Becoming a social worker

[coffeewithcream]

Hello. I was wondering if anybody could offer me advice on becoming as social worker. I would prefer not to go back to university as a full time student and my finances dont allow this. Im a fully qualified teacher with 10 years experience of working with children between the ages of 5-19 both in mainstream and special needs schools. I have an arts degree and a postgraduate certificate in education. Can anybody advise me on the different options...thankyou, Erica x x

You can qualify via Open University. Hope that helps. Good luck.

You can go via the OU, but this does make it much harder to find practice placements, as the OU doesn't undertake to find these for you, as far as I know. And it's not quite as simple as just calling up local authorities to arrange a placement, as often they have golden handcuffs an agreement with particular universities to offer all their placements to that uni.

As a postgraduate, you would not need to complete the degree in SW, but could do a 2 year masters instead, although not all uni's offer this option.

the best route IMO is to secure a trainee SW post with a local authority. they then pay for your training, provide placements and give the appropriate time off. An example is here.