I started within Children’s Services in Hertfordshire as a student 10 years ago. I’ve always had a passion for working with children and families. Initially, I had thought that I wanted to go into the police and do child protection. Before university I was exploring career options and realised that the role that I was interested in was actually going out and working directly with children and families. What really appealed to me with social work was the support and the care and helping families when they are in need.
I did my final year placement with Hertfordshire Children’s Services and I studied at the University of Hertfordshire and I suppose from the day that I started my student placement I felt really welcome here. For me now, ten years on, it feels like home. I know no different.
The biggest thing for me was actually the relationships between colleagues in Hertfordshire County Council. There are really strong positive working relationships both within teams and across services. I’ve worked in a variety of teams and there’s that real team-spirit, that team get together. In social work, it’s the sort of profession that’s highly rewarding but it can be highly challenging at times. It’s really important that you have great support around you from peers and colleagues and that guidance as well from senior leaders.
No day is ever the same – varied, interesting, fast-paced, no clock-watching. It can be challenging at times, but it’s a very rewarding feeling. At the end of the day and you can feel proud of what you’ve achieved in your day – there’s purpose in your role.
There are lots of different incentives for working for Hertfordshire. There’s variety – it’s a large county so you can work all over. I think it’s also the opportunity to work within different areas of Children’s Services. Within those ten years I haven’t stayed static in one team: I’ve moved around different teams in social services. As I’ve progressed I’ve had so many opportunities to learn about different areas of social care.
Hertfordshire also offer lots of different incentives. Since the pandemic we have very much a hybrid working model that involves some remote working and working from home and then working across the different offices, which is really appealing when you are thinking about the cost of living – saving on those travelling costs and also commuting time.
You’ll find there’s a lot of people at Hertfordshire who have been here for years, and you have to ask why. There are people in my team who have been here for 20 years plus! I’ve been here since I was a student. When you first come in and you see people who have been here for over ten years you think “how? That won’t be me”… and now ten years has passed”! I genuinely think it’s the people and the culture.
There’s something about that loyalty to the people and the families here and I suppose I find that senior leaders are approachable to speak to. There isn’t that top down hierarchical feeling. People are approachable and it’s just a really welcoming culture, it’s become like home for me.
Hertfordshire also offers a progression scheme right through from students, newly qualified Social Workers, experienced Social Workers, right through to management. It also offers hybrid working. Hertfordshire is also a large county, so depending on what type of social work you want to go into there are different teams you can work in, so you’ve got all the way through from Early Help to working with children where there might be child protection concerns or child in need concerns, there is working with children with disabilities, care leavers, children that are in care, adolescents, there’s a whole variety. You also have the other opportunities in terms of career progression.
You can’t have outstanding practice without a fantastic relationship with that family you’re working with. And how do you get that relationship when you could be faced with resistance, challenging families at time, families that might not want your involvement at times? Actually, it’s about building trust. I’ve had families that I’ve worked with back when I was frontline who outright didn’t want me to be involved, who didn’t want social care intervention. Slowly, through small steps, we built up relationships, built that trust. It’s about communication, it’s about working together and collaborating together, and coming from the same hymn sheet. It’s about making sure that families understand why we’re involved, it’s about supporting them and helping them to break that cycle. There’s a massive stigma, especially previously about social workers in Children’s Services – and what we do and actually when families realise that we’re here to help and support them, that’s when you can really evoke that positive change. Best practice is about the direct working intervention that we do with families and that’s when you can have the most effective practice. It’s listening to families. It’s hearing what children are saying and hearing parents and carers are saying. It’s about listening to their wishes and feelings and working together with them as best we can.
Hertfordshire County Council works in conjunction with a charity organisation called Frontline who support student Social Workers all the way up to Senior Leaders. It’s about supporting Social Workers through their training and helping them to become the best they can be to support children and families. I recently trained with them on a 10 month programme called Firstline, which is for new and aspiring middle managers – those who might have just stepped into new management positions – and it’s about how to support you with your leadership skills and supporting you to be the best leader.
Hertfordshire have lots of student programmes, so we have lots of students that come from all different areas. We have the step up programme, frontline, and the different universities that we work really closely with.
We have the assessed and supported year in employment, which is called the ASYE, which supports newly qualified Social Workers through their first year of practice. They have a dedicated ASYE co-ordinator and assessor and throughout their first year of practice they have to complete a portfolio of work to evidence how they are learning and developing, but equally at the same time they would have protected learning and development time protected supervision and case load.
We also have a practice academy, supporting our Social Care and Social Workers through from students all the way through up to leadership. There’s a whole variety of different learning opportunities. I think what’s great about Hertfordshire is that we recognise that it’s not just about training as a part of learning, there are different opportunities. In my team, we listen to podcasts, we’ve been to see experts by experience, guest speakers who’ve had lived experience of social care talk about their journey and reflected on that. We use our team meetings to reflect upon what we call social graces, we look at equality and diversity.
There’s a Hertfordshire social care teaching partnership, working very closely with the University of Hertfordshire and with the Tavistock and Portman Trust offering different opportunities in terms of post qualifying modules that social workers can study, specialise and qualify in. I trained as a practice educator, so there’s a course where you can train to then assess students once you’ve gained 18 months in practice. There’s a whole field of different courses and opportunities for wherever you are in your social work career, including leadership programmes.
Also, what’s really important to note is that it isn’t just social work, the training is there for people working in business support roles and one of my experienced Social Workers wanted to become a coach and she is now doing an coaching apprenticeship one day a week. The Social Workers in my team have those transitional skills that you develop throughout social work that you gain as you gather experience in the role .
It’s also good communication skills as well, so yes you do a lot of auditing and reports but they also deliver a lot of presentations as well – they deliver key findings to our Core Board and to the wider workforce. So it’s more than just doing assessments and analysing data, it’s quite varied, there’s an exciting side of the role. It’s about how they communicate, how they deliver those key messages. It’s an opportunity as well for people who want to develop their skills in a different area of social work, because it’s a lot of close working with senior leaders which you might not do in other social work roles. Working closely with heads of service, service managers, service directors. For example, the Audit Managers will work alongside a head of service and will be supporting them with the auditing of a particular area of their practice – so it might be, for example, the voice of the child and they’ll work closely with that head of service around developing an audit tool, completing those audits with another member of the service and then analysing that data and delivering those messages to the wider workforce.
In my last role, I was working in learning and develop in a new role. It was quite interesting to see the restructuring the of the programme for newly qualified Social Workers. We went from having an academy to changing the whole model of practice and still offering that support package. It’s called the Assessed and Supported Year in Employment (the ASYE programme). Looking at it from a new creative, innovative approach is one of the biggest things with Hertfordshire. It was really apparent to me when I did my leadership programme is that leaders are open to hearing new ideas they are open to trying new things to piloting new projects, especially within the quality assurance service. We’ve just about to refresh and revamp the quality assurance framework because although its effective and we’re getting the results we want we want to look at the best quality assurance cycle we can so only last week I had a round the table meeting with the directors and heads of service and gave them a proposal and everyone was really open to it, we were given feedback and from them we are now about to take a paper to board.
One great thing about Hertfordshire is that there are so many different projects going on at the moment, across all different areas – including fostering, family safeguarding. Senior Leaders are open to that change culture, they’re open to those new ideas, piloting and fundamentally making that difference and bringing it back to children and families. We’re in a time where changes happen so quickly and you’ve got to keep up with it. The pandemic is a really clear example of it. We’ve never needed to, as quickly as possible – overnight – change to a hybrid and remote way of working. Hertfordshire from day one were really supportive of that.
I think the other thing with Hertfordshire is the communications. The leadership team keep you updated internally so you know what’s happening with new ideas and what projects that are going on across the service.
I’m really motivated by the outcomes for children and families – it might sound cliché but it’s really true. Even now, stepping away from frontline practice, I still work very closely with those services and teams. We get the feedback from the children and families they work with about their experiences of the services.
From the start of my social work career, even from the start of my training as a Social Worker, it was all about those outcomes for children and families. I can remember young people, children, parents, carers that I worked with 10 years ago and that impact that I had on them. It’s that feedback that you’ve had from them at the end – when they thank you for making a difference to their lives – it sticks with you forever.
It’s about the fulfilment you get from the role. You don’t go into social work because you want to go into the corporate world with those sort of benefits, but it has other priceless opportunities.
