We are the success stories you brag about but overlook when we work for you

Dear Corporate Parents,

Last month, the theme of World Social Work Day was ‘Co-Building Hope and Harmony: A Harambee Call to Unite a Divided Society’. Our Harambee, our call for collective action, is for welfare systems to work better alongside those with lived experience.

We are the social workers who grew up in the shadow of the system. We are the professionals who once sat in our waiting rooms, waiting for decisions, waiting for moves, waiting to be heard, and waiting to be seen. The system taught us the hard way: it gave some of us grit, determination, and a preternatural ability to decode the world. Others were taught to continually be silent, unseen, and grateful to be in the waiting room.

We write to you as the Association for Care Experienced Social Work. We are your ‘corporate children’ who returned to the 'family business'. But while your strategies speak of "thriving," our daily reality as your workforce reveals a profound and painful disconnect.

We do not write this as a critique from the outside, but as a challenge from within. We are your employees, your colleagues, and your most valuable assets for change. Yet there is an uncomfortable truth many local authorities refuse to acknowledge: working for one’s own corporate parent is an emotionally and professionally complex experience that this sector is failing to grasp.

Across the country, we see local authorities draft grand promises to end discrimination and support care-experienced adults. We urge you: check the wisdom in the room. Look at the person sitting at the desk next to you.

One of our members was recently sent a draft strategy for care-experienced adults to review (along with other members of the workforce). As she read bullet points about "removing barriers," she realised she was the only care-experienced person in the room, and the only one whose career progression was being actively blocked by the very system that raised her. 

She described the urge to "bang her head against the wall." Having transitioned from "care leaver" to "student placement" to "employee" within the same authority, she found that while the strategy talked about support, her reality was defined by barriers akin to triple glazed glass ceilings.

Many of us choose this path to fix what was broken for us or to give back. For others, the system is simply the only home we have ever known. But for decades, we have served in silence as we carried the stigma of our childhoods alone.

Some of our members spent 20 years and more in practice without ever disclosing their background. Why? Because in this field, care experience is often treated as a professional poison.

We know the "pathologising gaze" too well, the moment a professional disagreement is dismissed as "unresolved trauma," or a challenge to the hierarchy is labelled "disruptive" or "emotional" rather than insightful. 

We care deeply because we have lived some of the experiences of those at risk of becoming your corporate children now. We are their best allies and your most valuable assets not your worst burdens.

We exist in a no-man’s land of dual identity: told we aren't "professional" enough yet treated as if we aren't "care-experienced" enough to be the experts of our own lives.

The system continues to ask absurd things of us. Consider our member who, upon starting a new role in fostering, was asked to provide a comprehensive list of every foster carer she had lived with as a child. This was requested with zero irony, no trauma-informed awareness, and no recognition of the psychological cost of revisiting those files.

These are not "standard procedures." They are micro-aggressions. They are acts of careism. Even as local authorities move toward treating care experience as a protected characteristic, the culture remains one of suspicion rather than celebration.

We are proud of our association, its roots, and each other. It is time for our workplaces to recognise our dual identities as a superpower, not a liability.

We are the "success stories" you brag about in your annual reports, yet we are the colleagues you overlook in your hallways.

If your strategy aims to support care-experienced adults, start with us:

• Ask us what "progression" actually looks like
• Ask us why we hesitated to disclose our status to you
• Ask us how it feels to be asked for a list of our childhood placements as a condition of employment
• Be curious about what discrimination towards care experienced people looks like and feels like – we can tell you

It is time to treat us like the experts we are. You raised us. Now, it is time you respected us

Signed,

The Association for Care Experienced Social Work