Care day 2018

Care Day 2018

February 16, 2018 is Care Day, the world’s biggest celebration of children and young people with care experience.  This includes children who are, or who were cared for by parents, kinship carers or other family members, often supported by social workers.

Scotland has made significant strides forward in recognising the importance of how we as a country look after children who need this; initiatives such as the Care Review  and the 1000 voices campaign  are testament to this intent. Over the last few years we have witnessed impressive contributions from care experienced young people at conferences and events which were previously more informed by “professionals”. Yet we can’t be complacent and feel we have ticked the boxes with our celebrations. There is still a long way to go in translating the rhetoric of change into real and sustainable action.

Social workers are involved in the assessment and planning for children and young people who may need to be looked after, and this work is frequently dominated by legal matters and tools, which were all developed to assist and safeguard the processes involved, but which can affect the most crucial building block of all: the forming of a working relationship. Young people tell us how frustrated and fed up they can feel when their social worker has to cancel, when they turn up late, when they seem stressed and tired, when gathering information for reports appears to take precedent over talking, and when they change jobs so there is (yet) another worker. While we don’t always have control over such things, we can affect how we communicate them.

SASW uses every opportunity possible to highlight in the right places what is needed to allow social workers to do the job they were trained to do. We promote prevention, and think we need to take great care before we consider “early intervention”.

We also hear from young people who are confident about saying their social worker was there for them and enabled them to be the best they could be in difficult circumstances. The testimonies we receive as part of the nominations for our annual SASW Awards are truly inspirational. What stands out is not working loads of overtime outside what is required, but workers who are calm, consistent, and made them feel they, as well as their families (even if they could not look after them) mattered. BASW adopted a Service Users and Carers Framework which assists us in our work as an association.

Social workers need to be well supported so that they can work with and for children and young people who need or want this. They need to be able to reflect, and to look beyond the tick list of risk factors. What is really being said? What goes on in the context of “the child”; what is the actual reality of the GIRFEC “My World” triangle? Is the family coping, is there evidence of domestic abuse, is poverty an issue, what can the community do? Is there any trust?

Some of the parents we work with today may be the care experienced young people from yesterday. We need to listen beyond the words or change how we speak if we aren’t heard so that we can communicate better. We have a duty to make sure that today’s care experienced young people can be confident parents of confident children tomorrow.