There’s still time to take part in Community Care’s annual jobseekers’ survey and share what you look for in a job, as a social worker or social care practitioner.

The research will explore what might tempt you to move roles, including the most important benefits an employer can offer, as well as your preferences for agency or permanent roles.

Community Care has been carrying out the jobseekers’ research since 2014, and we share the results with employers to help influence what they offer.

Everyone who completes the short survey has the chance to win one of two £50 One4All vouchers.

In June 2023, Community Care launched our Choose Social Work campaign. We wanted to show the reality of social work: of dedicated, hard-working people, working alongside children, families and adults, supporting them to improve their lives.

Over the last year, we have published brilliant interviews with people like Jenny Molloy and Fatima Whitbread, spent a day with children’s social workers in a London borough, and shared social workers’ best advice for those contemplating joining the profession.

Now, we have compiled the highlights of the campaign into a digital resource pack, specifically aimed at inspiring the next generation of social workers to join the profession.

If you’re thinking of becoming a social worker, you know someone who is or you want to be reminded of why you chose the profession, the pack is for you – and is completely free to access.

Special thanks go to Cafcass, for supporting the Choose Social Work digital resource.

To access the resource pack, fill in the form below and the pack will be emailed to you.

Please do support the Choose Social Work campaign by sharing the resource pack with colleagues, schools and young people who might be interested.

Today, Community Care celebrates 50 years reporting on and supporting the social work profession.

We published our first edition on 3rd April 1974, a few years after the creation of a unified social work profession in the UK, with the advent of social work and social services departments, a single qualification and generic social work roles.

As our first editor, Mark Allen, said in a recent interview to mark our 50th anniversary: “People felt that it was the start of a new era in social work, so attitudes were positive.”

The profession has been through a lot since then, and we have evolved too.

How Community Care has evolved

We launched our Community Care Live event in 1997 and our Community Care Inform Children subscription-based learning resource in 2007. Then, after publishing a weekly magazine since 1974, Community Care went completely online in 2011, with the Inform Adults site launching in 2014.

Since 2017, Community Care has been owned by the Mark Allen Group, the publishing company founded and chaired by Mark, under which the brand has continued to evolve and innovate, such as The Social Work Community – an online community for practitioners to share thoughts and ideas.

Through these changes, and the much more significant developments in social work, we have always sought to be a supportive ally to the profession, most recently through our 2023 Choose Social Work campaign.

Our interview with Mark was the first in a series of pieces of content we will be publishing over the coming months to mark our 50th anniversary as well as looking to the future. You can stay up to date by bookmarking this tag page, and signing up to our free newsletters.

‘A privilege to support social work’

Community Care’s publishing director, Katie Sharman, said: “The Community Care team and I feel a real privilege to work on a brand that supports social work, a sector filled with inspiring and hardworking individuals that work tirelessly to improve lives. It has been fascinating to look back at copies of Community Care from 1974 and reflect on how both the brand and sector have changed since then, as well as think about what the next 50 years will bring!

“We continue to be committed to providing learning, careers and news content that best supports the sector, and the best ways we can deliver this content especially with the current pressures on time and resource. Most recently we are proud to have launched The Social Work Community, a place for the social work sector to connect and network. We are always keen to have feedback on how we can continue to support the sector so please do get in touch with any thoughts and feedback by emailing communitycare@markallengroup.com.”

In 1976, Tony Inwood and his brother, Colin, appeared on the front cover of Community Care magazine.

Tony was 23 at the time and had recently left Caldecott, a residential home for children and young people in Kent. Tony had been put into local authority care at the age of six; both his parents had suffered from severe depression, his father having attempted suicide and spent time in psychiatric hospitals. After a time in foster care, Tony lived at Caldecott for eight years.

Forty-eight years after that original Community Care article, Tony has written a book, Flying Under the Radar, about his childhood and time in care, how this led to a breakdown in his early adulthood – and how he has overcome these challenges to reach a place of happiness and security in his life.

What are Tony’s memories now of his time at Caldecott?

Memories of care

“It wasn’t perfect by any means, and some of the care lacked sophistication,” he says. “But on the whole, it was extraordinary. It just had a special kind of spirit about the place. It drew people in. And it was a kind of healing spirit.”

The focus of the original Community Care article about Caldecott was this spirit, and why ex-residents like Tony and Colin would come back for reunions, years after leaving the home.

Tony says that he “enjoyed going back [to Caldecott]. I enjoyed seeing some of the people I knew”, as well as wandering around the grounds of the stately home that housed the Caldecott Community.

However, after leaving the home, he also developed mixed feelings about the place.

He writes: “For some years, there remained a wistful, almost subconscious longing, to go back there, to want to make things better in a way that cannot be done; to continue and develop relationships that were cut off.”

Support after leaving care

One of the biggest challenges was the minimal aftercare provided to young people leaving care at the time. Tony tells me that leaving Caldecott felt “a little bit like being abandoned. Not quite. But if there’d been some kind of extra ongoing support there, that may have helped.”

Tony writes now that: “I believe that aftercare support is crucial to enable young leavers to adapt to life in the outside world and to feel undergirded by the staff and/or social workers as a part of that process.

“For some this may need to last for several years before they are able to feel fully confident and independent. The vital point here is that to get this support it is not only fair and beneficial to them personally, but enables them to play a role in society according to the gifts that each of them have. So, the lack of this is a very sad double loss.”

Social work support

This lack of stability and ongoing support from one person was also a theme in Tony’s experience of social workers – or child care or welfare officers, as they were known at the time.

From the moment I was put into care I had about five [child care officers] altogether. So you just get to know a child care officer, and suddenly they say, ‘Sorry I’m leaving, you’ll get a new one soon’.”

“This was quite common, I think, in those days,” says Tony. And in fact it is still common for children in care to have multiple social workers during their time in care – as care-experienced adults we interviewed for our Choose Social Work campaign told us.

“In fact, originally in the 50s, I think they were called welfare officers,” says Tony. “And standard Caldecott jokes said, ‘They’re not so much welfare officers as farewell officers’, because people had so many of them, which, of course, didn’t help your stability.”

However, despite the lack of a consistent professional to build a relationship with, Tony says the child care officers “were helpful, and they intervened a lot over the problems with my foster parents”.

When his brother, Colin, requested their local authority notes and Tony read these as an adult, he found that, “Looking back, obviously they did quite a lot to help, particularly in times of crisis. So I would certainly say they helped me, definitely, despite the regular changes.”

Advice for staff working with children in care

What advice would Tony give to social workers and other professionals working with children in care now?

“I think the crucial thing, not so much for the social workers themselves but the actual staff [in residential homes], is to be aware of what children are going through,” he says. “And when they’re displaying erratic behaviour or disturbed behaviour, aggression, withdrawal, whatever it is, to know that that’s an alarm bell.”

This wasn’t the case for Tony: when he started drinking towards the end of his time at Caldecott, staff reacted in a fairly unsympathetic way to the symptoms, not the cause, of his behaviour. In Flying Under the Radar, Tony writes:

“The act of getting drunk as far as I was concerned, was not only to relieve my immediate feelings of anger and frustration, but also, I consider in retrospect, as a kind of plea for help. It was a classic case of ‘Not waving, but drowning’, but no one appeared to notice. It may be that no-one could have helped me at that stage. I do not know. They could have tried though, that was the point. They could have referred me to a psychotherapist, they could have tried talking to me, they could have done anything to show me they could see that I was in pain, but they didn’t.”

The value of relationships

If social workers are able to sustain an enduring, long-lasting relationship with a child or young person, it is a “lifeline”, says Tony.

“I think you feel, ‘Somebody’s interested in me’, even if they can’t solve all your problems, which they obviously can’t. But the fact that you know they’re, if you like, there for you, they’re interested, they’re trying to do their best, is enough to give you that encouragement to think, you know, ‘Well I’ll keep going’.”

In a statement, Nick Barnett, CEO of the Caldecott Foundation, which runs the home where Tony lived, said: “Tony was in care in the 1960s. In his book he shares this experience, reflecting on Caldecott as a wonderful therapeutic community.

“Since then, the therapeutic care sector has come to understand much better, through learning from clinical research and offering carefully adapted trauma-informed support to children and care-experienced adults, how the early childhood trauma which Tony experienced is highly likely to have continued to have an impact into his adulthood, despite some more positive elements to his experience.

“It is critical that children and young adults receive therapeutic care that supports them in addressing childhood traumas, losses and possible associated complex attachment issues so that they are able to live fulfilling lives.

“We must continue to support and guide young adults after they have left care. Life continues to throw challenges at us all. Most of us are fortunate to have loving families to support us through this. Sadly, this isn’t the case for many care leavers.”

How residential care has changed

Tony himself adds: “It is amazing how things have moved on in residential care over the last 50 years. The work done now at the Caldecott Foundation, as it is now called, is fantastic. The staff to child ratios are much higher. The therapies that children receive are very intense and staff training has moved on to a very high and sophisticated level. There is also much being done in the way of aftercare, which is so vital.”

Tony Inwood in 2023. Photo: courtesy of Tony Inwood

Today, Tony leads a “fulfilling and happy” life, and he credits this to his “rock solid relationship” with his partner, Simon, for providing a stable and secure home, along with the Christian faith he discovered in his adulthood.

In writing Flying Under the Radar, Tony hopes to demonstrate to anyone who has suffered a traumatic childhood that “there is always the possibility of a better and worthwhile future”.

If he was talking to a child or young person who was struggling now, he would say: “Things can get bad but, you know, there’s always another day, another year, and it may not always be that way.

“If people are really in a bleak situation, they may find that hard to believe, but this is why I think my story is a demonstration of it.”

Flying under the Radar by Tony Inwood is available on Amazon.

Almost 2,500 social workers and other professionals working in the sector attended a free Community Care webinar to mark World Social Work Day.

The webinar focused on how to look after your wellbeing and manage secondary trauma, with expert speakers Sass Boucher and Kate Collier of SelfCare Psychology.

During the webinar, Sass and Kate outlined their five pillars of protection model, which outlines behaviours and resources that can help practitioners and organisations mitigate the risk of secondary trauma. These are:

• Awareness of the issue;
• Peer support;
• Self care;
• Supervision, and
• Being trauma-informed.

A full recording of the webinar, plus a written transcript, will shortly be available on our subscription learning sites, Community Care Inform Children and Inform Adults, for all subscribers to benefit from.

Social workers can also access free tools to support wellbeing from SelfCare Psychology’s website.

This year marks 50 years since the first edition of Community Care was published, on 3 April 1974. As part of our celebrations, we made this webinar free to attend for all social workers and social care professionals.

You can keep up to date with all the anniversary content we publish by bookmarking this page, as well as signing up to our free newsletters.

To mark World Social Work Day, Community Care is hosting a free webinar with two expert speakers about wellbeing and secondary trauma.

The webinar, which is on Tuesday 19 March from 12noon-1pm, will cover how to look after your wellbeing and manage secondary trauma, the feelings of hurt that result from exposure to others’ trauma.

This year is Community Care’s anniversary, marking 50 years since the first edition was published on 3 April 1974. As part of our celebrations, we are making this webinar free to attend for all social workers and social care professionals.

The expert speakers are:

• Sass Boucher – counsellor, psychotherapist, lecturer and co-founder of SelfCare Psychology
• Kate Collier – head of learning and development, Black Country Women’s Aid and co-founder of SelfCare Psychology

Attend this webinar to:

• Understand how to look after your wellbeing in a professional context.
• Learn about the risk of secondary trauma and how it might affect you as a social worker.
• Understand how to mitigate the risk of secondary trauma through healthy practice, as opposed to simply “treating” the problem.
• Find out more about SelfCare Psychology’s Five Pillars of Protection model and how it can help you as a social worker, or support your team as a manager.

The webinar is relevant to all social workers and social care professionals, whether working in children’s or adults’ services, and is free to watch live.

Community Care Inform subscribers will have access to the recorded version of the webinar, plus a written transcript and additional resources.

Register now for your free place at the webinar.

Society places an enormous onus on social work, expects it to do a very difficult job in almost impossible conditions and then screams hysterically when things go wrong.”

You would be forgiven for thinking this was written a few years – or even a few days – ago. It is, in fact, a quote from the editorial in the first ever edition of Community Care magazine, published on 3 April 1974.

As I was skimming through the musty book containing all the editions from Community Care’s first year, I was struck by two things: how much the salaries have changed – in cash terms, at least – and how little the reputation of social work has.

Social work’s negative press

Since the 1970s, social work has hit the national press time and time again, especially when a child known to social services has died.

At the same time, its successes have often gone unnoticed. For example, during the Covid-19 pandemic, among the – deserved – praise for medical staff, delivery drivers and care workers, there was little mention of the social workers, who continued carrying out in-person visits to children and adults at risk of harm.

It was into this context of suspicion, hostility and ignorance about social work that Community Care launched our Choose Social Work campaign, in June 2023.

Showing the difference social work makes

We wanted to show the side of social work that you rarely see in the media: of people like you, our readers, working alongside families and adults, supporting them to make changes to their lives; sometimes having to make difficult decisions, but not making them alone.

We wanted to challenge that common misconception, beloved by TV dramas, that social workers can swoop in by themselves and take a child away.

Instead, we have shown the reality: that social workers are part of multi-agency teams and arrangements, with schools, police, health and mental health all playing their part and sharing decision making.

As part of the campaign, four journalists from the Community Care team went to Wandsworth children’s services to shadow social workers for a day:

The day ended with me being in absolute awe of the social workers I met. The decisions, the effort, the planning that goes into their work is phenomenal and cannot be understated. We only hear of the bad stories in the mainstream news but we never hear about the children and families social workers help.”

Giving voice to those with lived experience

Another hugely important aspect of Choose Social Work was ensuring that we involved people with lived experience of services. While we did hear about poor practice and how the care system as a whole often fails children and young people, we also featured some very moving stories about times when social workers formed meaningful and long-lasting relationships with the children they worked with.

In one video that we specially commissioned for the campaign, care-experienced author and campaigner Jenny Molloy interviewed a young person, Lizzie, and her social worker, Janet, about the relationship they had built and why it was so important to both of their lives.

Dear Future Social Worker

Throughout the campaign, we have asked you to share advice with the next generation of social workers. Given the negative media coverage of the profession, it must be difficult for any sixth-former or university student, or someone considering a career change in later life, to understand what the social work role involves and how to prepare themselves for the challenges they might encounter.

We’ve been so pleased with the response to this series: three of the letters are the most-viewed pieces of the entire campaign, and they’ve been shared across social media and have caused lively discussions in the comments section. Here’s some advice from two of my favourite letters:

Yewande (centre) speaking at Community Care Live

“Being a child protection social worker taught me that reward will come from seeing positive outcomes, and that you need to celebrate the small wins. Praise comes in different forms, and job satisfaction helps you to have a long lasting social work career.”
Yewande, manager and practice supervisor

Your views on Choose Social Work

The comments sections of news websites are often fairly horrifying places: I try my best never to stray ‘below the line’ on most sites.

But your comments under Choose Social Work articles have been so heartening, both for us and for the social workers and writers you have been responding to. These are some of the comments that have stayed with me:

The campaign’s future

Lyn Romeo (second right), chief social worker for adults, flanked by past, present and future chairs of the Adults PSW Network. Photo courtesy of the Adults PSW network.

Over the last seven-and-a-bit months since Choose Social Work was launched, we have published more than 40 pieces of content, including written articles, podcast episodes, videos, letters and galleries.

I would love to be able to share all of them here, but it would make this already long article more like a novel. Please do take a look at the Choose Social Work page, where you can see everything we have published as part of the campaign.

In 2024, we will still be championing Choose Social Work – and we hope you will too. Please contact me on ruth.hardy-mullings@markallengroup.com if you have any questions about supporting the campaign.

Community Care’s big Five-Oh

The first edition of Community Care magazine was published in 1974 – making this year our 50^th anniversary.

In the editorial in our first magazine, our then editor, Mark Allen, wrote that, “Community Care, with your co-operation, will do all it can to ensure that social workers are not made society’s universal scapegoats.”

This is as true now as it was 50 years ago. We hope that you will continue supporting us, so that Community Care is still going strong in another 50 years.

And our promise to you is that we will continue being the voice for and of social workers and champion the issues that matter to you.

In June, Community Care launched our Choose Social Work campaign to champion the profession and inspire the next generation of social workers.

As part of this, we are exploring how the often negative media coverage of the profession affects social workers – and how it can be improved.

In this episode of our Learn on the Go podcast series, from Community Care Inform, two expert guests discuss media coverage, blame and shame of social workers.

The guests are Dr Liz Frost, associate professor of social work at the University of the West of England, and Dr Maria Leedham, senior lecturer in applied linguistics at the Open University.

They discuss Maria’s research into mentions of social workers in UK newspapers and TV dramas, why media coverage almost entirely focuses on child protection, and whether there are signs that this negative bias might be changing.

The podcast is available on most podcast platforms such as Apple Podcasts and Spotify, or you can find it by putting ‘Learn on the Go’ into your search engine.

You can view a written transcript of the podcast here.

Community Care’s Choose Social Work campaign, which has been running since June, aims to champion the brilliant work social workers do every day, inspire the next generation of practitioners, and counteract the negative media coverage of the profession.

We asked senior leaders to share their best advice for social workers, and why they are proud to be part of the profession.

Jack Cordery, Cafcass

I’ve been a qualified social worker for 40 years now. I’ve never had a moment of regret.”

Jan Williams, Essex

It’s important to hang on to what’s good about social work, and why we’re here, and what we’re doing.”

Jen Salter, Wiltshire

As a social worker, even throughout your career, you can stay in touch with young people and continue to impact on their adult lives.”

If you’d like to share your own advice for the next generation of social workers, you can write a letter as part of our Dear Future Social Worker series. Please email ruth.hardy-mullings@markallengroup.com to contribute.

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As part of our Choose Social Work campaign, Jenny Molloy talks about the role social workers have played in her life, particular moments that made a difference, and the advice she would give to new social workers.

Jenny Molloy is the bestselling author of Hackney Child, Tainted Love and Neglected, and a care leaver.