Social work.....

This is going to be one of those posts that you don't really know where to start.



Before Xmas we took on a new lad who arrived under a cloud, he was being moved for his own safety, gangs drugs and crime were all mentioned. Sounded like this was going to be a barrel of laughs.



He came into care when mum decided she could not cope and dad, who is divorced from her would not have him either. From what I can work out he has not had an allocated social worker for much of his time in care and the foster carers have been left to get on with it as the placement drifts.


He presents as extremly immature, unable to share, unable to reflect on how he impacts on others. He has two behavioural strategies, he either threatens to smash the place up or he cries.



He does not do school, could not possibly cope with classes and insists that he must get personal tuition.

He has been spending parts of school days at a Trust where he has achieved but having seen the place for myself I would hardly say that he has been in any way "pushed"




He is hardly the child from hell.

Yet I think the plan is to dump him here till he turns 16 when they can stick him in a bedsit and quietly abandon him. 


We have two well established young men here who are significantly more resilient than him in fact I think they are both far more savvy. Yes he could tell you where to buy drugs but they could tell you where to buy food and what's more they could make a reasonable stab at cooking it too.



Anyway, there is nothing for him locally in terms of education and so really he has to move on. This has been where things have started to unravel. The social worker was supposed to be getting really stuck into this, he was pretty sure he had somewhere for laddo to go. Great stuff, so we made a few enquiries of our own and ohh guess what, the carer he was "moving" to has not been contacted about him and the answer anyway would, be no.

It will be an interesting phone call when he calls us up tomorrow, will he be truthful or will I be treated to some work of fiction.

People wonder sometimes why many foster carers don't have a very high view of social workers.....

R.