Feeling hopeless about finding a new job.

[Miniflamingo]

I’m nearly 41, so getting on a bit in terms of how desirable I am.
my current job pays me just over £26k and it is demanding for the pay. It is third sector and I have a team of 9, plus I manage a caseload alongside that.
I support young people with mental health problems - but I have no qualifications in this. The role was originally ‘social prescriber’ but it has evolved into meeting the massive gap between ‘bad’ and ‘bad enough for CAMHS’ for want of a better phrase. I support young people who have attempted suicide, are self harming, have eating disorders etc.
The issue is I’m very badly paid and I have no supervision around some of the extremely distressing stuff I deal with.
But I am stuck. Because I like this work but I haven’t got the qualification to do it ‘officially.’ I am a single parent and I lack the time or money to do much beyond a level 2 counselling qualification.
I also have a real crisis of confidence and feel I am useless and pathetic which isn’t helping me either. I have been in this role for three years and prior to that had stupidly had time out to raise my only children.
Basically - I feel I am unqualified, unskilled and undesirable. The experience I’ve got is worthless because I couldn’t do this anywhere else without a proper qualification.

Any ideas?

I have no idea whether this is achievable but it sounds like you do an immense amount of much needed work for such low pay. I imagine your employers would struggle to find someone who can step in to manage a team of 9 and to deal with the issues that you deal with on that pay grade. They’d more likely get someone new with no experience. So…. Would they fund a qualification alongside the job and agree to a pay increase at the end of it? Appreciate budgets are stretched but I would think this would be very much a case of what ok earth would they do without you.

I am afraid that this is a familiar story - the issue isn't you, the issue is budgets cut to the bare minimum.

A number of local authorities offer social work traineeships with on the job training to qualification level. Would that be an option? We can't recruit enough, and I think that is a fairly common problem. A quicj google suggests that there are a fair number of such offers around, and with hands on experience you wouldn't need a degree to start out, but would end up with one.

No, they won’t.
There are several team leads across the county, all with a similar number of people in their team.
They advised me to do the Level 2, which I have and things like Mental Health First Aid for children and young people.
However, I am dealing with very complex trauma in a lot of cases. I’ve had young people Phone me and say they are about to take their own lives and I have had to call emergency services to their houses. The level of what we are supporting is complex and high - it is never ‘mild anxiety’ or ‘school avoidance.’ which is what we were told when we first took these roles.
It is also a lot of SEND and the impact of SEND on mental health.
I have a lot of experience, across a massive range of ages and issues - but I feel it is worthless.

In addition I am also trying to provide some sort of supervision to my team beyond the basics.
I am aware that they are also dealing with difficult situations day in, day out. So I am often taking calls into the evening to at least listen to them so they can offload some of it.

The first thing you need to do is look at your boundaries, taking support calls from your team into the evening isn’t sustainable in the long term, and it means your organisation can get away with providing poor support because you’re filling in the gaps. Set a time in the evening to turn your phone off and tell your team you aren’t available - it’ll be hard for them and for you, but you’ll burn out (if you haven’t already) and that does no one any good. Alternatively you could start including the support time in your working hours calculation and take TOIL for it.

What happens in your own supervision - presumably you have 1:1 time with your manager? Explain you need some of that time to talk about the impact the work has on you.

If there are a number of team leads in the same position can you all make representation to the organisation collectively about the level of training and support you need now case loads have become more complex and higher risk?

Qualifications are harder because they take time and money - there are organisations that offer modular courses that combine to make up a counselling qualification if that’s the route you want to go down. You can pay as you go and study is relatively flexible.

It’s a tricky situation but you will need to be able to advocate for yourself as strongly as you do for the kids you work with.