Hayley is a Child Protection Coordinator with Sheffield City Council. She talked us through her role in supporting practitioners as they navigate challenging situations, how her own story sparked an interest in social work, and the impact managers can have in reducing barriers to senior roles for people of colour.
In her current role, Hayley taps into her social work experience to support frontline colleagues, providing an objective “critical friend” to bounce ideas off or chat through the unique challenges and situations faced by the families they are working with:
“For me, it's very different from fieldwork. I think when you're in the moment of fieldwork, you can't sometimes see the wood for the trees. We provide that oversight, we can be the critical friends, because we're able to have that objective overview and look into the case and make recommendations.”
Working alongside frontline social workers and managers, coordinators help to ensure the responsibility of getting the right outcome for each young person doesn’t fall on one individual. As well as helping to improve outcomes by bringing a wider range of ideas and perspectives, this approach works well for social workers themselves, embedding support and reflective feedback in day-to-day practice.
“I love this role, because I'm a people person, I really am, and I get to work alongside the managers and the social workers more. I'm passionate about social workers, their workload, their emotional well-being because it is a job that can be so overwhelming. I’m able to guide social workers but also work with parents and children.”
Hayley’s decision to become a social worker was a long time in the making, and came about through her own experiences in an abusive relationship:
“I sort of fell into this kind of work. I was in a relationship with my children’s father for thirteen years, we had three children. He started abusing substances, so we separated. Before separating there was a period of time where it was quite an acrimonious relationship.”
The need to process and understand this led Hayley to develop a strong interest in the psychology of relationships and the decision-making process around them. Through volunteering work, she was able to reflect and build an understanding of what she had been through, while also discovering a talent for building rapport with others and helping them to work through their own issues.
“I joined a domestic violence volunteer group, just doing admin and things like that, and over the course I discovered that I had been a victim of coercive control and emotional abuse. I obviously didn’t recognise it at the time, and it fascinated me. I wanted to understand more about people, why people make decisions.”
Hayley went on to work in several other roles which involved relationship-building and supporting people, including befriending and home help, before moving into family support. A particular highlight of this stage in her career was being part of Sheffield’s Multiple Heritage Service, which specialised in helping young people from mixed ethnic or cultural backgrounds to explore and celebrate their heritage. In a city as diverse and multicultural as Sheffield, this was particularly valuable. She decided to become a social worker while working on a MAST (Multi Agency Support Team) in a family support role. Impressively, she was able to juggle family, work and studying to achieve her social work degree through the council’s “grow your own” programme:
“It was very hard work, but we got through it! I had always teetered on the idea but I thought I would wait until my youngest started secondary school. I can look back now and think, “Wow that was quite a journey” but you don’t see it at the time.”
One of the key challenges Hayley faced as part of this journey lay in the structural and cultural barriers which can prevent people of colour from advancing to senior levels. Often, social norms, expectations and microaggressions within workplace culture can come together to have a major impact on confidence:
“It’s about not feeling at the level of your white counterparts, and that’s so sad. I think it comes through the stereotyping and language we use. I know for me personally, I’m quite a confident and enthusiastic person, but that has been misconstrued before because of the colour of my skin.”
Hayley found that this came to the fore in interview situations, where she became aware that she was masking her natural personality and enthusiasm to avoid similar negative experiences. The lightbulb moment came when working with her manager on interview preparation for the coordinator role:
“Going into the interview for this job, I was doing interview prep with my manager at the time. She spoke to me after the interview and said “Where’s Hayley? I’ve known you for 20 years and I don’t know the person who was sat there!”
As a result, she was able to approach the actual interview with a focus on bringing a more genuine version of herself:
“I was able to tell my story and incorporate all my skills, experience and knowledge, but also retain a bit of me. For me, that was massive.”
Discussing equality more widely, Hayley strongly feels that the key to building a more diverse and inclusive workforce is through actions like this. Although having policies and procedures in place is important, a truly anti-racist approach requires individuals to take responsibility and make use of every opportunity to tackle inequalities:
“I think it needs to be a continuous process. I’m Black 365 days of the year, not just in October for Black History Month, or “equality month” or whatever. I’d like to see people confident to be able to think, “Right this is a daily thing, these microaggressions, I’m going to challenge them!”
Children’s social work matters to Hayley because:
“They’re the future, aren’t they? I want things to be right for my children, for my grandchildren, for generations to come. There’s nothing more powerful than family, and when you get it right, that thing can go on for generations.”