For Community Care’s 50th anniversary, our My Brilliant Colleague series invites you to celebrate anyone who has inspired you in your career.

In this entry, social worker Noemi Dziatkowska has nominated her supervisor, Sharon Modeste, who she describes as the “heart” of Wandsworth’s early help team.

Sharon Modeste is a qualified social worker with over 20 years of experience working within vulnerable and diverse communities, including in the prison service and various child protection and safeguarding teams.

She is currently a senior practitioner in Wandsworth Council’s early help, targeted parenting and family support service.

To Sharon,

I want you to know just how much you mean to me and to everyone in our team. Your contributions to the social work community are nothing short of extraordinary.

Photo: Sharon Modeste

You bring so much compassion and warmth to everything you do, and your positive spirit makes it a joy to come to work each day. Even on the hardest days, you lift us up and inspire us to keep going.

As your supervisee, I feel so incredibly lucky to have you as my guide. When I joined early help in October 2023, as a nervous, newly qualified social worker, I didn’t know what to expect. In just a year, you’ve given me so much more than just knowledge. You’ve helped me grow my confidence and find my voice.

Every supervision session with you feels like a gift because I always take away something new and valuable. You care so deeply about my growth, always encouraging me to stretch myself and embrace new learning experiences.

I couldn’t have asked for a better mentor. More than that, Sharon, you are the heart of our team.

You’re always the first to offer help when someone is struggling and you consistently go above and beyond when we’re under pressure. Your kindness and dedication shine through in everything you do.

You don’t just do your job, you pour your heart into it, and that makes all the difference.

We are so lucky to have you, and I’m endlessly grateful for everything you’ve done for us all.

I hope that I can take on the learning you passed on and be as successful as you are one day.

Noemi

How to nominate a colleague

For our 50th anniversary, we’re expanding our series My Brilliant Colleague to include anyone who has inspired you in your career – whether current or former colleagues, managers, students, lecturers, mentors or prominent past or present sector figures whom you have admired from afar.

Nominate your colleague or social work inspiration by either:

• Filling in our nominations form with a letter or a few paragraphs (100-250 words) explaining how and why the person has inspired you.
• Or sending a voice note of up to 90 seconds to +447887865218, including your and the nominee’s names and roles.

Despite the need to provide your name and role, you or the nominee can be anonymous in the published entry.

If you have any questions, email our community journalist, Anastasia Koutsounia, at anastasia.koutsounia@markallengroup.com.

For Community Care’s 50th anniversary, our My Brilliant Colleague series invites you to celebrate anyone who has inspired you in your career.

In this entry, service manager Michelle Vernon has nominated her first social work manager, Hilary, whose exemplary practice and supervision have influenced her career for over two decades.

Pictured: Hilary / Photo by Michelle Vernon

Hilary was my first social work manager following my qualification in 2000, and has been a friend and guiding light since.

She was then the manager of a small team at the Albert Kennedy Trust, a charity supporting LGBTQ+ 16-25-year-olds at risk of homelessness, and I was a keen, but cynical, social worker.

I was disillusioned by the motives of people in my course and suspected the profession was  full of power-crazed maniacs. Instead, Hilary taught me that there is room in social work for compassionate practice and management.

She was, and remains, one of the most thoughtful practitioners and managers I have ever worked with. She cares about people, challenges poor practice and decision making, often at great cost to herself, and, perhaps most importantly, is kind.

My first experience of supervision was with her – she centred our conversation around my identity as a practitioner and helped me to think about how I practised.

Having had such a positive first experience became a key insight for when I did my stint in a local authority, where supervision was focused on case management and nothing more. I knew that I wasn’t expecting ‘too much’ from those meetings, but that I deserved more.

I have since gone on to manage teams, and now a region, and I still base my provision of supervision on that very first experience I had with Hilary.

I understand the importance of having a safe space to explore, think, and just notice where you are within the work; a space where it is okay to be vulnerable and seek direction. There is an understanding that we all continue to learn.

I like to think I am firm but fair and that definitely began with Hilary.

Thank you H!

How to nominate a colleague

For our 50th anniversary, we’re expanding our series My Brilliant Colleague to include anyone who has inspired you in your career – whether current or former colleagues, managers, students, lecturers, mentors or prominent past or present sector figures whom you have admired from afar.

Nominate your colleague or social work inspiration by either:

• Filling in our nominations form with a letter or a few paragraphs (100-250 words) explaining how and why the person has inspired you.
• Or sending a voice note of up to 90 seconds to +447887865218, including your and the nominee’s names and roles.

Despite the need to provide your name and role, you or the nominee can be anonymous in the published entry.

If you have any questions, email our community journalist, Anastasia Koutsounia, at anastasia.koutsounia@markallengroup.com.

Note: There is a poll embedded within this post, please visit the site to participate in this post's poll.
As a newly qualified social worker, I was wracked with guilt and shame when I found myself disliking a child I was working with.

These feelings snuck up on me, a slow burner perhaps, but however hard I tried to suppress them, they were real.

Charlie* was a pre-teen living in a residential setting. During our meetings, he would interrupt me, call me a liar and other names and tell me that he didn’t want me there. I felt thoroughly disliked by him. It was painful.

How could I live with myself? A social worker who doesn’t like a child? That wasn’t supposed to happen.”

I was so full of good intentions but dreaded my time with him. Initially, I couldn’t bring myself to tell my supervisor – I was sure she would judge me and question my professional competence.

But I soon realised I needed help. My feelings towards Charlie were starting to affect my decision making.

Understanding the dynamics of our relationship

The first hurdle was admitting my feelings to my supervisor.

Once I had overcome my fear and talked to her, she handled my admission sensitively and professionally.

Exploratory supervision helped me understand that, just because I wanted to build a partnership with Charlie, it didn’t mean that he wanted the same.

He didn’t want a social worker in his life and my efforts to relate and care for him were adding to his feelings of ambivalence and hostility towards me.

My resilience was certainly being tested.

I was leaving every visit feeling hurt, offended and angry.”

And so my supervisor and I started to unpick the power presence in our relationship. I had been left feeling like Charlie held all the power, but in reality, he held very little.

As a child in the care system, he had no choice but to have me involved in his life and had little say in where he was living or in how often he was able to see his family.

Polishing my trauma-sensitive lens

By thinking out loud with my supervisor, I reflected on the importance of understanding the reasons behind his behaviours towards me within the context of the trauma he had experienced.

I came to understand that Charlie’s history of neglect and abuse was a critical factor influencing his actions and I was helped to see him through a trauma-sensitive lens, rather than a lens that was muddied by my own feelings.

He had suffered multiple adverse events in his life which had no doubt impacted his ability to self-regulate and make trusting relationships. This was compounded by the several changes in social workers he had experienced.

With the best intentions, I had attempted – and expected – to get close to him and become a mentor, when he actually needed time to trust me.”

Recognising what my job was

Making sense of how trauma was affecting Charlie helped me take a more strengths-based approach to my work with him.

Instead of concentrating on his deficits and difficulties, I changed my use of language to help him develop his sense of hope and optimism around areas of challenge, like building relationships with other people.

I focused my time with him on praising his strengths, abilities and talents, and less on areas he could improve on.  This immediately seemed to relieve the pressure between us.

I moved from an adult ‘finger wagger’ to his loudest cheerleader.”

Up until then, I had thought that his ‘uncooperativeness’ had been getting in the way of me doing my job.  However, some soul searching on my part reminded me that working with his ‘uncooperativeness’ was my job!

Leaving my professional ego at the door

I continued to use supervision regularly to ensure my work with Charlie was focused on enhancing his development of a positive sense of self.

I continued being strengths-based; using an approach which came from true belief that he already possessed the skills and strength to build relationships and manage his anger.

As a practitioner, I learnt to leave my professional ego at the door. I learnt that people will not always be thankful for my efforts and good intentions and it was naïve and self-serving to think that they would.

Accepting the complexity of relationship-based work

Admitting that I didn’t like Charlie was an important step in building my professional confidence and sense of self.

I learnt that relationship-based social work is not about immediately getting others onside; it is far more complex.

My relationship with Charlie needed to be built with an understanding of his past trauma and the organisational context at play.

As a practitioner, I also needed to work on understanding and managing the emotions and feelings he evoked in me.

As my relationship with Charlie improved, I gained the confidence to view my feelings as signals that needed attention and reflection rather than as failings.

Accepting each other

Supervision became a driving force behind learning and growing in my understanding of both of our responses to each other.

By focusing on the cause of the behaviour, rather than the behaviour itself, Charlie and I built our relationship. He began to accept my involvement more easily.

I don’t think I can go as far as to say he ever looked forward to me visiting or that he liked having a social worker.

But, over time, we came to an unspoken agreement. He was the expert on his own life and experiences. It was my role to facilitate, not fix.

Charlie had just needed help in building the confidence to believe that he was capable of his own personal growth and change.

Social work practice is a relationship-based activity which pivots around interactions that occur between social workers, people who receive support, carers and other professionals. Social work supervision is itself a relationship-based activity that should reflect the kind of trusting, supportive and empathic relationship that practitioners are expected to build with the individuals they support.

This supervisory relationship should be strengths-based; the supervisor focusing on the strengths of the social worker just as the social worker uses strengths-based approaches with the people they support. Strengths-based supervision aims to draw on the knowledge and expertise of both parties. It supports a collaborative relationship between supervisor and supervisee, one built on shared responsibility and shared learning.

A strengths-based approach should be empowering while enabling the supervisee to grow and develop their professional practice.

Strengths-based approaches are indispensable in modern social work. By providing a forum to think critically about and model strengths-based relationships, supervision makes its own vital contribution.

References

Department of Health and Social Care (DHSC) (2018)
Post-qualifying Standards for Social Work Practice Supervisors in Adult Social Care

Department of Health and Social Care (DHSC) (2019)
Strengths-based approach: Practice Framework and Practice Handbook

Rankine, M (2019)
‘The “thinking aloud” process: a way forward in social work supervision’
Reflective Practice; International and Multidisciplinary Perspectives, Volume 20, Issue 1, p97-110

If you have a Community Care Inform Adults licence, log in to access the full guide. You can access more supervision guidance on the practice education knowledge and practice hub.

The room was packed with black, female social workers, practice educators and lecturers listening and conversing openly, unfiltered.

Within the safety of each other’s company, they spoke of missed promotions, enduring racist remarks from professionals, feeling alienated, their traumas and the barriers they met when creating black female-only spaces.

The occasion was the one-year anniversary of the anti-racist movement (ARM) for social workers, a black female-only group.

According to its founder, Shantel Thomas, the idea had come out of a necessity for a space for black women to offload without white colleagues casting doubt on their experiences.

“Social work is a female-dominated profession and what you find is, yes, men may be in the minority, but they climb a lot easier,” says Thomas, a social work academic who was formerly anti-racist lead at the British Association for Social Workers.

“Women, especially black women, tend to hold on to their trauma internally and there wasn’t a safe space to express that without having to explain and apologise or try to compensate.”

A reflective anti-racist model

Photo by ARM

In a unique approach, the group employs social work techniques to “create an emotionally-informed thinking space” and help its members cope with traumatic experiences caused by racism.

This involves using a reflective case discussion model of group supervision developed by social work professor Gillian Ruch, which resists problem-solving and steers practitioners away from “blaming or pathologising” and “feeling individually responsible for an outcome”.

In each session, practitioners are invited to take 10 minutes to describe their dilemma. They then sit silently as other members discuss and share their theories and perspectives before coming back and reflecting on what resonated.

“Naturally, as social workers, we get straight to what we need to do instead of stopping and thinking why this may be happening. [Through this process,] we’re trying to encourage thinking before taking action,” explains Thomas.

What the sessions particularly focus on is black female practitioners’ wellbeing and self-confidence, which is often eroded by microaggressions and racist incidents in the workplace.

By providing different perspectives of other black women, the group offers members a space to process their often confusing and painful experiences, says Thomas. This enables them to take more strategic steps to alleviate them.

“What happens with black women is we experience a microaggression or a direct, overt type of racism and we start to second-guess our consciousness. We overthink about what that could be and it’s so painful that it affects us internally. When we discuss it, she’s able to get validation, unpick it from different viewpoints and understand that it’s not about her, it is about other systems or structures.”

Missed promotions

A common theme among members has been lost promotions with vague feedback, with roles given instead to less experienced white colleagues, says Thomas.

One black social work lecturer had worked in her role for around 20 years, including supporting big projects and an international recruitment campaign. But when she put herself forward for a promotion, a white colleague she had mentored got it instead.

The rejection and vague feedback that followed left the lecturer doubting her worth as a professional and so she turned to the group for advice.

Having raised issues with the same organisation several times, she was connected with a key member for one-on-one mentoring.

“She was doubting herself and her abilities,” Thomas says. “She had achieved so much but that one thing about not getting the job counteracted all that. And sometimes, it doesn’t matter how much unpicking you do, there are no solutions. That’s what the additional conversation was about. It was ‘you need to get out of there because it doesn’t feel like things are going to change’.”

With ARM’s support, the lecturer not only quit but applied for a more senior role with a different employer and was appointed.

The need for black female-to-female mentorship

Mentorship is key in ARM, which highlights the benefits of having experienced black female social workers supporting other black female practitioners.

For social work professor Dr Carlene Firmin, her most vocal years were at the start of her career, when she had been nurtured by black women in her workplace.

“If I think back to myself at the start, I was bold. I was going into a room confident, very clear about what I thought. Then that was quiet for about 15 years,” she says.

“At the start, there were black women around me, leaders that nurtured that fire inside me. And that’s something a movement like this can offer to people starting out.”

According to Thomas, no black woman, or man, can be prepared for the harsh reality of being a black social worker. That’s where the need for a black mentor lies.

‘We need a space to talk about the trauma’

The first time she realised she could have needed a black mentor was as early as her first year as a qualified social worker. During a visit, a mother became vocal about her distaste towards having a black woman commenting on her parenting.

“She was direct about it. I remember sitting there frozen because I didn’t know what to do,” says Thomas. “I grew up nestled in my Caribbean bubble and I hadn’t been exposed so brutally to [the reality of the world]. So it was like somebody punched me in the stomach. It made me realise how others see me, not for anything that I’ve done, but for the colour of my skin.”

When she returned to the office, she did not seek her manager or a colleague for support. Instead, she went to the bathroom, cried, and went back to work quietly, never speaking to anyone about it.

“My manager was an Asian lady but I didn’t know what to say. I remember it so vividly. Even speaking about it now, I can feel how I felt at the time. That would have been a perfect time to have a mentor,” she adds.

“There are many experiences that I purposely haven’t thought about for my own survival. But that’s where mentoring, coaching and therapy come in. We need a space to talk about all the traumas that we experience.”

To join one of ARM’s sessions you can contact Shantel Thomas via Twitter or LinkedIn.

High workloads and a lack of supervision are undermining the professional curiosity and challenge needed for effective child protection practice, research has found.

Several serious case reviews found that high workloads meant social workers lacked the time to build the effective relationships necessary to exercise effective challenge in families where children were at risk, according to the latest – and final – three-year analysis of SCRs, covering 2017-19.

And inadequate quality and frequency of supervision was a factor in two-thirds of local reviews of serious cases in 2021 analysed by the Child Safeguarding Practice Review Panel for its annual report, issued – like the SCR analysis – last week.

The panel, which is appointed by government to advise on safeguarding and analyse serious cases, said practitioners were frequently overreliant on parents’ accounts of events, and did not probe further, and linked this to the lack of supervision.

Its report also outlined issues with risk assessment, information sharing and escalation of concerns and led the panel to renew its calls for the government to set up expert multi-agency units in every area to take responsibility for child protection cases.

‘Children cannot afford to wait for reform’

Annie Hudson, chair, Child Safeguarding Practice Review Panel

“Our annual report shows that while many professionals work hard to protect children, there are fault lines in the system that inhibit good information-sharing, risk assessment and critical analysis and challenge,” said panel chair Annie Hudson.

“It is now time to make changes in how agencies work together to protect and safeguard children, building on what is working and creating the right conditions to support the very best multi-agency practice. Children cannot afford to wait.”

The Department for Education is due to respond to the panel’s call – made in its inquiry into the murders of Arthur Labinjo-Hughes and Star Hobson – early in the new year, alongside the DfE’s response to the Independent Review of Children’s Social Care, and an implementation plan.

The panel called on the DfE to “urgently release its plans to reform children’s social care and to strengthen the child protection system”.

‘Lack of effective challenge’

As with the panel’s review of the murders of Arthur and Star, both its annual report and the SCR review – carried out by academics at Birmingham and East Anglia universities – highlighted a lack of effective professional challenge as a key practice issue.

An analysis of 23 of the SCRs – found to be broadly reflective of the 166 reports studied – found that the issue occurred frequently, including practitioners not questioning parents’ accounts of events or not following up on missed medical appointments.

Drawing on previous studies, it highlighted the challenges for social workers and other practitioners in balancing building a respectful and supportive relationship with parents with adopting a critical and investigative stance.

Several SCRs identified workload issues – including limited resources, high caseloads and high staff turnover – as a barrier to effective challenge because they undermined professionals’ ability to build relationships with families.

While reviews also identified frequent examples of professionals working hard to overcome this barrier, they found practitioners had to make time to do so, “often going over and above the allotted time permitted by their agencies”.

Working with ‘hostile families’

The dynamics of relationships with parents also presented a barrier to effective challenge, the report found, with SCRs saying practitioners found parents “difficult to engage”, challenging or, in some cases, hostile.

“Within these SCRs, there is evidence that working with hostile families could shut down professional curiosity, derailing appropriate challenge and inquiry,” the report said.

In one case of intrafamilial sexual abuse, where the family had made threats to professionals’ lives and pursued neighbours who provided evidence against them, practitioners “withdrew from the family and avoided asking challenging questions about the children’s welfare”.

However, the particular SCR found no evidence that safety plans were drawn up for professionals by employers, despite the threats having been made to their lives.

Organisations ‘need to promote physical and psychological safety’

The research report stressed that practitioners needed to feel safe to exercise professional curiosity, meaning organisations had to have robust safety policies, such as lone working protocols, and procedures that supported psychological safety.

This included providing the “space and support to discuss and process the powerful emotions evoked by challenging encounters with service users”.

However, the Child Safeguarding Practice Review Panel’s annual report found a lack of frequency and quality of supervision was a factor in 268 (67.3%) of the 379 local rapid reviews into serious cases that it analysed.

It said good supervision was a “crucial component” of an organisational culture that supported critical thinking and professional challenge, by enabling supervisors to scrutinise practitioners’ attitudes and assumptions and help keep a focus on the child’s lived experience.

“This was noted by the analysis of rapid reviews which concluded that practitioners need to be supported to further develop their skills in providing good and sensitive challenge to families and other professionals through regular quality supervision. This will enable a move from a reliance on self-reported information when assessing risk,” the panel’s report added.

‘It helps me understand how I should do things, not just what I need to do.’
‘We discuss how emotions are affecting my decision-making’
‘I’m prompted to think about theory and research in relation to my work.’

How often are the above statements true of your supervision? Or are you just grateful if you have something resembling a regular session?

Most research into social work supervision has focused on how often practitioners have such meetings. And that’s clearly important when surveys and anecdotal accounts indicate some social workers don’t get regular supervision at all.

But as David Wilkins writes, there is a surprisingly small evidence base for how or indeed whether supervision supports good practice. That’s why Wilkins is engaged in a number of research projects into supervision and its impact. As part of this, in conjunction with Community Care, he is surveying social workers to find out what their supervision provides them with and the kind of discussions that take place in meeting rooms across the country.

You can take part and help improve understanding of what actually happens in supervision and what makes it effective. Share your experience in the brief survey which asks you to consider statements like the ones at the start of the article in relation to your own supervision. It’s completely anonymous and there are no personal questions. The questionnaire takes around eight minutes to complete.

Click here for the survey

This research is being carried out by Dr David Wilkins (University of Bedfordshire). If you have any questions, you can contact David directly: david.wilkins@beds.ac.uk or @david82wilkins. The findings from this survey will be shared via Community Care and in other ways in due course.

David’s research is focused on children and family social workers. Community Care is also interested in the supervision experiences of social workers practising with adults. You can complete our survey here, or get in touch by email.

By Elizabeth Rylan*

Being a social worker requires adaptability, flexibility and the ability to respond to new and unpredictable situations. We practise across a range of settings and in one day I might review an older person with dementia in a residential home, assess a young adult with autism and then prepare for a mental health tribunal. I often think of this as having to have a range of ‘hats’ of varying styles – I may be carrying out the same role, but what this looks like in practice will differ.

Additionally, in my current role, I am both a case-holding practitioner and a supervisor to an unqualified, case-holding member of staff. I have always been interested in supporting and mentoring others but the step up to become a formal supervisor was a big change. However, once I had worked through my initial, perhaps commonly felt concerns (who am I to instruct another person what to do? Do I know enough? What if I get it wrong?) it has become part and parcel of my day job and one of the aspects I enjoy the most.

One of the aspects I was very conscious of when starting as a supervisor was balancing competing demands. Over the past 18 months I have supervised three different members of staff and have tried to work through how to best negotiate the differing dynamics. This is what I have learnt:

1. Start as you mean to go on
   In my view, a clear and co-produced supervision agreement is key to promoting a shared understanding right from the start. This can include aspects such as the purpose of supervision; the remit of both parties; what supervision will ‘look’ like, for example, whether discussions will be recorded in notes or on case files; and also what to do if there are difficulties in the supervisory relationship.As yet, I have never had cause to refer back to this document to remind my supervisee of their responsibilities and I think that may be in part because expectations have been clearly set out and I have sought their buy-in to the process from the beginning.
2. Be honest and be human
   I carry a full caseload myself with no reduction for being a supervisor and it can be daunting to try and squeeze even more into an already packed schedule. I am efficient but I’m not superhuman, and I have learnt the importance of being honest not only with myself in terms of what is realistic for me to achieve, but also how to communicate this to my supervisee. I am upfront and open with them that my priority is the client, whether they are allocated to me, allocated to them, a situation I am overseeing on duty, or supporting another colleague on a one-off piece off work. That means that I have to be focused and clear in how I prioritise. So if they ask me whether I have time to talk through a situation, they have to be prepared for occasions when I may have to say “not right now”.I always try to gauge the urgency of the query so I know if I need to make that my focus. Otherwise I will always try my best to offer an alternative time when we can discuss matters properly. This means they have the assurance that I will provide the guidance, but at a time when it will be more mutually beneficial, rather than when my mind is whirring away on another matter and my attention is somewhere else entirely, which is when there is a greater risk of skimming the surface and missing a crucial piece of information.
3. Have clear boundaries
   I am both a colleague and a supervisor to the person and need to juggle the hats. For example, I may be giving them guidance on a specific case in my role as the duty social worker, and then later providing them with supervisory feedback on how they are managing duty processes in general to support their continued development. Being a colleague can have its advantages; I am working with them on a day-to-day basis and can provide increased input particularly if they are a new starter with the team or struggling with a contentious issue. However, I am conscious that they could feel that their line manager is ever present and therefore feel under observation, and I want to instil in them a sense of being able to get on with their job without checking every aspect at every turn.I am also aware that as a colleague I may be feeling similar pressures or share their exasperation with an ineffective process. It can feel hypocritical to have to convey the party line and ensure they do X, Y and Z, if I feel that it is overly time-consuming or of little value to the client. It is important to remember that how I feel about the issue is a matter for my own supervision, and my role with my supervisee is not to join in the moaning but to support them to find a constructive response to channel their frustrations to positive effect.
4. Learn from experience
   Looking back to when I started in the role, there are of course aspects which with hindsight I would do differently and discussions I could have handled better. If I am giving guidance to others then I also need to be prepared to receive constructive feedback myself to expand and consolidate my skills. I have been a supervisee for much longer than I have been a supervisor, and I have reflected on my own experiences receiving supervision to consider what I have found most and least useful and methods I would like to incorporate as I develop my own style.
5. Using your own supervision
   Of course I like to think that I am a delight to supervise! But stepping up into the role prompted me to reflect on how I interact with my own supervisor, particularly following a recent change in my line manager. I now have a better understanding and insight into their role and empathy for the demands that they are seeking to balance themselves. I have become clearer in raising for discussion my style of practice and how I best communicate, to ensure that I am taking more ownership over ensuring that my supervision is productive and constructive. My own supervision sessions can be a useful forum for me to discuss not just the practical aspects and any workload issues relating to the person I supervise, but also how it is contributing to my sense of professionalism and career development.

Overall, I enjoy my supervisory experience and recently I have been reflecting on how I can continue to build on my learning. The outcome of this is that I am now on course to become a practice supervisor. I am looking forward to developing my mentoring and management skills and implementing them in practice. I suppose this new role will be another ‘hat’ to add to the collection.  At this rate, I’m going to need a bigger stand for them all!

*Elizabeth Rylan is a pseudonym for an adults’ social worker based in a local authority in the south of England