Becoming a social worker

[Cupofteaandbiscuits]

Be honest with me!
I am currently Deputy Head / SENCO / DSL in a primary school. I do love my job but my interest is in trauma and safeguarding and whilst I get this a bit through my DSL
and SENCO role but I regularly think that I should have been a social worker.
I’m now seriously considering it.
If you are a social worker, be honest. Is it a rewarding job?
I spend a lot of time at work and am rarely home which I assume will be the same being a social worker? I have two primary aged DC.

Can anyone give me any insight into being a social worker? Thank you x

Within the children's services it's mostly admin, firefighting, and trying to get grown ups to act like grown ups. You don't tend to spend as much time with children as you'd hope.

You'd need water tight childcare arrangements with people who are flexible to plans changing last minute. You also need to be fairly thick skinned when it comes to criticism as it comes from all angles.

It is a rewarding career and, despite the challenges, I don't think I'll ever leave it.

I'm not a social worker, but work in their department. Personally I would never want their jobs. I used to be a teacher and thought about retraining in social care but now realise I was incredibly naive to think I could do it well.

From my observation, children's social care is less about working with children and more about arranging the lives of adults. Most of their time is spent ensuring the adults can attend contact with their children (planning travel and contact centres etc), can keep their house acceptable (ordering clothes, home goods, organising cleaners), get their children to school (arranging taxis, nagging parents every morning to get up and ready, sometimes even driving them yourself) and liaising with other professionals to ensure they attend interventions (drug/alcohol counselling, DV support, probation, education courses, health appointments etc).

They do very important work, but it is horrendously emotionally taxing, frustrating and tedious.

These are so helpful thank you.

I’d also like to know what their hours are realistically like?

It's profoundly rewarding - whilst I have worked in local authority children's services departments (both as a practitioner and in practice development roles), I have purposely kept my career varied working across all different sectors and by moving into various interesting management and leadership roles.

I played a role in one high profile case some years ago and I remember thinking "okay if I die tomorrow, my life has been worthwhile, my small contribution has made a difference". My absolute passion though is developing other social workers, with your background in education I imagine you would be an asset in that space (once you're qualified and have a few years practice under your belt).

Never below 40 mostly around 50 hours a week.

And sometimes higher than that if getting Court papers ready

Sorry to ask a stupid question but do you have a rota for weekends? I work 60 hours a week at the moment but at least I don’t work weekends!

Again, caveat that it's not me who is the social worker.

Normal hours are 9-5, but there are a lot of cases where you have to stay late unexpectedly. Our social workers rack up a fair amount of TOIL. Sometimes it's just a phone call that drags on, other times you're called to an emergency and stuck there until late night. It's not uncommon for social workers to have to be away overnight or do very long days with train travel to supervise contact or attend court proceedings.

Our social workers all work from home quite a lot, although they still do visits on those days.

If you want to work part time, that's very doable as a social worker. Most of ours are part time to some extent, even the managers.

I think you would be better off staying in your current role. It’s an incredibly draining job, burnout is high as is staff turnover. There should be an out of hours team covering out of hours so the duty phone would go to the out of hours team after 5pm when I did it but you would continue working on cases that came in before 5 pm.

Our LA has a separate team who do out of hours social work. I don’t work with them directly but my understanding is they mostly respond to phone calls that come in (new referrals, emergencies etc) rather than do the more regular work or have cases themselves.

If children's it may well be similar hours you do now but no school holidays off and no time to take the real amount or toil you accrue. A job with one of the highest burn out rates. Awesome job if you have amazing family support. Don't look at touching it if you don't there are other areas of social work with more predictability. If looked after children there is a huge amount of travel, if child protection you will regularly work late.

Out of hours is covered by a separate team, however schools often get a referral in at 4.55 which means you have to go out on it.

I would stay in education, but maybe try to find a role that includes more pastoral/ safeguarding type stuff?

I think you'll miss having the school holidays off too - the long summer & all of Xmas, especially having young children.

So as not to drip feed but without going into outing detail, I work a lot of the school holidays due to the current situation in my school. I also worked for the LA for a while before I did this job and weirdly didn’t mind not having school holidays as time off was actually off but I don’t know if that’s the case for social workers? thank you so much for replies. I really appreciate it!

Are you working from home though over the holidays?

I think it'll be hard going back to 52 weeks after doing term time.

I did know one or two SW's back in the day who worked term time only, but they had been there a long time and managed to change their hours.

I've considered going back a couple of times over the years, but friends who are still in the game always advise me not to!!

I work in the job. Have worked various departments. The safeguarding end is hard going, emergencies, court, often working late (at home) or writing reports on weekends.
My current job is more telephone support based, I wfh most days and have no visits. Also a clock off at 5pm job.
Adoption/fostering not as heavy going.
It's a good paying job, normally 5-6 weeks holiday and flexi always built so a couple of days off a month to add on. Not easy, sometimes rewarding, often frustrating

From working as a Social Worker myself I'd not recommend it at all. I lasted 2.5 years and a lot of my friends from Uni who went their respective ways have either left or wish they had something else to fall back on so they can leave.
It wasn't so much about the type of work for me, it was the absolute impossible volume to manage. Case loads are supposed to be "protected" but often you'll find yourself having 25-30+ on your caseload which how one person is supposed to manage is beyond me. Anything and everything can come in at any point for any of those "cases/families" so you're left juggling all sorts, mostly admin as you never have the time to actually spend with the families and children you are trying to help. There's forms upon forms und documentation to complete which I'd say take up 80-90% of your time with the other 10-20% being meetings, visits with families and court appearances.
It isn't how it used to be (going from older colleagues experiences) when there was a lot more funding and resources. Now it is just firefighting and being unable to provide what you want for families and children which is just absolutely soul destroying and you'll likely end up making yourself ill just simply by caring (that's why we go in to it isn't it?!) Copious amounts of staff off sick at all times, and it's usually always mental health related as supervision (meant to be monthly with management to support you and go through your workload) doesn't happen as often as it should if at all.
So sorry for the negativity but this is the reality so you can weigh it up. It's a sad state of affairs and takes someone very special (or someone with no social life, family or their own hobbies) to do this job as it can easily consume you, both in and out of the office. Meant to be 9-5 job but you regularly end up working over just to get paperwork/court reports in and ferrying vulnerable children up and down the country to placements out of area. Hard to relax on days off and annual leave also as you know what shit show awaits you when you return. Sorry op.

My social worker seems very happy and I see her walking her daughters on the school run! Although she has said things have got harder with higher case loads

I also have a good friend who is a social worker.

Both for the Children with Disabilities team so maybe that's less awful? Or hopefully less heartbreaking as most parents in contact with the disabilities team via social care want to help and like me, had to ask for it beg so they can access things like respite etc

If you're working in local authority children’s services it's not part of your role to work at the weekend but it's inevitable that you will use weekends to do admin. Your job description will be around 9-5 Mon-Fri.

All LAs have an out of hours duty line that will address any emergencies until the day team comes back but this is mostly call based and is a separate team to the day teams.

I also worked in Learning Disabilities Team for Adults and their families and as a social worker you also have to beg for things like respite and basics due to budgets! It's horrible because you feel like you can't give people what they need and deserve :( added frustration getting shouted at by the people you're working with when all you're trying to do is help! But when "packages of care" have a £300 per week budget and anything over has to be discussed and justified with higher-up's it's no wonder it's a shit show when services for LD's are much more likely to be 3k per week let alone £300.

Just to hop on to this, there are so many different social work jobs and areas you can go into. I am currently a mental health SW with older people and its incredibly rewarding, sad at times, element's of safeguarding but I feel very protected in the Adult world and I very rarely work late and have flexibility to work 4 days a week. I can also work from home and plan to go further in training to be an Approved Mental health professional.
I did work in child protection previously and it was definitely more pressure and fire fighting and at times working late. There are out of hours teams who cover evenings and weekends