'Something needs to change'

Published by Professional Social Work magazine, 17 October, 2022

Being an agency social worker has not been a wholly good experience for me. Don’t get me wrong, there have been positives such as pay and progression and opportunity to experience different local authorities. It has improved my knowledge, skills and I have matured in my profession.

However, as an agency worker I have been told I have no rights when a local authority employee made false allegations about my practice. When I challenged this person they denied they had said anything and that they were thankful for my time working with them.

In another local authority my manager attempted to use me as a scapegoat for upper management failings. My union advised me to complete a full chronology and share with the directors which I did. It worked and I got a good reference.

I realise the importance of protecting myself, to ensure everything is documented and the need to be assertive and challenge. I have been exploited, working 18 hour days, seven days a week. I was not paid overtime for this.

I am so sad about local authority management, upper management, and the direction of our profession. I wrote to my MP about the recent independent review into children’s social care. The response I received was a copy and paste with a biro scrawl at the bottom saying how much they appreciate social workers.

I don’t have all the answers but we need to move away from the current state of affairs and we need a voice in government and recognition of our work by the public.

I want to challenge, I think we need to challenge things like KPIs and performance data; how we are being inspected by Ofsted; how we are being overseen by the Department for Education; how our regulator is being run, the treatment of social workers in the court arena.

Have we become ‘yes’ people? Our local authority directors certainly appear to be. I don’t know one who speaks up and out against the politics running our profession and the number of unqualified chefs in our kitchen telling us what to do and taking over.

We are a unique, inspirational, awesome profession which I feel needs protecting and advocating for. Not everyone wants to be a part of challenging but to me challenge is core to social work. I need to be challenged in my role, I need to be questioned on what I am doing, why I am doing it, asked to justify.

Social workers constantly get challenged on their practice, why then can we not challenge upper management and directors and government on what they are doing? In my experience challenge is not always welcomed. Directors do not want to be seen and have no interest in their workers until Ofsted is due in.

I have had a couple weeks reflecting on my next role. I might relocate to Australia as a social worker, I might take a role focused on court work only or I might move into an organisation outside of local authority in adoption.

I will not return as a frontline children’s worker, nor a children’s team manager. I might look at another management role.

I was burnt out in my last role, I was burnt out in the role before that. I worry children’s social care is going to end up privatised. There are already many private companies running ‘projects’ and local authorities paying huge numbers to buy in social work teams to ‘fix’ their issues.

Something needs to change…