Skip to main content

About Me

My photo
Natalie
My name is Natalie, I started this blog as a Newly Qualified Social Worker working with adults. I have now progressed to a level 3 Social Worker and want to continue sharing my experiences.

End of ASYE

This is a weird one for me to write because I finish my ASYE tomorrow and this blog started from writing about my experiences as a NQSW which has been a part of my identity for a long time but presuming everything tomorrow goes well (fingers crossed) then I won't be that anymore. I will officially be a Level 2 Social Worker.

I feel a mix of emotions with this. I feel relieved because the paperwork is all done and handed in but I also feel a bit I don't know if sad is the right word. I started over 2 years ago because of maternity leave in the middle, I have done it both full time and part time. Before I was a parent and after so it has been a bit part of my life and although I am staying in my team so nothing changes day to day it is starting to feel different.

I feel the imposter syndrome I had more so when I started my ASYE rearing its ugly head again. I started that fresh out of university and that feels an entire lifetime ago. The people I started with have long since finished and been practising for well over a year now, they are thinking about what training they want to do next to progress further and I am a little left behind. Obviously my life has moved on in other areas and I absolutely wouldn't change that for the world but its a bizarre feeling.

I am not quite sure where I belong in all of this. I am currently a NQSW who has been graduated for 2.5 years. This should have been finished a long time ago so it feels nice to close the door on that chapter but in the same respect I do not know myself as a Level 2 yet. I have been through different stages of being a Social Worker, student to ASYE and now to Level 2. It is yet another change but also day to day not really a change at all.

I know I will work on harder cases, have more responsibility and will continue to gain knowledge through this but I still feel back in my student days in some respects. I know I am not the only one who has imposter syndrome or is waiting for someone to question why they are where they are or what they think they are doing.

I finished my degree in 2021 and I still haven't quite grasped that. I've “almost” finished my ASYE and it is crazy to me that I am at this point. I don't plan on stopping writing this blog but I am not sure how often new blog posts will happen. I am going to try for at least once a month but initially I promise nothing. A lot is changing at the moment in terms of the end of my ASYE but also personal changes that are time consuming. I know that people tell me they enjoy the blogs or find them helpful so it is definitely something I want to continue.

Labels:

Comments

Post a Comment

Popular posts from this blog

Racism

The topic of this blog is going to be racism. As I am sure you can tell from the picture on my profile I am a white woman so I am not necessarily the best person to be writing about this topic but I wanted to give some musings following a recent conference I attended where the focus was all about racism. We did an activity to help us recognise our own privilege. I was sat with colleagues from multiple different cultures and countries. Throughout the activity I was completing my own but also watching how other people were responding to it. It was a list of scenarios or situations and if it was relevant to you then you had to add something to a bag. There was a list of approximately 25 statements. I think I added 6 to my bag but I watched as colleagues added easily double if not triple the amount that I did. I found that it made my heart feel heavy because although I know I have privilege for some aspects of my identity there are some aspects where I do not. I could see people speci...
2 comments
Read more

Poverty

I knew I wanted to write about poverty for this blog and had already started writing it when someone mentioned to me on a training course about being anti racist that one of the chapters in the anti-racist social worker in practice book is about the link between racism and poverty. I did not want to write about poverty without thinking about the connection or different experiences people can have due to other factors and how the same as other characteristics about people can link via Intersectionality poverty is something that will be experienced differently based on characteristics such as race. Within that chapter it talks about the changes to tax benefits from a survey completed in 2023 by We Are Citizens Advice which shows how different families are impacted money wise. I was extremely surprised that black families are impacted by over triple the amount of white families and Asian families almost double the amount of white families. I understand that we are in a cost of livin...
1 comment
Read more

History of Social Care

  So before I even start getting into this one I want to warn you that it won't be an easy read. I am going to reflect on a training session I went on recently and some of the information is harrowing and hard to hear so if that is not something you can handle right now feel free to click off completely or go find a different one of my blogs to read instead. The premise of this training course was looking at the history of Social Care and included discussions around asylums, the laws and legislations surrounding this that defined the terminology of the time and a conversation about Nazi Germany. The thing they all have in common is that they were looking at how people with disabilities were treated throughout history. We were shown a list of reasons that someone may be sent to an asylum or similar and I find it so interesting that one of the reasons you could be sent is for using medication to stop conception but it was enshrined in law that you could be forced to be sterili...
Post a Comment
Read more