After eight years as a social work assistant in a frontline duty team, I decided that I wanted a more varied experience of working with people and wondered if the grass would be greener on the other side of a three-year degree course.
So, I applied for and was offered a place on a BSc in social work at a university in Wales. As a mature student, coming back into education at the age of 44, a single parent with a three-year-old daughter, giving up my job, packing up our home and moving to a new city while still hanging on to my sanity has been interesting.
One of the admin staff at my old department commented during my last week that she thought I was very brave starting again at my age. It made me smile, and I took it for the compliment it was. Other colleagues were less positive and my mental health was good naturedly called into question on more than one occasion. Why was I uprooting our entire lives to move to a city where we didn’t know anyone? Yet, I always corrected them, I don’t know anyone yet.
For me the most difficult thing to come to terms with was my daughter’s struggle to acclimatise to our new life. My daughter Rowan had her third birthday two days before we moved. New sights and sounds were strange and frightening to her. I’m not saying the other tasks involved with the move weren’t exhausting and stressful. But I’m an adult, I can rationalise this. Rowan struggles with transitions, and despite the best efforts of myself and various friends and family, she was extremely distressed by the move.
On the first day of the course induction, as I listened along with 30 other students to the program leaders telling us what it would be like over the next three years, I had a call from the university creche. Rowan’s nursery worker was finding it impossible to settle her. I could hear her crying in the background and my heart dropped into my stomach where guilt promptly chewed it to pieces.
Any parent who reads this will recognise the feeling. It’s horrendous and floods you with instinctive reactions that make you want to rush to comfort your child. I couldn’t do that. We had just listened to the speech about how 100% commitment to the course is expected of all undergraduates. I couldn’t go haring off to cuddle my daughter at the first hurdle. So I suggested some songs, nursery rhymes and her favourite story book to sooth her, asking them to phone me again if none of these strategies worked. I then spent the rest of the morning tense, fighting back tears and nausea until I could ring the nursery at lunchtime to get an update. She had settled. But this experience stayed with me well into the first semester, my new friends on the course took to asking “How is Rowan this morning?”
I’m now in my second semester and with the first placement approaching I’m relieved to say that Rowan has settled. As for me, I can safely say that so far being a social work student is everything it promised to be and more. With my horizons broadened, preconceptions challenged, values scrutinised my learning curve is soaring upwards.
It has been quite a rollercoaster ride getting to this point. I am now facing the challenge of my first placement and wondering whether they will be sympathetic to my situation and allow me to take Rowan to school in the mornings. This would be better for Rowan, who has had quite a lot of transitions to make since turning three.
My placement also makes me think about my future employment prospects in social work. The degree program leaders are not unsympathetic to the plight of single parents. But just as the Care Council of Wales places certain obligations on us in terms of professional and personal conduct, so the program leaders have high expectations of us in terms of excellence in our work and commitment to the course. Lecturers and senior management are doing everything possible to raise the credibility and profile of social work as a profession.
As a future social worker, I hope my employer will be understanding of my situation as a single parent. School plays, sports days, prize days, we all know how important these events are to children and as a childcare social work assistant I had this conversation with parents many times. I like to think that a profession which has a duty to prioritise the welfare of children would support parents to do this, whether they are employees or service users.
