A love letter to social work

We are honoured to be able to share a 'Love Letter to Social Work', a beautifully written account of the social work profession by Liz Sales, who has since sadly passed away.

This inspiring piece was written by Liz as she battled her illness, and her moving narrative offers poignant and heartfelt reflections as she revisits her journey through social work over the years.

I have worked in social care for 35 years and it is now 25 years since I qualified as a social worker. I find myself tearful as I now have to contemplate retirement on medical grounds due to cancer.

I have been on sick leave for 6 months and still don't feel fit enough to return, but giving up being a social worker is hard. It has defined me for so many years. It has brought me sadness and joy. I have made so many friends and I have met so many families and met so many children and young people who have allowed me into their lives. How can I give this up?

I never meant to be a social worker. I was brought up in care after the death of my parents when I was 5. I wasn't very impressed with the social workers I came across, although I do remember one who was kind to us and arranged for me and my brothers, who had been placed elsewhere, to meet up on Sundays at her rambling Tudor house. The subsequent social worker was not so kind and was brought in when I had apparently been naughty. Reading my social work file when I was in my twenties showed sad letters from my foster carer, asking for small amounts of money for clothing and later letters from a teenage me asking for money for school books with a response saying I now had a Saturday job and should pay my own way. Reading my social work file didn't make me enamoured of the social work profession - it was judgmental and often unkind. Calling my dad ‘the putative father’ because my parents had been unmarried and suggesting that at 6 years old I had ‘barrack room’ language that I had brought from home, never considering that teenage boys, in the Dickensian children’s home I was living in at the time, took great pleasure in teaching a little 6 year old girl every swear word they knew.

I went off to university at 18 - something fairly unusual at the time, something only my brothers had done before in the local authority I was told at the time. I didn't have any particular yen to be at uni but I realised I could move 500 miles away from my controlling elderly foster carer and off I went! I was supposed to be studying French but soon found I was way behind my peers as my day trip to Boulogne didn’t really match the year spent working abroad or the long holidays in France of my fellow students. I switched to psychology and got heavily involved in student politics. I hadn't been very political at school but I think university showed me there were other underdogs and others worse off than me, and that I could do something to change things. So I argued with right wing students, I collected for the miners, I marched against apartheid, collected for the ANC, culminating in a brief speech at NUS national conference calling for a minute’s silence for Nelson Mandela (who was at that time still imprisoned in Robben Island).

I managed to scrape through my finals and was elected to the Student Union as the education and welfare officer. I enjoyed advising and campaigning on welfare rights and wrote a booklet of housing advice. So, when that year was over I applied to any job that seemed to be related to welfare rights. One job I applied for was as an education welfare officer for the now long gone Inner London Education Authority (ILEA). I didn't really know what the job was about and I didn't really want to be in London, but I used the interview as a way to recoup the cost of visiting friends in London. But I got the job and so I moved to London, to a grubby flat share at the top of an elderly Polish lady’s house in Brixton.

At the time ILEA had appointed a large number of education welfare officers so we had a 2 week training course. The second week a speaker came along who told us that ILEA wanted to change education welfare into a social work service for school aged children, and wanted to change our job titles to education social workers. I can remember that moment sitting there, thinking “What have I done? A social worker? I don't want to be a social worker!” But it was too late to go back now, I had a job and I had moved to London, so I had to get on with it.

I met some amazing people in that first social care job – my colleagues and also families. Families in grotty hotel rooms who were there because they were homeless or fleeing domestic violence; families newly arrived from Bangladesh struggling to understand the education system; single parents whose homes were invaded by cockroaches from the estate’s central heating system; young Black teenagers being coerced into lifestyles their mothers were desperately trying to pull them back from.

I also discovered that I really enjoyed working with teenagers, particularly those often seen as more challenging, and I really enjoyed working with boys – a surprise to my feminist younger self. I had been a very quiet, withdrawn teenager who hadn't really been allowed to have adolescence until I got to uni, but there was something in those teenagers that made us click.

My love of working with challenging teenagers hasn't gone, I still reach out to them, even though now I'm more of a mother or grandmother to them than the slightly older peer of my early days in social care.

I never meant to be a social worker. I didn't have a mission as a care leaver to make things better for others because I had been in care myself, but it made me listen to troubled young people and advocate for them and enjoy their company. I have a long list in my head of children I have worked with that I really wish I could have taken home with me, dating from the early 1980s to only 6 months ago.

From education welfare I moved on to what was then called ‘intermediate treatment’ which aimed to offer alternatives to care and custody for young people. It was a rather pompous name for a wide range of creative services for troubled young people that no longer exist. I started at a day programme in Peckham and I think it was the best job I have had. There were some hairy moments, such as avoiding having a fire extinguisher thrown at me, but also so many moments of joy as we saw the young people progress and develop – from being able to do a math’s problem or being able to write using a computer to being able to mountain bike in Oxleas Wood. I remember taking a group of them away to Derbyshire, I think, and successfully managed to complete a 100 foot abseil. One of the boys who always called me ‘gel’ was so impressed as he had been too scared to do it, that he called me ‘darlin’‘ after that. From there I went to a North London borough and spent 7 years working with young people and their families. There weren't the current restrictions of only working with a family for 6 weeks or 3 months but we were able to mentor young people for as long as they needed, often for years. There was joy when a homeless young man who attended our weekly drop in and had spent hours fruitlessly trying to teach me to play chess, finally told me he was gay and told me the whole story about how he had become homeless. There was joy when a young woman I had worked with had her first child and managed to set up her flat and keep her baby. There was immense sadness when a young man died after inhaling the accelerant from a fire extinguisher, and another died after falling onto railings.

I had kept thinking that working in social care was temporary but I finally gave in and realised that social work was my life and I needed to qualify, so I completed my Diploma in Social Work (DipSW) whilst still working. My placement in a neighbourhood office focused on child protection work. Despite being on Holloway Road at 10 o’clock at night with a woman experiencing a mental health crisis and then having to leave home the following morning at 7.30 am in order to take her children to school from her grandmothers, I enjoyed child protection work and decided it was time to branch out from working with teenagers, and moved to a central London borough to be a full time child and family social worker.

I loved working in central London. I learnt so much from the families I worked with who originated from all over the world. Being on duty you never knew what language you would need each day. There were some low points – a family who pinned the bloodied foot of their dead pet rabbit onto the living room wall for luck was unpleasant, to say the least, but mostly I listened and learned from families trying to make new lives for themselves and I enjoyed sharing spicy tea with them. (A short footnote – I know lots of social workers who won't accept a cup of tea from families, but I always believed you should accepted what was offered to you, even if it is only a glass of water. No family wants to be visited by a social worker. There is always some level of shame that you need help or intervention from outside your family, and offering a tea or coffee is a way of levelling up that power relationship for them, so please accept what is offered.)

I was also the social worker for 2 brothers whose mum was dying from AIDs related illnesses – contracted, she thought, when she had been raped by prison guards on her journey from Uganda. Speaking to her the day before she died and her entrusting her boys to me was one of the most moving moments of my working life. The day she died and I had to tell her sons was hard. I remembered the day a social worker came to see me and tell me my mum had died. I made sure the boys were OK and took them to the funeral and a month later, I cracked. 6 weeks out of work, nursing my mental health, I was able to return to work and return to supporting the boys. The plan was to reunite them with family in Uganda. I became pregnant with my first child and handed the boys over to my lovely colleague and friend Cynthia, who took them to Uganda and settled them with family and set them up in school. I often think about them and have wondered if I would ever meet them again. My friend Cynthia, godmother to my eldest, sadly died of cancer way too soon. She was so full of love and life and gone so early.

We are getting nearer to the present. I moved to the leafy suburbs whilst on maternity leave to be nearer my mother in law, the only grandparent. Starting work outside of London was a bit of a shock. Nearly all the social workers were white and so were all the families I worked with. I am white British but my working life up to them had been with colleagues and service users of many different backgrounds and cultures. I focused on child protection duty – and I know it doesn't sound right – but I enjoyed the buzz of never knowing what I was going to be doing each day and meeting each days’ new challenges. My childminder didn't appreciate the number of times I was late to pick up my son, so after my next child was born, I had a year off work and then moved to fostering where life was more predictable. Child number 3 came and I worked part time until she started school. It took a while to appreciate the slower pace of fostering and then to understand the depth of work needed in assessing and supporting foster carers to care for children who had experienced abuse, trauma and neglect.

How did my experience of being fostered impact my work? I think it helped me to see both sides. When foster carers were really struggling and at their wits end, I would help look from the child’s perspective, how they feel, what is going on for them? I had a mixed response as to whether foster carers should know my background. Some colleagues felt that you should never tell anyone you had been in care as if it was a shameful secret and many colleagues I have met over the years don't feel able to be open about being in care. I made a decision to be open about being in care – I never told young people as I strongly feel that interaction with them is about them not about me, my experience might help me think about what is going on for them but they don't need to hear my story. Social workers, foster carers, colleagues – why should I hide my experience from them? There will always be times when things that happen when working with children and young people in care triggers a memory or feeling, but part of being open about being in care helps to work it through and make sure that my own experience isn’t skewing my judgement.

I couldn't stay away from teenagers for long and soon became involved in setting up a supported lodgings scheme for young people in care and care leavers aged over 16. The carers who came forward and devoted themselves to looking after our young people were and are amazing. They enjoyed teenagers and embraced the challenges they brought, and often provided the last chance of family for young people who had moved many times. I stayed with the scheme for 9 years and it is one of my proudest achievements.

Looking back I should have stayed, but thought I needed a new challenge and encouraged by my senior manager, I applied for a promotion to manage a child placement team. Unfortunately my menopause hit with a vengeance and I found myself tearful and anxious on a daily basis.

Alongside this, there was a massive restructuring of the whole of children’s services and I was moved into commissioning and after having 5 different managers in a year, I crashed. It was an impossible job and with my hormones causing me to cry over anything meant I just couldn't face it any longer. After a break off work for 3 months and various medications I went back to work but I felt I needed to go back to social work, so since then I have been managing a care leavers asylum team. It has restored my faith in social work. The personal advisors on my team are hardworking, committed, knowledgeable and fun! The young people we work with have experienced so much trauma that we can't really imagine happening to us, but they keep going and trying to make the best of their lives here. They are sometimes infuriating but mostly inspirational.

My children will tell you that I often neglected them for my ‘work’ children. They were often the last to be picked up, often crying for me to stay home when I had to go back out to work in the evening. They also got fed up with having to talk about things, asking just to be punished rather than talk about problems. Restorative justice, solution focused brief therapy, theraplay, didactic therapy have all crept into my parenting at times, along with the usual heated arguments and slammed doors of family life. It also meant that I was quite happy to embarrass my teenage son at the skatepark as crowds of adolescent boys held no fear for me.

My kids have grown up to be relatively well balanced despite the neglect. They get stressed and upset just like anyone else but they seem good at talking through problems and getting on with the challenges that life brings. The kids that I should have brought home, I’m sure some are doing fine, but some I wish I could have brought home and maybe I could have made a difference to their lives. I always thought that when I retired from social work and my kids had left home I would be able to foster and life would have turned full circle. Now that isn't going to be possible due to my ill health, but I hope that others keep putting themselves forward for that amazing life affirming challenge. My foster carer wasn't great, but she did her best with little support and little money. Foster carers I have known have all been different but they put their lives into the public domain and care for children and young people that are in desperate need of love and care but often do their best to reject it.

So why is this a love letter to social work? I am a social worker. I am also a care leaver, a mother, a bookworm, a friend, someone living with cancer and many other things. I didn’t plan to be a social worker but I am so glad the profession found me. My social workers didn’t inspire me to become a social worker, but I hope I have inspired some of my children and young people (sorry they are always my children and young people rather than children and young people I have worked with or service users) to be social workers, or to be whatever they dream of being. Social work has defined me – it has helped me to look for the best in people, to look at things from other people’s point of view and to believe it is always worth trying to help people have better lives. Social work has also brought me many friends and amazing colleagues in the different places I have worked and many, many laughs (social workers often have a wicked sense of humour). It has been a pleasure and a privilege to have my life enriched by so many children, young people and their families and maybe I can carry on for a little while, maybe I can’t, but I will still always be a social worker.