Rachel: Social Worker

Well, I first came into Lewisham as a student actually and that's where I learnt the ropes in many ways of social work and I found that it was a very exciting place to work. I love the support of colleagues I liked the innovation they were doing in terms of different flexible and new exciting ways to try and work with families.

We have a lot of experienced members in our team which I draw on so much and is one of the main reasons I actually stayed in Lewisham post my student qualification. It's so important to have people you can bounce off, who you can talk to who you talk can about your experiences with, difficult phone conversations you might have had, those types of things are a real emotional support for me.

I don't think that I would be able to do this job without them and I think that you can't do child protection social work alone, you have to do it within a team and I draw on so much of their experience, skills, opinions, decisions and it literally helps me to make decisions and plans for my families.

I mean success in social work is quite hard to quantify and to pinpoint I mean there are situation where we put together all the pieces of the puzzle and we find that children are not safe within their homes and then making that decision, doing something about it and finding that the children are thriving in a foster placement for example is a real success and that's something that you can see and that's very important. Or just building that relationship with somebody so that they feel able to talk to you about something that may have happened to them and then building that rapport - that to me is a success.

Lewisham's a very varied Borough, it's a very multicultural Borough, there's a lot going on, there are a lot of different issues going on. So there's the opportunity to work with so many different people within so many different sectors, different professionals, different multi-agency work. I just find that it's so varied that I literally get a taste of everything.

There's excellent training and there's a very varied programme of training each year and you can pick and choose and there's different levels, there's high level training, there's more low level foundation training and it's very easily accessible. Lewisham are very keen to keep people within Lewisham and to build up a strong network of Social Worker seniors who have stayed within Lewisham and worked up that ladder so I think that the support's definitely there.