People ask me this sooner or later. Usually they are in another job, and have been thinking about it for longer than they have told anybody.
I can’t answer for you. I can tell you what I would want to know.
What it pays
Less than you think for the first few years, and less than teaching or nursing feel like they should. Nobody has ever gone into this for the money and I would worry about anybody who said they had.
Look up the real figures for where you live before you decide. Look up the rent as well.
What it costs
Evenings, sometimes. Sleep, sometimes. A certain lightness that you had before you knew what you now know about what happens in ordinary houses on ordinary streets.
You will not be able to watch the news in the same way. You will not be able to walk past a child crying in a shop without slowing down, and your family will learn to keep walking and wait for you at the door.
What you need to be good at
Less than the adverts say, and different things.
You need to be able to sit in silence, and to write a clear sentence. The third thing is the hard one. You have to hear something terrible and keep your face kind, and then hear something funny five minutes later and laugh, properly, because the person telling you needs you to.
You do not need to be tough. The tough ones leave, or stay and go hard, which is worse. The ones who last are the ones who can be upset and still turn up.
What you do not need
A difficult childhood, or an easy one. Children of your own. To be twenty-three. Some of the best social workers I have known came to it at forty-five from a bank, or a kitchen, or the army, and knew things about people that no course could have taught them.
Who should not do it
If you want to be thanked, do something else. There are jobs with thanking in them.
If you want to rescue people, be careful. It feels like kindness, and a good deal of it is wanting to be needed. The work is slower than rescue and less flattering. It is helping somebody to do a thing themselves, and then going home, and not being mentioned when they tell the story.
If you need to be certain, this will be very hard. You will make decisions about children’s lives on the best information you can get, and the best information is never enough, and you have to decide anyway.
How to find out before you commit
Volunteer somewhere that puts you in a room with families: a contact centre, a youth club, a helpline. Do it for six months, through a winter.
Ask a social worker if you can buy them a coffee. Ask them what they did last Tuesday. Do not ask them whether it is rewarding. Ask them what they had for lunch and where they ate it.
Read something true about it. I have a list.
Would I do it again?
Yes.
I would want more help in the first year than I got, and a manager who had time, and a desk of my own. I would want somebody to tell me that the feeling of not being good enough is not information. It is weather, and everybody has it, and it passes and comes back.
But yes. I have been in rooms where a child was believed for the first time, and I was one of the people doing the believing. I do not know another job that would have put me there.
I cannot tell you whether to do it. I can tell you that the people I would most like to work beside all hesitated, for a long time, and that the ones who were sure from the first day worried me.
Maisie x
Next in the notebook: How to survive your ASYE