Is it possible to be a Social Worker/etc with flexibility?

[StrawBlueRas]

Hi all,

My children are currently young, aged 5 and 7. I’m trying to plan ahead for a better financial future. I currently work for a small company in a hybrid role, 5 days per week earning around £30k annually. Main perk of the job is being able to WFH 3 days a week. Makes my life soo much more flexible and accommodates my children’s needs.

I have always thought about going into a Social Worker/support worker career.

For anyone with experience, I wanted to ask:

Is there any decent money in this role? Ideally I’d love (who wouldn’t!) to be earning at least 50k someday.

Is there any flexibility with working patterns and WFH in this field?

is there any similar work you recommend I work towards that would balance family/work life?

also any tips on qualifications/certifications I could work towards in the meantime?

I have done a LOT of research my now my brain is fried and I would appreciate other opinions and pointers! Thank you.

What qualifications do you have? You could start doing the social work degree if you don’t have one. Placements can be full on though especially with young kids.
50k is doable with a few years experience, in some teams people move up very quickly. Most social workers I know have several days wfh, lots of visits etc depending on which team your on

Used to be a SW. I did wfh most days ( but with home visits to service users arranged as well) this will depend on your manager/team/local authority as policy varies. Starter salary around £25 k upwards, you'd need to be senior or manager to get to £50k I think

I qualified a couple of years ago and am on about 42k.
It's flexible to a point - so I take my kids (4 and 7) to school every day, I wfh 90% of the time, I've never missed a sports day/assembly/performance etc as I arrange my own calendar BUT the stress, responsibility, caseloads etc are frankly unmanageable. I work at least 50hrs per week, lots of our team work much more but I'm exceptionally organised and also have strict boundaries around my weekends and won't log on. However I manage this by logging on between 5.30-6am every day.

I have a degree in psychology and ample experience with children and charity work. Thank u for the replies so far!

Do you mind sharing how you became a social worker eg your qualifications and pathway?

I work alongside social workers. They do WFH a lot in terms of not being in the office 9-5. But even if they have a couple of days a week WFH, some of them will still involve going out on visits and having meetings at fixed times. For example, we have strategy meetings at 9:30 and 3pm which obviously is tight or clashes with school runs.

The biggest lack of flexibility is in the working hours themselves though. Often emergencies crop up and a social worker (either the allocated one or the duty one) can be working until it is resolved. I can think of emergencies that have run up to 10pm or later for most of the social workers in our department. Working until 7pm is a regular occurrence. They do obviously claim this back as TOIL, but that’s irrelevant in the moment if your kids need picking up (and it’s often tricky to get to use the TOIL around your normal workload).

The only social workers with small kids I know are those with partners working more traditional hours or family childcare on top of paid childcare.

You’d need to do a post grad in social work to qualify as a social worker. Then 50 grand is possible in first line of management or more if you go up higher in statutory social work. WFH and compressed hours possible. It’s very stressful though.

Hmmmm I think it depends what type of social worker. Child protection - you can be dealing with stuff until late in the evening and whilst it’s possible to wfh you’d be m having a fairly high caseload/duty role/meetings and visits a fair chunk of days.

adult social worker maybe different, seems to be more flexibility there from the ones I know.

if you have a psychology degree why not a therapy role?

(ex social worker here, now a psychotherapist)

Also, I’d not go back to CP social work due to stress. Not for a long time, if at all. Much prefer therapy.

I'm a social worker (well am in management now as been qualified 12 years). As others have said most local authorities have hybrid working now so you'll definitely have opportunities to WFH in the week. Our local authority offers 9 day fortnight to all social workers and they have a pretty manageable workload - be warned though not all authorities are equal in that regard!
Pay is not bad - a senior practitioner (so an experienced social worker who supports other sws but not TM level) in our LA (West mids) £47-52k and you would probably be around 4-5 years post qualifying dependent on how you progress, some people with lots of previous experience etc can progress more quickly.
In terms of impact on childcare all roles come with different pressures, so for example in duty and assessment or safeguarding teams you can end up having late night S47s, or emergency accomodation of children for example. If working with children in our care that would be less common but you will have lots of children out of area that may necessitate overnights. There are roles such as in the MASH which tend to be more structured in terms of 9-5 although super hectic during the day. Fostering has it own pressures but would tend to be less likely to have out of hours work etc.

Social work is a great profession but it is a vocation don't come into it because you think it may be a flexible career because it's bloody hard work but the capacity to affect change is pretty awesome.

I earn £60k as a social work manager and WFH 3 days per week. But I worked in frontline for 6 years before becoming a manager and while social workers do WFH it's by no means reliable and they do have to go out on visits most days.

It depends on where you work as to where you work and what role and how your manager is as to how much you can wfh. My managers were all very flexible for me wfh in my own time but less so at other times, but that was pre covid. Child protection is very unpredictable and there were times I was out until 7pm/9pm and even 1am a couple of times. I really depended on what was going on. If the kids from my cases were being removed it was my responsibility to take them to a placement and that could involve long drives after waiting around for a placement to be found. More so on duty that other roles. Adoption, fostering, kinship were all more predictable on hours. Mental health depended on the role as to if there were emergencies and a duty rota eg for if someone needed assessing for sectioning, but there was an extra qualification for that part. I cant answer about older adults and adults with disabilities.

I came out of social work as it wasnt family friendly or good for my kids.

I completed the Social Work Degree paid for by our local authority when I was already working there in a support role. I already had another unrelated degree prior to this as was considering teaching many years previous.

SW is poorly paid, so the degree cost is unlikely to be repaid, if that matters to you.

I've been in social work for fifteen years, now an IRO (chair meetings but don't line manage)
There tends to be flexibility with mornings, in my experience many SWs do their morning school run, but evenings is much harder. If you're working with school age children (which is pretty much every team in children's social work apart from adoption) then you're required to visit children most days after school, so between 3-5pm tends to be your busiest time for being out and about. If you work in a duty team, child protection team, children with disabilities, you're likely to work late - as in, out dealing with things, not at home on a laptop- quite often. If you're working with children in care the job is a bit more predictable but you often have to travel further because the children won't all be placed in your local area, so you might plan a visit at 4pm but be 50 miles from home. And when emergences happen in those teams they can be really intense, including need to stay overnight sometimes.
There is a lot of WFH but it's WFH in between visits and meetings which are face to face and at schools, children's centres or the office. If you're working full time you'd usually (with good diary management) be out and about 3 or 4 days out of 5 you have some control over your diary but it's that busy that you can't really keep spaces free often, if a visit or urgent meeting is needed then you need to find space.
Adoption teams can book more visits in the daytime because the children are mainly under 4, but that comes with a lot of travel too, adoption matches can be nationwide.
The majority of social workers are women so obviously many do have childcare to consider, but at most it's a case of having some days you can work as late as needed (or out, not just WFH in the evening) and one a week where you can't work past say 5.30, and your team know that and accommodate you if something comes up on one of your cases.

I don't want to put you off, it's a great career, but it is usually a mix of after school clubs and calling on friends or family to get the kids, you need to have a network. In all the jobs I've had as a social worker in children's, a common theme is not being able to get away from work when expected. Even in something that sounds straightforward, like say, assessing people to become kinship foster carers, you end up assessing people who work nine till five and need all their assessment visits to be done at 7pm! Theres no 'i don't work those hours' you're just expected to make it work really.

You can study to be a social worker through the Open University, which really suits people with family commitments.

SW isn’t poorly paid. I was checking out basic grade SW posts advertised in Scotland the other day and bottom of the scale was between £41k and £45k.

There’s definitely flexibility and WFH in all SW jobs, but not much control of overall workload and you do need to ability to work late to cover any crises.

Someone with a relevant degree can do a MA which is in practice 18 months until you can start working full time as a family worker before graduating (assuming placements go to plan) and start around 38k (outside of London)
I honestly can't think of many careers you can retrain in that start that well, with a pretty much guaranteed job.

@StrawBlueRas depending on what grade you got for your degree it could be worth checking if the Frontline social work programme is an option for you. It is a shortened version of the course where you're paid throughout, learning on the job. It is intense but the students on it do really well in my experience.

Really helpful replies so far, thank you! Looking into open uni now too.

I got bursary for post grad but that was in Scotland. However quick scan looks like there may be bursaries available in other parts of the uk too so that is worth investigating OP. I have moved into another support sector and my pay grade is 50 to 60 thousand but that’s with management responsibilities. Other non statutory roles don’t tend to pay as well but it’s less stressful generally.

In comparison with teaching and nursing for example it's not poorly paid. Starting salaries around £34k can be found and quick progression towards late £40k with a few years experience.

You need a network around you should you want to do social work as you can’t predict when you will finish work. Every day is different. Court work is trickier again as it’s almost impossible to work part time if you have children in nursery on your working days as court will list hearings on your day off as they will consider you available if you aren’t on annual leave.

My friend is a social worker for a fostering company. She earns around £40k and WFH most of the time. She does have to be ‘on call’ some weekends though.

I guess you're looking at children's services then? Adult Care has less evening work in my experience, unless you go into mental health

Open uni isn't that different to the standard courses though, all require long work placements and that's the biggest part of the course. Those are fixed hours and not WFH though (apart from the odd hour here and there, and a couple of study days) as quite simply you're not yet competent enough to work independently at home. You're expected to be shadowing a lot of the time, and then doing a small number of visits and simple pieces of work (such as direct work with children) on your own.
I had to end a student placement because she kept messaging me to tell me she was 'working from home'. Not sure what on, I hadn't set her any work that could be done from home at that stage!

I think if WFH multiple full days a week is important to you though you would need to consider a different career. Simply because social work and support work involve a lot of working directly with people, face to face. So there's always going to be a limit on WFH and flexibility, in the same way you couldn't do nursing, OT, health visiting etc primarily from home. There is a lot of paperwork to do but that doesn't reduce the number of visits, meetings etc that are face to face. There's strict rules in most authorities about being in person with children and families so most meeting types are face to face. There's a few exceptions (urgent professionals meetings or short catch ups) but teams calls with families at best is ineffective/unhelpful for families and at worst dangerous practice (COVID taught us that)