Social Work Week – introducing our Team Manager, Sue

Sue McNulty is one of our Team Managers in the Yorkshire and East Midlands region. For Social Work Week we sat down for a chat about how she found herself working in social care, her own fostering experience and what makes the social work team at Team Fostering so special.

So Sue, how did you get into social work?

I started off doing community and youth work before going on to gain a social work qualification.

My first experience was working in supported accommodation. I was part of a project which supported mums with learning difficulties and their children. That’s what I did for quite a few years then I moved into child protection.

Around that time I also became a foster carer and for 20 years I had the parallel of working in child protection, social work and the front end working across adoption and fostering.

That’s what I’ve done until coming to Team Fostering. I wanted to use my fostering experience because that’s been really important to me. I’m also now a shared lives carer.

What’s so great about your role?

I think it is an incredible privilege to be a social worker. You can be the pivotal point for change for a lot of families and you can really be involved in helping people have a better path and helping kids have a better opportunity.

How many jobs give you that ability to literally make that difference? It’s the most rewarding thing. To see children and young people blossom – either in their own birth families because they’ve got the right support at the right time or because they need to be somewhere else and you find the right family for them, either through fostering or adoption.

I honestly can’t think of anything that would be more satisfying that getting that right because ultimately it’s about making things better for the next generation. For those kids who are our most vulnerable members of society, that don’t have a voice, are overlooked and aren’t heard.

I think this is the best job in the world.

What’s the day-to-day like?

No day is ever the same. You never know what you’re going to pick the phone up to, what you’re going to walk into, who’s going to email you.

It gives you such diversity. You can work with all kinds of people. In fostering you’re working with adults and children. You get best of both worlds I think.

I don’t say it’s easy because it’s not. Emotionally it’s a very demanding role whichever area of social work you work in.

You need to be well looked after and have the care and support to be able to do the job well and be effective and safe.

How does Team Fostering support you to deal the demands of the job?

What’s good about Team Fostering is that we’re a learning organisation. We look at things we need to know about and understand we need to be upskilling people to be able to do it.

We have reflective space where any staff can come and have sessions with the psychologist. We understand that meeting their needs in that way means we are going to be safer and better at what we do.

Just as importantly – we are one big team. For some people it’s like family. We are all there with one thing in mind, which is to get the best outcomes for our kids and to do it as well as we can.

We’re not here about money, we’re not here about bums on beds or numbers. That isn’t what drives us. What drives us is doing the best for our kids. It is a lovely place to work, we’re really lucky.

Do you have favourite memory from your time at Team Fostering?

It’s more generally when we see the kids coming in and we see over time how they change. How they’re more settled and more confident and what they’re getting out of that.

You see them change physically. Some kids grow really quickly when they come into care because they’re able to relax and they’re getting the nutrients they need.

Some of our Sanctuary Seeking Children – from when they arrive to seeing them six months later you can really see a difference. Some of them have been travelling a year, 18 months, two years and they’re quite undernourished. In just three months they can be unrecognisable.

Tell us about the supervising social workers at Team Fostering.

We’re got a really good team. We’ve got some wide-ranging experiences in our social workers who’ve come through all sorts of routes to get here. We’ve got a few social workers who’ve grown up in fostering families so they understand it from that perspective. Some have been social workers practising in other areas of social work. They are totally committed to doing well by the kids and doing well by the carers.

They’re fun, there’s always laughter and they share each other’s ups and downs. Even though we work across Yorkshire and the East Midlands we work as one team. We all know each other’s families really well. A carer could pick up the phone to anyone and they’ll know your case, no matter what day of the week it is and what time you ring in.

What was your own experience of being a foster carer like?

Myself and my partner became foster carers when our youngest child became 16. We always wanted to do it and said we’ll do that when the kids are older and we’ve got more time.

It’s very, very rewarding. Really satisfying and humbling. Absolutely incredible.

But really hard. I can empathise with carers when they’re struggling because I get it. But that for me is a small trade-off for the satisfaction you get from doing what you do.

There isn’t one way to do it, every child is different. That’s what I find exciting about it. You put yourselves in these positions and it’s a challenge but when it goes well there’s nothing better.

You’re making a difference and these kids remember. You’re part of their lives forever. You just keep having to get more chairs round your table.

I wouldn’t change a thing.