Social work with children isn’t all doom and gloom. People are often surprised when I tell them it’s fun, but it often is. It can be entertaining, hilarious, gut wrenching and heart breaking all at once. It’s four seasons in one day, every day.

I’ve spent the last five years working on a long term care and care leavers team, the end of the line for children who cannot return to their families and cannot be adopted. I watch them grow up and may be the only constant in their lives. I’m greeted with excitement by small children at front doors. I’m the safe adult supporting at school, police interviews, college open days, hospital admissions. I’m a corporate parent – a weighty responsibility. I worry about my children at weekends. They have become part of my daily routine, part of my life. This is a world away from child protection and intake teams but I have come to love this way of working; I am able to build a relationship with a child at their pace. The bond will come in time.

We must visit every six weeks until they turn 18. The children have some say over how they spend time with their social worker and I try to avoid formal meetings, awkwardly perched on sofas. So we do our own thing together and create a routine they like. I have one boy I take to an arcade where coins are shared out equally and prize tokens carefully saved for the next visit. Another likes countryside walks, another requires chips and talks about animals. I feed chickens and buy ice creams. Sometimes we must discuss disclosures, allegations, change of placement, news of birth families. Sometimes we spend a whole visit comparing superheroes or building Lego. I remember the correct items required for each child and the location of the Frozen soundtrack CD in the car. Social workers can have a unique relationship with children. We are neither teachers nor disciplinarians; I have never told a child off for swearing.

I work with a boy whose adoption broke down after only a short time and he was returned to the care system. Our conversations take place in a fast food chain next to a building site, and he likes to critique the progress of the workmen when we sit down. This is his routine. Then the conversation begins. Though he barely went to school one year, he liked studying books in English and was keen to discuss some of them with me. In the context of literature, we had conversations about being abandoned, friendship and loyalty. Since then he has, at quite random times, shared memories of his birth family, being removed and his subsequent adoption and its breakdown. Once he described his final contact with his mother and father while I was paying for parking.

I worry this kind of practice will soon become impossible. I have more children on my caseload than I ever have before. With each new allocation I already feel guilty about how difficult it will be for me to put the hours in to really get to know them before I have to make decisions about their lives. But looking back, these have been amazing times.

Grace Shepherd is a pseudonym





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