I’ve just come back from my trip across the country to shadow a supervising social worker in fostering and adoption. Before I get into the details, this week I also spent a day in a duty and assessment team. I’d shadowed there before and have posted about it in detail (it seems to be my most read post!) but this day was a bit different as I sat on the duty desk just seeing the different referrals that get made and which ones go through to social workers. It was really interesting as they get all the police reports through as a matter of course, many of which aren’t relevant to social services but if someone under 18 has been involved, they have to know about it. And then a huge variety of cases come in – from kids who went missing and have since come back but seem to be depressed (possible referral to children and adolescent mental health services) to possible domestic violence cases – some of which don’t need SS intervention because court proceedings are already in place for contact and the police are involved. It was just interesting seeing the behind the scenes work and the invaluable work of the social work assistants who input all these referalls onto the systems so if any case comes up more than once, it’s carefully noted – these are some of the people losing their jobs in the cuts.
Anyway, back to fostering and adoption!
A supervising social worker (SSW), supervises foster carers – supervising visits to check all is going well, helping to prepare reports for reviews, assess and recruit carers, help with life story books – and this social worker did a huge amount of other tasks too – working in adoption, (recruiting and assessing families to adopt), getting involved in life appreciation days, where all the professionals involved in a child’s life, get together with the family that is about to adopt them to tell them more about the child, and she does post adoption work – helping those who have been adopted, who want to know more and perhaps reunite with birth families. Among other things. That’s a pretty vague description of her job, having only spent 2 days with her.
The first day we had a meeting at the primary school of a child who is in foster care. We met with the foster carer, a teacher from the school, as well as a representative from another school where the child’s sibling goes, the child’s social worker and a few others. The meeting was to check how the children were doing in school, both educationally and from a social point of view – and as one had just started secondary school, it was a good opportunity to discuss in more detail the kind of support it was felt she needed and some of the things the foster carer might want to discuss with her – for example – did she like the idea of starting a clean slate and no-one knowing about her past, or did she want to feel a or several specific teachers knew about it and therefore she could turn to them when she wanted? Also, how to prepare the child for questions that would come up about her past. In biology, you tend to cover genetics and eye colour – in English they were going to be asked to write about their life so far etc.. things I’d always taken for granted.
There was also some additional things to consider about contact. These siblings had a younger sibling who was about to be adopted and whose family don’t want them to have any further contact. This issue has always been one I find difficult. I wrote a post much earlier about cutting off sibling contact – I find it a hard one to get my head around if the siblings don’t cause any risk to the child – and I could only imagine how hard it was to tell these kids that they could no longer see their younger sibling – or at least for many many years until they get to 18. It also brings up the role of social media – once they’re all on Facebook, who says how long it will take for them to reunite of their own accord, without support systems in place?
We then had lunch with the social worker I was shadowing’s old manager – where I heard more about many of the issues local authorities are facing at the moment – staff off sick, less managers about, overworked people – and much of the work getting privatized to more dynamic organisations.
After visting the foster carer from the school meeting again to get documents ready for updating CRB checks, and discussing risk assessments around the home, we went on to visit another foster carer. A kinda super nanny figure who has adopted many children and is now fostering many more. In many ways it was incredibly inspiring seeing how many lives she had changed. She was dealing with a whole spectrum of issues from disabled babies born from drug addicted parents, to teenagers dropping out of jobs, sleeping with their partners too young and everything in between. There were lots of interesting things for me:
- no one could sleep over at the house without being CRB’d – ie the kids’ friends
- she talked about going shopping with some of the kids in care and when random people came over saying “aahh cute, whats their names?” she has to change the names because of the situation
She was also having interesting challenges regarding contact. It seems that some of the children in the past had changed their behaviour drastically the moment contact with their birth parents stopped – they calmed down, they immediately stopped bed-wetting etc. I found this really interesting.
One thing that did concern me a bit, and something that came up in my mind the next day too, was that taking on all these children, could and it seemed sometimes did, have quite an impact on the birth children, or even older adopted children. Can you always give enough time to your own/older kids, when you have so many younger kids/kids who are quite demanding to focus on too?
The next day we visited a family looking to adopt their first child – we had a general chat with them and then did some exercises about children’s behaviour . Some of it was quite interesting, ie a discussion about hitting your child. The exercise was clearly trying to make sure the couple thought it was wrong to hit a child – but, I just wondered whether it was quite as black and white as this. I’m not saying I think it’s right – but equally I doubt everyone thinks that a light hit is the same as child abuse. I know it’s a topic that comes and goes in different generations and that we have to be particularly careful about people who are about to adopt and their attitude but I still thought it was quite a tricky issue.
We also had an interesting chat about contact and options such as keeping contact with birth parents but without sharing photos. Also, what happens if the birth parents go on to have other children after you’ve adopted this one – would you allow them contact with their siblings? Contact is clearly an incredibly challenging and interesting part of adoption and I found it particularly so as I’m pro adoption for myself at some point so was often wondering what I would do in a given situation.
This couple were going to pre-approval training where they met others in the same position – I imagine this can form a pretty great support network, and certainly many of the foster carers we visited, seemed to know others they’d met at various training groups.
Finally we visited one more foster carer who had a number of her own children as well as those on placement. She seemed to be doing a remarkable job and I very much enjoyed sitting with a baby on my lap! One of their children is soon to be adopted so there was much discussion about that process and how to make the transfer smooth, in terms of letting them come into the house and start to look after the child as much as possible. The carer seemed to be incredibly thoughtful making suggestions such as texting the adoptive parents photos of the child when they wake up saying “morning mummy and daddy” – and she’d created a gift, a printed book of photos for them, as well as the life story book they’d worked on.
We discussed a template for an ideal life story book – something the social worker could create for all her carers if they wanted to use it. A life story book is a book that gives the child a sense of history and identity as they grow older, as well as some continuity for the next carers – it includes photos of them growing up, people important in their life – and anything from what subjects they liked in school, food or toys they like, to medical history.
What also struck me over this trip was how much time and money you needed to have to make fostering or adoption work. Fostering itself pays but as it doesn’t pay much, it certainly prevents people with less money from doing it. Although I know this is a contentious issue in itself – you’d never want people to foster for the money so it’s a hard balance to get right. But also having the time – if you work, and you’re adopting, how do you take time off for regular social worker visits – many of the people we met were stay at home mums or housewives which made meeting social workers more flexible – or people who worked shifts.
The broadest point though was that in every case, the change in the children being fostered was said to be remarkable - such an incredibly rewarding thing both to do and to observe.
Another great experience, and thank you to the fantastic social worker who not only allowed me to shadow, but to stay in their home for a few nights!
So that brings my shadowing to an end. I’ve done a mental health day centre, a social worker in community mental health and in fostering and adoption and some time with a charity who work with kids in care. It’s been a fantastic five weeks.
Next week is my induction week at uni and lectures begin the week after…I’m excited and nervous too – just the idea of being a student again after this time makes me slightly anxious…but I’ve been waiting for it long enough!
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