giving an update on all the areas of the CAF framework – child’s developmental needs, parenting capacity both of birth parents and foster parents etc. I have just completed my first one for a LAC next week. As part of this, it’s important to get the views of the young people pre the meeting. I was given a specific consultation leaflet to go through with my young person, but we are going to be learning to use a piece of software which is a much more dynamic and engaging way for young people to express their views, tailored to their age group – where they can choose themes and characters and play games while filling in their answers. After the LAC review, I will then be updating their care plan in accordance with key decisions made.

-          I need to attend PEP reviews every 6 months. Personal Education Plan meetings – where you discuss with the school how the young person is getting on, look at any extra support they might need…

-          You also need to make sure their health assessments are done on time and there is an ongoing health action plan

On top of this, there is a lot of day to day stuff. I have found so far that despite being pretty efficient (that’s not trying to blow my own trumpet but I think if I have one strength, being organised and efficient is it) I have a huge to do list that grows by the day. Each visit you do often ends in a pile of tasks – mine has included everything from applying for a passport for my young person to helping to arrange contact between them and their siblings to looking into whether a foster care agency will pay for the young person to go on a school trip.

Then there’s the stuff that you really want to be focusing on, creating more meaningful direct work with young people. From my measly 10 days, I can already see how little time there is to do this, even as a student. I have started to read up on life story work, in the hope of creating a book for one of my young people before she moves to her next long term placement. I am looking into finding an advocate for another young person and need to consider a referral to counselling, if their eligibility meets the threshold, for another.

In between this, there are duty days, where we must not arrange visits, but be on the desk for anything that might come in – such as supervising contact sessions between birth parents and children in care, or helping out with cases where the social worker might be away.

There’s also the limits set by the fact that you can only see young people after 4pm when they come home from school. I have found this can make it quite hard, in the three days a week I’m on placement, to fit all my visits in, but it’s also a really nice way to break up the day, if you’ve been sat working through your more ‘paperwork based’ to do list in the first half of the day, knowing your visit is coming up to look forward to.

There’s lots of other stuff that I know little about as it isn’t something I’ve yet had to do – like viability assessments – working out if someone might be a suitable foster carer before handing it over to the fostering team to do the full on assessment.

I’m loving it so far. It’s very interesting. There are a huge number of learning opportunities. Perhaps frighteningly so. We have a big responsibility – the term ‘corporate parent’ comes up a lot. And everytime I see something on my list move further down, it’s important to remember and sometimes reconsider priorities. It has made me sad that so early on, I’m struggling sometimes to find the time to work on the things I really want to, but I also think that the smaller tasks are taking me that much longer because I have to ask a million trivial questions.

It’s pretty damn exciting though. I’ve spent lots of time researching direct work techniques, starting to make my own toolkit, including my handmade board game! And a variety of worksheets for when they might be appropriate.

There are also many challenges, and I'm sure i'll go into these more once I gain further experience. But one that has struck me is the dynamic between social worker and foster carer. There have been 1 or 2 instances already where the tone a foster carer has used, or their advice to the young person, didn't sit entirely right with me - and I think that will be an interesting dynamic to explore further..

That’s all for now!

End of summer, preparing for final year.

I can’t quite believe my 2 month summer has come to an end. I wasn’t quite sure how I’d fill it but in the end it was ridiculously busy. I spent a bit of time back at the WhoCares Trust charity, I spent 2 weeks and 3 Sundays, on an incredible camp, mentoring 16 year olds. This has been my favourite bit of the summer and I’m sad to be saying goodbye to them this weekend. I’ve been back to adland to freelance. And I’ve completed my training to be a Prince’s Trust mentor next year. I’ve also spent a bit of time thinking about and reading up on my dissertation topic – which as it stands, is about the lack of emotional support/the role of the support network for care leavers…and am coming to the end of organising my big annual charity event which takes place next weekend. So…. This week I went to have a meet and greet at my new placement team, a local authority Children in Care team. Generally, I’m incredibly excited about the opportunity. This was my top choice for a placement team, and the area of foster care is one of the main ones that inspired me to move into social work, within a broader passion for social justice. I’m also pretty nervous. It’s going to be an extremely different environment from the last placement. In my first placement, the first 6 weeks were an induction period where we held no cases, and even when that changed, it grew slowly to 3 clients, all of whom lived in the setting and so were also ‘managed’ by all the staff there. This time, I have already been told 3 ‘cases’ allocated to me, before I’ve even begun. But there sounds like a heap of learning opportunities, and basically I just hope I’m up to the job. I was thinking a bit about the role – and how on the one hand, you’re trying to get your portfolio done for uni, and hit your key roles etc, and on the other hand you’re trying to impress your practice educator and do a good job. And I think its quite easy to forget, as a student, the third area – in this case, to do a great job for the children I’ll be working with, the whole reason we all chose this career. Whilst that may sound like I’m not doing it for the right reasons or ridiculous that I would even forget this – I don’t think that’s the case, I just think it’s easy to become bogged down in the targets you are being set and the task at hand, i.e to pass the MA! And so, to remind me of that constantly, I stuck on the wall a fantastic double page spread from the WhoCares magazine, entitled ‘social workers read this’ written by young people, with quotes as to what makes a good and bad social worker. Tomorrow comes an opportunity to recap on some of the law, ready for my first week next week. Here’s to a challenging but hopefully fantastic final year, and the chance to reinforce and reward my decision to change career! P.s If anyone has any idea how to sort the formatting in Blogger and make the paragraphs that I can see when i write the post, actually appear when i post it, i'd love to know!!

Working with teenagers for the first time...

This week I had my first experience of working with teenagers. I have been convinced for quite some time that this is the age group I’d like to work with when I qualify as a social worker, but I hadn’t actually had any experience to base that on. I’ve done youth work with 10-12 year olds for years but teenagers was a new thing. My experience on my first placement, working in a residential project for adults with mental illness had taught me many skills that I thought would also help with this age group. My role as keyworker had been all about developing one on one relationships, and I had worked with clients with a range of emotions, from aggressive behaviour to apathy and disengagement, all of which I felt would be relevant. This week I worked as a mentor on week 2 of a three week programme. (I still have week 3 to do, but it’s not residential.) It was an incredibly inspiring process and massively reinforced my desire to work with this age group. There’s so much written about young people, many of these stereotypes we discussed this week – of violence and anti-social behaviour, of laziness and apathy. But this group of young people couldn’t have been more different. In fact, one of them, on his 16th birthday, was on a visit that we lead to a care home where they engaged with people with both dementia and schitozphrenia, and turned to us to ask if he really had to leave then or if he could stay longer. He’d been going round giving the older people nicknames (in a good way) to make them feel part of our team. He was singing songs with them and generally having a pretty great time. This is the stuff that should make the press. This programme is all about inspiring future leaders and discussing engagement in the local community. As our group had signed up for drama, we worked with an incredible practitioner, who helped them make sense of their experience through theatre, and express many of the emotions and difficulties they had felt, in such a powerful showcase on the final day, that it brought some of the audience to tears. They left their families with a message of possibilities and hope. And they’re coming back next week to work on a campaign about raising awareness of mental health issues, in older people within their local community, to try to inspire and engage other young people. In addition to all this group work, myself and the other mentor of the team, carried out one on ones with each young person, spending time with them to discuss their goals in life and identify their strengths. This was probably my favourite bit of the week. Because this week was a huge learning for me too. At times I felt a bit despondent, looking at the other youth workers and feeling that I was a bit too shy in comparison, that I didn’t have their outgoing ability to jump into a room and instantly energise 63 kids. But over time, I have come to accept that there’s little point comparing yourself to those around you and to accept who I am and the strengths I do have, and I’d like to think that working in this way, through one on ones plays to my strengths. Getting to know these young people and inspire them to see quite how amazing they are. The theme that constantly came through was their lack of self belief. One of the things I most enjoyed was talking at the end of the week, to the mother of the drama’s leading lady. The girl whose acting skills blew me away but who was filled with insecurity. I really enjoyed telling her mum quite how great she was, and using the one on one time, to try to drum that in, just a little bit more. I also found certain moments a real challenge and learning for me. Having mainly worked with much younger children, I was in a few situations that I was not used to, where I saw young people upset and where it wasn’t for me to help. This was something I struggled with at first. One night I came back to my flat to find 2 of the 4 young people I was ‘looking after’ in tears. I got the sense that it was about something like a fight with a friend and I asked if they wanted to talk but they didn’t. It was incredibly difficult that evening going to sleep, hearing people crying from their rooms but accepting that they are not kids, they are young adults and they are entitled to their own space and their own way of coping, knowing I am there if needed. I think this is all part of learning about life development, and understanding how to tailor your communication appropriately. How to build the relationship of a mentor, not a friend or teacher. How to guide, support and inspire, not patronise or preach. I’m only halfway through my social work journey and I still don’t know where it will take me. But I really do feel privileged to have spent 6 months working with adults with mental illness and this last week and the next to come working with these young people. I don’t know what job out there is going to be right for me, whether it will be a pure social work one or not – but I do know that working with these young people in the last few days, has made me feel more fulfilled than I have in a long time.

End of my first placement - looking back

I am now at the end of my placement, just two weeks to go. Looking back, I think I have learnt huge amounts and been very luck to be placed in a setting where I have been so immersed in my clients' worlds, where I get to see them all during their good and bad days or hours, not just for the one hour social work appointment that I might be limited to in a different setting. I think that has been invaluable as a first year placement, helping me build my confidence in communicating with a range of clients, learning to put boundaries in place, to work with aggressive behaviour and to try to achieve some positive outcomes. I spoke in my group supervision on Friday about my lesson in celebrating the small differences. You can't come into this career without hoping to make a difference but none of us can 'fix' things. Of my 3 clients here, one is currently in prison and one has had to leave the placement temporarily after an aggressive incident. However within the last 6 months I can celebrate the little things I have achieved; the conversations where hopefully I broke through and helped give hope, the services I found and helped my clients engage with or the sense that someone cared which felt new and unusual to them. So many people struggle to define social work and admittedly my job on this placement has not been that of a traditional social worker - more a keyworker, working alongside therapists. But what has struck me, perhaps one of the many difficulties of the job, is that every time you open your mouth to a client/service user, you are doing your job and those words, that you often come up with in the moment are so important. When a client is telling me they feel suicidal, or unloved, or they are being threatening or just despondent or apathetic, we think in the moment of the best thing to say. And often I feel at that time quite a lot of pressure to consider my words carefully abd put the emphasis on listening. This is why I am glad next year we will be learning counselling skills. So I look towards my summer now, with a mixture of chill time, volunteering and dissertation work and am slightly disbelieving that I am now halfway through and will qualify next year. I am excited to start working with social workers in September and to get closer to the client group I believe I want to work with but I'll miss both clients and staff a huge amount. I feel lucky to have had this setting and I believe that the group supervision and fri afternoon business meetings together with regular 'pre' and 'post' groups are an invaluable foundation for reflective thinking, both on a personal and collaborative level. Bring on the final 2 weeks!  

Celebrating small differences

I haven’t written a blog post in quite a while, mainly because university has been pretty mental. My exams are now finished, and I have recently found out I have been accepted onto a local authority graduate scheme which means I will get my second placement with them and if the placement goes well and I like it and they like me, pending an interview, I’ll be offered a job there for the next two years. I’m very excited about it although anxiously awaiting to find out which team I’ll be placed in. My top choices would be LAC or young offenders, as my instinct is that that is the area I’d like to work. And if not those two, then I’d like child protection as I think the experience would be invaluable. So we’ll wait to see! I now have about 30 days left of my placement and a month to complete my portfolio – it’s weird being able to see the end in sight, and I’m trying to sort out my summer. I’m waiting to find out if I’ll work on a residential camp with young people and have a few other places I’m in contact with, as well as dissertation work and a holiday planned! So, diary aside, recently there has been some big stuff happening on placement. My first client, who I have spent a great deal of time working with, will be leaving soon, at short notice, for a range of reasons I won’t go into for confidentiality purposes. As a result of this imminent departure, I felt that I did the first piece of work that I felt really proud of, and one of the reasons I’m writing about it, is because it’s nice to celebrate the good stuff that we do, particularly as it wasn’t really recognised at all by my placement and I think sometimes this stuff should be. Or maybe it just felt like a big deal to me but either way I’m happy. My client was going to have a choice to go to a different placement that they were offered or not take it, which would likely mean she would find herself homeless. As I predicted, when offered the placement she said that she did not want it. She was angry at the organisation and refused to listen to what was on offer nor did she want to consider the consequences. The assessment at the new placement was lined up for the same day, so if she could not be persuaded to go, a few days later she was likely to be homeless, so it was a pretty important day. I couldn’t bear the idea of my client being homeless. Despite certain unacceptable behaviour, I had seen so many great qualities in her (not to mention that no-one deserves to be homeless) and had formed what I think has been a really good relationship through the ups and downs and so I was determined to support her to make the decision that I really felt was best for her. I sat with her over many hours, sometimes just with her, sometimes in a meeting with the housing department which she had organised and sometimes over the phone when she left to talk through her options. At one point while she was angrily shouting about not wanting to have anything to do with the organisation, I stopped her and just said firmly, ‘I’m speaking to you as an adult here, what will you do on Monday, if you don’t take this placement’. And it seemed to work/ She stopped talking and just thought about it and then asked me why I cared so much and I was glad to be able to say that I’d really enjoyed working with her over the last 5 months so it was really important to me that she was ok wherever she went next. She said she would think about it and a few hours later called me to say she’d take it. For me, I guess this was a pretty big deal, it felt like I’d made a bit of a difference. She may well act out in a similar way at the next placement, as she so often has before. But I knew from her CPN that no other options were available, and I’m hoping that after so much rejection in her life, knowing someone cared, might have made a tiny difference. This will be a difficult week as I’ll really miss her and hope it goes well. But I think it’s important that we celebrate the small differences we can make. Particularly because I find that in my placement, differences are so often intangible and up and down, mental health has no quick fix solution – nor do any of the issues our service users come to us with, that the small peaks have to be noted, to help us get through the frustrations that many days bring.

Capacity, lawyers and ramblings

First - I have no idea why this blog has got rid of all my spacing but don't have time to work it out right now, apologies!! During the course of my MA I have done some basic learning on capacity. I know the 5 key principles of the MCA and broadly understand the DoLS. But in terms of application there are still areas I'm unclear on and how well trained different professionals may be in this field. Recently I witnessed a client who needed to go to court and give a guilty or not guilty plea. The weeks before the hearing their mental health had deteriorated quite a bit and it was thought this was largely due to the anxiety about the upcoming hearing. In the days before, my client was asked to call the lawyer to tell them the plea so they could prepare the case. The client refused to do so and then when they did call, it was only to sack the lawyer and ask for a different one to represent them. On the day, the client was incredibly anxious, did not really engage with the lawyer and so it was suggested that they say that the client lacks capacity to make a plea and therefore can be assessed by a psychiatrist. When I was informed of this I thought it was the right decision and wondered why none of the staff had thought in the day or two before that this might end up being the case. Someone expressed the view that the lawyer had only said this because they didn't know how to deal with the client, having only met him years before and therefore wanted to avoid it going to trial if a non guilty plea was given. This lead me to think firstly did he have the capacity to make the decision to change lawyers at the time and therefore end up with one who may have been less experienced at 'dealing' with the client and also it felt sad that it was looked at in that way rather than think we are protecting the client's mental health. I still find it hard to know whether they did have capacity in these two decisions regarding the lawyer and the plea. They can retain the information and communicate the response but can they understand it? I struggle to know. I suppose that's the purpose of the assessment. We had assumed the client had capacity and I had done everything to support the client in making the decision, explaining the outcomes of both pleas and I was aware that the client could make an unwise decision but was it one they understood? Also, are there any lawyers with specific training in working with clients with mental health difficulties? Or much training in this matter? Apologies if this is a really obvious question .

My post on Guardian Social Care Network

The Guardian kindly asked me to write a post about my career change!

http://www.guardian.co.uk/social-care-network/social-life-blog/2012/apr/05/swap-advertising-social-work?CMP=twt_gu