Social Work Spotlight - Episode 10: Scott

Episode Date: August 21, 2020

In this episode, Scott and I discuss his career change from cabinet making, hospitality and pastoral work with young people to finding an innovative approach to social work through development of the Australian Social Work in Schools program. Scott is now the social work in schools project officer focusing on building and maintaining partnerships with schools and developing resources. He also teaches a number of mental health units at the University of New England translating his skills and experience across social work, pharmacy, nursing, and sports and fitness psychology. He is also a supervisor of social work students on placement.Links to resources mentioned in this week’s episode:UNE SWiS website - https://www.une.edu.au/about-une/faculty-of-medicine-and-health/school-of-health/social-work-in-schools-swisUNE SWiS Handbook - A Field Education Handbook for Social Work in School (SWiS) Placements. DOI 10.4226/95/5a027e2193330, Handle link https://hdl.handle.net/1959.11/22093UNE SWiS Handbook - Planning and implementing a Social Work in Schools (SWiS) Placement. DOI 10.4226/95/5a0289e395033, Handle link https://hdl.handle.net/1959.11/22094Doris Testa from Victoria University has many articles published - https://www.vu.edu.au/contact-us/doris-testaAASW School Social Work Scope of Practice document - https://www.aasw.asn.au/document/item/8308COVID-19 social work student resource repository - https://www.anzswwer.org/nfen/resource-repository/Resilience Project - https://theresilienceproject.com.au/Mandatory Reporter Guide for reporting suspected risk of significant harm for children and young people - https://www.facs.nsw.gov.au/families/Protecting-kids/mandatory-reporters/what-when-to-report/chapters/mandatory-reporter-guideThis episode's transcript can be viewed here:https://drive.google.com/file/d/134fFhS8deUxt17Bv0rXGx205mltLmEsX/view?usp=sharingThanks to Kevin Macleod of incompetech.com for our theme music.

Hi and welcome to Social Work Spotlight where I showcase different areas of the profession each episode. I'm your host, Yasmin McKee Wright, and today's guest is Scott. Scott developed an interest in social work following careers in cabinet making, hospitality and pastoral work with young people, finding an innovative approach to social work through development of the Australian Social Work in Schools program. Scott is now the Social Work in Schools project officer, focusing on building and maintaining partnerships with schools and developing resources. He also teaches a number of mental health units at the University of New England, translating his skills and experience across social work, pharmacy, nursing and sport and fitness psychology,

in addition to supervising social work students on placement. When did you start as a social worker and why did you choose this profession? This is my ninth year in social work. I've done lots of different things. I'm a cabinet maker by trade. I've worked in hospitality up in Queensland. I've worked across two or three different churches as a pastor, youth worker for about 20 years.

And when I was doing those different roles, I thought there's going to be a different way of helping people. And so the last roles that I was in in a church, in fact, all of my roles have been linked to schools in some way. So I've been playing around the edges of schools for probably 25 years or so. And I thought, well, I need a career change. It's time to do something different again.

And I looked at different options and social work came up quite a few times. And I thought, let's give social work a go. And immediately, when I started getting involved, I thought, this is the stuff I've been wanting to do for the last 20 odd years and just couldn't do it well enough. And so I went through the University of New England, linked in with Miff Maple. and Miff and I got along really well.

At that time, I was working in drug and alcohol support. And I said to Miff, I want to do something different than what I'm doing. Is there anything like an avenue through the union? She said, actually, there's a program looking at school stuff, which is right up your alley. Do you want to look at that? This is our sixth year now of doing the social work in schools program. So it's been a fantastic move. So I haven't been in many roles as a social worker as such.

So in that drug and alcohol service, we were doing homelessness, crisis services, drug and alcohol community support, as well as residential support. So it covered quite a few roles, but I haven't had a huge experience like many other social workers my age. But it sounds like you would have been able to translate some of that experience over to working in schools. Yeah, definitely. Starting in the schools, first and foremost was about building rapport with the schools. And that's what I've been doing in that drug and alcohol. the whole service, building rapport, facilitating groups in the therapeutic setting, which I hadn't done before I'd run groups in pastoral work, but I hadn't run groups in a therapeutic setting.

And then when we started placing social work students in the schools, that's when we really started to make a lot more links with skills, like past experiences, and translating them into my own practice. Okay. What would you say your current role entails? Like what's a typical day for you? I wear two hats at the moment at UNE. One is, well, probably three actually, three hats.

One is the social work in schools project officer, and that's for two days a week, and that's really just focusing on building partnerships with schools, maintaining those partnerships because school staff change and move across schools often. So it's really just maintaining links within the schools. Developing resources, so there's quite a few resources. we've developed and trying to encourage our social work students to consider social work in a school in field education. The other hat I wear is I lecture into mental health units at UNE. That goes across social work, pharmacy, nursing and sports and fitness psychology as well. So there's quite a few

areas that I teach mental health sort of units. And then my third role is a supervisor of social work students on placement. So I normally have around 10 students on placement. That pretty much equates to two complete days of just supervision. Yeah. And how have the current restrictions with COVID affected? I imagine it would have affected it quite substantially, both the lecturing and the social work in schools project. Yeah, so with lecturing, it didn't change much lecturing at UNE. Everything that I was doing was online anyway. But COVID still impacted the students. So there was. more of that pastoral care type stuff happening with students, even though they're online across Australia, just trying to support them to keep going with their studies, even though it was a really

difficult time. What I didn't want to see out of my units was a huge dropout rate. And we didn't, we didn't have many drop out at all. We've still got probably 95% of our enrollments in the units that I'm doing. So there was a bit of extra work in trying to engage those students online, and trying to inspire them to keep going. It's okay. You know, take care of yourself, those sorts of things. So teaching wasn't impacted that much for me, but when it came to social work students in schools,

you know, some of them had only been in the school one or two weeks. It's a tricky time in schools the first couple of weeks because you're entering a community from 100, 200, 300 kids, sometimes up to 6 or 7, 800 kids in some of the high schools we go to. So being a social work student can be quite, daunting going to that community of adolescence. And it's a crucial time for getting yourself out there, becoming known, being out in the playground, introducing yourself to students. And for some of them, I just started doing that and then everything went into lockdown. So all of a sudden,

they were thrown into, what are we going to do with placements? Will they continue or not? Some of my students had their own children at home. So they were homeschooling. They were trying to do their placement hours while they're homeschooling. Yeah. Being the IT person for their children, there was huge changes for that cohort of students. Sure. And then for probably five or six weeks, that cohort of 10 students just worked at home. No one could go to their school.

So they linked in with what the school was doing with wellbeing, and they found their little niche, and they developed resources and then promoted those to the students and of the student families to try and support them. Okay. That's a pretty creative way of using that time. It was. Everyone had to really think outside the box in a really short time frame. We didn't have three or four weeks to try and plan. It was, let's get something together for tomorrow. And some of the students were really creative. They were, you know, they initially started sharing resources around, you know, here's a nice little meme or here's a nice little bit of information about COVID, about washing your hands for kids. You know, as time went on, some of them started

being a lot more structured and they were sending an email, you know, maybe on Monday morning to every school student and saying, you know, Monday might have been something like, minimize Monday or something like that. And so the theme was, you know, minimise the risk of catching COVID. And there might have been one or two little attachment things that went with that. Over the weeks, they came up with little themes that, you know, Monday was this theme, Tuesday was that theme, Wednesday was that theme. And then we started getting replies from, students and interactions with students that were actually reading these things from the social work students. So there was engagement then. Yeah, there was definitely engagement. And one of the things

that we did find amazing, we got engagement from parents. So the schools were trying to engage with their parents and sending home tips and that was helping some and other parents linked in with what we were doing. And so we started thinking, well, let's try and make sure that everyone is covered by every possible angle. So then, some students started putting little powerpoints together and making a movie with them, you know, 30 or 40 seconds with a bit of nice music. And then there was further interaction from students, staff and families. So really thinking outside the box and moving all of that well-being idea online in a very

short space of time. Yeah. I can imagine that would have been a really good opportunity to get to know the parents as well, get to know that person, that child as a whole, and to gain their. trust of the parent. They can really see you and understand what you're doing. Yeah, and that's one of the things that a few schools have said, you know, what your student was able to do over that four or five weeks in reestablishing connections and partnerships with parents has been, you know, so helpful. Most of the schools that we go to, most of them will say one of the big problems we've got is our

parents don't connect with our school. Only the few do who are involved in P&C and those sorts of things. from a social perspective, oftentimes the only times that parents are invited to go to a school is when little Johnny's in trouble again. Or there's the awards night, which a lot of parents don't like going to. So we've been trying to work with schools to say engage your parents in a different way. And COVID gave us a really good excuse to engage them in a different way. Yeah. And what kind of support new or old is available to those students? How have they been able to get through this period, the school students. Everyone back in New South Wales is back at school now

and attendance rates around 85, 90% or so. So our Swiss students have been able to re-engage with those kids that have their online interactions with. Now they can actually meet them in person. So I guess we've swung into maintain that well-being feeling. That's the centre of school social work, maintain that well-being focus. But now engage it instead of online, now it's face-to-face.

So now they get to practice their face-to-face direct practice skills as well. Most schools have like a triage sort of system. So if a child is feeling down and they're not feeling on top of things, they can go to a teacher. Generally it's a well-being teacher in a high school or the year advisor. In a primary school, they generally go to the deputy principal and just say, look, I'm not going so good. Sometimes their behaviours actually communicate to the rest of the school

that little Johnny is not going so well. behaviours like emotion dysregulation, they might get quite angry in the playground or sulking in the classroom and just, you know, this is unusual behaviour. So there'd be some contact point in the school and then the school will work out in a triage sort of way. Does this child need to go to the social work student for just a bit of a bit of wellbeing support, a few little simple strategies for support? Or do they need something more like let's go to the school counsellor or do they need a referral out to a local service, for example? A lot of schools have that. Sometimes it's not really well structured. And the problem is some of that

behavior that schools see is that it's the same as naughty behavior. So if a child is not emotionally very well, it doesn't mean they have a diagnosis. They just had a bad time at home. They've had a fight with their mum or their dad before they went to school. They're just not feeling themselves. If they do lash out at a friend at lunchtime, for example, that's bad behavior and bad behavior gets punished. What we've been helping to see is little John is communicating that something's not right. So instead of disciplining him, let's get him through the triage first and see what's going on behind for him. Yeah. And schools are getting better at that. Is the social work in schools project unique to your university, to your area? Yes and no. So no, it's not unique to our university.

there are other universities that do have placements in New South Wales schools. Most of those are in Sydney and Western Sydney, but they don't have the numbers or the regularity from my understanding that we have. If you go to Melbourne, Melbourne have amazing setups for school placements across Melbourne, but they're mainly in Catholic schools. Tasmania, same deal. It's fairly common in Tasmania in metro area. South Australia, very similar.

There's a little bit of it going on in WA, again, around Perth. And Griffith in Brisbane have started taking it up in Queensland. Other universities are definitely looking at social work in schools. Melbourne Unis are well established. I think there was an article done 50 years of social working schools in Melbourne. The thing that makes UNE different is that we've avoided metro schools. So we've gone to low SES, high average. original enrolment, high disadvantage rural towns and said, we'd like to come in and help you

in your high school. Here's the program. So that's the difference with you and E. We've developed a model that really does focus on low SES schools. So in saying that, some of the schools that we started in in rural areas, like I said before, school staff move around. So they've moved from those rural towns into, say, Western Sydney. And now we have two schools in Western Sydney that, absolutely love the program. Again, low SCS schools, but we're creeping closer to Metro. Yeah, yeah. Yeah, that's what I was going to ask, whether it was an identified need and responding to something very specific within the Armadale community. Yeah, so it did start off with one of our local Armadale schools, actually, one of the very old primary schools here. And this is

about two years before my time. So my understanding of the history is that Miff Maple, who was the head of social work at that point, had a good working relationship with the school of education at UNE. And they worked together on a couple of things. And then they said, what if we try and do something in one of the local schools that we know has lots of needs? So they contact that the principal, I think this was in about 2013 or 14. And she loved the idea. And so that sort of got that ball rolling as a bit of a pilot just to see what happens.

and then from there other schools heard about it and then the education fellow said look I'd like a little bit of a presentation down on the coast you know would you bring some of your Swiss students along and do a presentation which we did and that just got this snowball effect for schools wanting to hear about it and then how do we sign up yeah and now we still get quite often a phone call or if I do approach a school now they've heard about the program but don't know much about it And it sounds like you're developing programs for not just social work students, but for social workers working in schools. Yeah, definitely. So through the COVID time, you know, with students spending so much time at home, we said to them, let's bring an emphasis of research into your placement. And that research will be about researching and developing a program. I think we had four complete programs now that have been of such a high standard.

I was a standard, the standard they brought together. One looking specifically at trauma-informed care in schools with an Aboriginal emphasis. One on Year 7 girls self-esteem. One year-60 year-seven transition program that can be used across any primary school to high school. And one focused on a wellbeing app called Smiley Mind. And she developed a program that you can work with the kids, help teach you. them mindfulness and the usefulness of mindfulness, especially with COVID going on. And the school loved what she did so much that they said, you know, next week the kids go back to school.

We want you to run this with every kid in the school. So she was suddenly in charge of not organizing so much, but running through with the teachers, this is what mindfulness is about. This is how you can teach it to the kids that you'll have. So the teachers were trained up very quickly on how to use smiley mind, how to use this program she put together, and they're taking that all the way through year seven to year 10. Every student in that school now knows about that app.

The benefits of mindfulness and the simple tips to making mindfulness work. I'm wondering if there was any tension. I mean, you're preaching to the converted here. Obviously, I understand the impact and the benefit of social work students and social workers in schools. But has there been any tension with, let's say, very experienced teachers having a social work student suggests something new to them. Yes.

Yeah, each school is different. So it's got its own culture. Some are really, really strong on well-being, some less so. And then within that culture, within that school, there are some who are very outspoken about, you know, what's this well-being rubbish that you're talking about all the time? It's about, school is about the three-ars, reading, writing and arithmetic. Yes, it is, but if you get the other three-Rs right first,

that is relationships, relationships, relationships. Yeah. The other three will come together very easily. And just trying to help teachers to see that they have an influence on the well-being of each child in their classroom. Not just an influence, but a responsibility. And a responsibility, yeah. If they greet the children as they come in the room, all young adults,

as they come into the room, greet them, say good-day, make a bit of a connection. It's going to be a lot easier to teach them, you know, whatever they're teaching, if they've got some sort of a link with you. Some teachers don't want that. Some teachers don't allow our social work students in their rooms. And that's fine. We just say, look, you know, work with the teachers who want you in there. We're not there to change the system.

It's going to take much more than us to change the system. Just work with the teachers who want you in the rooms and work with the kids so that you can. Yeah. Sounds like there are so many things that you could choose. But, well, do you love most about your job? What's your favourite part? The thing that I love at the moment is seeing social work students get social work.

So the first few years that I supervised students in schools and outside of schools, a lot of them just didn't understand what social work involves. They didn't have that grasp of what is the profession about. And oftentimes it would just swing to that direct practice sort of intervention, which was almost psychology. And so it was a real battle to try and help them to see critical social work. and structural social work and those types of things. But what I love doing now is I love supervising the students.

I've become better at doing it. And so they're walking out of their first or second placement with a much clearer understanding of social work and the scope of practice that you can have within a school setting. Yeah. On the other side of the coin, what's the thing that you find most challenging? Administration. Administration, there is so much paperwork that goes on,

these days with placements. One of the other challenges I find is when school staff do move. So you just get everything set up really well in the school. They're used to having a social work student around and then that staff member, your contact, goes to another school or takes on another role. So all of a sudden, you've got another person that you've got to train up again

to understand the program more fully and understand how to support the social work student. That's one of the most challenging things within the school setting. School staff just keep moving. I'm amazed at how often they change their schools and roles. Okay. And is that within your area a common thing,

or do you think that's a general thing? You know, we're probably in about 30 different schools, but it seems quite common. And those schools are spread out from Kiyogal-Lapni Casino in the north, down to Wollongong in the south, and out to Dubbo and Brow. broken hill. It's a huge area. It's a huge area, but oftentimes I'm reestablishing social work in schools in a school again because someone's moved to another school or their roles just changed.

And schools seem to go through a lot of restructure. And then they'll go through a lot of restructure in bringing in the student support offices the new role that social work will hopefully continue to feel. They'll restructure again. I guess that then emphasizes the need for consistency with the children with the students. And if there's that transient nature, then they just don't have that and they probably need more support than they would if it was a consistent teacher base. Yeah. And one of the things that, you know, with our social work students, a lot of school kids will come and talk with a social work student and just tell them how it is. They don't want to go and talk to the counselor. They're for the crazy people. And that's the thing we often hear with

school children and young people. The counselor is for the crazy kids and I'm not crazy. Yeah. So they're really happy to come up and chat with a social work student, tell them that, you know, life's pretty crappy or had a fight with mum today or my fish died last week. And you go, well, that's what we're here for. You know, if that's upsetting for you or if that's depressing or that's making you angry, then, you know, we're here to just hear and listen and you can delode and debrief and then you can go back to class. Yeah.

Because if we send them back to class in those sort of emotional states, they can't learn nearly as well. So our students build up a really quick rapport with a lot of kids across the school. And then after 16 or 17 weeks, they say goodbye and then another student comes in. And there's often tears from the school students, you know, because they've built up such rapport that he's a consistent person in my life who has the time to give me the time and listen to me because my teacher doesn't have the time. She's got 24 other kids in the class to look at. You know, the deputy's busy all the time with the Nautil.

kids. So sometimes there isn't that person, and that's one of the things we've provided is a person who's there five days a week, come and talk to me. Yeah, because I imagine the counsellors wouldn't be there every day, so they might have to hand over some things to the school counselor, but they would be the in-between. Yeah, and that's one thing we do encourage our students. You know, when you start feeling out of depth, this is more than well-being, then you go straight to your task supervisor and you triage, refer on to the next person up. You're there to not do any harm. So support the kids as much as you can,

but get further support if you need to. There are not many schools that I know of that have counsellors there every day. Some schools will have two counsellors. There might be one on Monday, Tuesday, another one on Thursday, Friday. So if you're having a bad day on Wednesday, bad luck the counsellor's not here.

Social work student is. And some of those counsellors are really keen to work alongside our students, and some are not. You know, we've had one or two counsellors say, we don't know what you're doing in the school as a social worker. Why, what are you doing? What are you here for? So there's some schools that are very closed off, some school counselors who are very closed off, and others welcome our students and they work together and they counsel together.

They pick up so many direct practice skills and strategies and work together collaboratively. So, again, each school is different, but there's not many schools that have counselors there all the time. I would have thought, especially in public schools, resources, would have been something that you just can't afford to not have. And they're being essentially told you don't have a place here. It just seems quite surprising. I think that's part of social work. As you know, I haven't been in social work that long.

But as I've done research, it seems to be that social work hasn't made itself really crystal clear on what we do. And I don't know if we're going to get it much clearer. Because we're in so many different fields of practice, that if you came up with the, you know, this is what we do, you're going to miss one field of practice or another. So it's a matter of social work really, and the opportunity is here for school social work now to really make it clear what we do do, here's the boundary and this is what we don't do. And that's why we've got our counsellors and a rather mental health people in schools.

So, yeah, and I think a lot of those other allied staff just don't understand what social work is. One of the tasks that I do give our social work students is to put together. either what I call an elevator pitch or their spiel. Yeah. And two or three PowerPoints, five-minute presentation, stand up in front of all the staff. You know, once you've found your feet and you're okay, stand up in front of the staff and tell them again from your perspective,

this is what social work is, this is what I'll be doing. And then the next student can come through and do the same thing again. So the staff are constantly hearing, whether they're new staff or whether they've been there for a few years, they're constantly hearing, this is what social work is. And that's making good inroads in some parts. That's great. So really just enhancing the understanding of the profession.

Yeah. What kind of support do you need in your role? What does looking after yourself mean? Looking after myself, I try not to do any work at all on the weekends. So even though I've got three different roles, they don't fit into set days. Like it's really hard to have just supervision days or just, social work officer days. It really is hard. So oftentimes I'll be working at night. Normally Monday, Tuesday and Wednesday nights, I'll be working as well. So when it gets to the weekend,

I just turn the computer off, leave it, and go do something totally different. So I like restoring old cars. My wife and I will go for a walk through the pine forest. We'll take the dogs sometimes. We just bought a house a couple of years ago, so we did a lot of renovations in that. I just try and leave the computer alone. Yeah. I'm over the computer. the weekend. Too much admin. Yeah, do something totally different. Through the COVID thing, I learned how to bake beautiful bread. Then the problem is you're sitting around eating bread all day. Then go for a walk in the pine forest. Yeah, work it off. Yeah, we actually, we went up to the Blue Mountains a couple of weekends ago and we just caught the end of the mushroom season, which was a lot of

fun. So yeah, it took us almost two weeks to get through all the mushrooms and that's after giving away half of them. But yeah, it's good. It's good just getting out and just being a month's nature and not having to look at a computer or a pen. Yeah. Yeah, absolutely. It sounds like this is such an atypical career path for you, especially having started a bit later on and having all that experience behind you with the pastoral care work and homelessness work. But where do you see it going from here. Where do you see your path from this point? I think my role would become more of a consultancy sort of role potentially to other universities or the Department of Education. That's where I think I can keep moving towards. I could keep doing what I'm doing. Now there'll always be social work

students and I'll always be pushing with UNE and other universities to get them into schools, especially now that we've got, you know, social workers going in there as student support officer of roles. Whether there's always teaching online, not too sure of that. But my own, I'm doing a master of philosophy in research at the moment, and my focus is on supervision of field education students in Australian schools. I flagged with the Department of Education that supervision of students and getting the most out of these new student support roles that they're putting in could potentially make the difference between making it work and making it just sort of limp through. You know, New South Wales has been a history of social work dabbling in school since the 1960s.

But we've never managed to do it really well. If we really bolstered together and worked together, we could do it really well and make a huge influence on our school children and young people. So what do you think has changed? What impact has social work in particular and that lens or the research that you've been doing and obviously the people who have come before you what's made a difference what's put it into the spotlight i think often physical health has been everything and there was not much mention of mental health go back to the 70s mental health was mental institution it was mental illness as we understand it now and i think now over the last probably 15 or 20 years especially they've been a real push to bring up that physical health to the same level as mental health,

that they work together, that they work off each other, that mental health is just as important as physical health. And I think as that's come to the forefront, young people and more services have come up about suicide rates, suicide attempts, eating disorders and the rise in those sorts of illnesses. and the recognition of how probably media and social media influence all of those things, that our kids now are not coping nearly as well with it as potentially my generation might have. And probably the generation before that, we didn't even talk about that. We don't talk about it. It's just that old stoic sort of idea.

But now we do talk about it and we're not doing so well in it because our parents weren't taught how to work through those things. That's a bit of a messy answer though. No, no, no, it makes sense. You mentioned a while ago about some of the psychologists or some of the other roles, perhaps not having as much of an appreciation for social work. How is the role of a student social worker or a registered or experienced social worker different in a school setting to a psychologist or to a pastoral care worker? I think the thing that sets social work out,

some psychologists are there to do therapeutic work with students, but there's only a few of those around. Most of the psychology work in schools, in my understanding, is more around assessments. So if a child has a learning difficulty or deficit, making an assessment in order to then get funding to support that child in the school. So there's sort of two different roles that the psychology people can do. And then if you've got like a chaplain or a youth worker in the school, they can definitely sit down and chat with a kid the same as our students do. But oftentimes they've only got a TAFE certificate to, or maybe a diploma in youth work or community services. And they don't have the depth of understanding of evidence-based, critical thinking, to be able to work with more

complex cases. So we definitely need people like our youth workers in schools. We definitely need those, and we definitely need our psychologists in there. What we need is somewhere in the middle. and that's where I think social work fits. As part of that triage team, they can go, you just need a bit of time with the youth worker, off you go, and they can support you fine. Or on the other end of the spectrum, actually this is out of my depth.

You need to go and see the school counsellor and we need a referral to get some more supports around you. Sure. And I think, and maybe this is part of my own bias, but I think families today are a lot more complex and complicated than what they were when I, was in school, however many thousands of years ago that was. It's a changed world.

There are a lot more complexities coming out in families that need to have some of those critical reflection skills to be able to sort of manage well. I think that's where social work fits because we also line up with, you know, supporting people's rights. So there's a lot more young people coming out around their gender. And whether we agree with that or disagree with that, they have the right to who they want to be and how they want to live their life. So supporting that sort of human right perspective in a school, I think is going to be more and more a need. Yeah. So I think social work has that.

It works individually. It supports human rights. And at the same time we look at the whole school system and try and work out, you know, where the school system does still cause disadvantage. And one of the simplest disadvantages that I see often is that if little Johnny's in class and little Johnny's naughty in class, little Johnny will be sent out of class. And what that does, little Johnny is already playing up because he doesn't understand what's going on in class because he's been out of class so often already. And it just further exacerbates his need for educational support to catch him up with the other kids. But of course in the classroom, he's emotionally not there, he's disengaged, he's off daydreaming.

And the teacher understandably doesn't have the time to spend with him. So if we can help teachers to see that that's, Johnny's behavior, he's having a meltdown, you know, maybe getting him out of the class, but giving the skills to calm down and come back into class. I think also the family complexity, having increased is in line with, there's more exposure or more access to things like social media that put things in the spotlight,

whereas previously they wouldn't have been, you know, kids' primary school age have their own phones, and they have their own media accounts. So much more is shared for better or for worse. Definitely. And it look funny, you mentioned phones. Phones are an absolute nightmare in schools for causing issues. I think it's great that kids have phones.

They can ring their parents if they need to get picked up. They can have access to different online things and help them in the classroom. So there's that side of the argument of phones in schools or devices in schools. There's the other side because not all kids, use them in the way they potentially should or could. So they cause so many problems that cause emotional distress, fights, all that sort of stuff as well. So, and kids have access to all this information all the time. And I was listening to the fellow who runs the resilience project and he was saying that kids now, because they've

got devices all the time, are exposed to a huge percentage more information every day compared to what I would have had in my generation at school. So they're sort of experiencing information overload just from having these devices with them. They've got access to their Snapchats, their TikToks, they might be on Smiley Mind, hopefully. They've got news. They've got access to so much other stuff. And then teachers are saying, Johnny, learn your three times tables.

And they just can't cope with it. With all the wonderful work you're doing and all the investment and funding that's going into schools, let's say projecting five, ten years into the future in a perfect world, what would social work in schools look like for you? Might take ten years? I'd love there to be a social work, like a qualified, experienced social worker in every school. That is both high school and primary school. The government's move to put social workers into high schools is really good.

I think we could probably have more long-term benefits in a primary school, but it's definitely fantastic having us in high schools. But if we had an experienced social worker in every school that was part of and collaborated with the rest of the school well-being team, that is the school counsellor, the front office admin, the principal and deputy principals, They'd input into some of that curricular sort of development. You know, how do we bring emotion regulation type skills and things into the classroom?

How do we calm our kids down if they've had a big game of football after lunch? Now you're trying to teach them something. How do we bring in strategies to help kids calm down in the classroom? And the other part of, that's within the school. The other part of the branch is connecting with family. So being really part of that school community and part of that leadership team around wellbeing with power and input, but also reaching out to parents and building that partnership between parents and schools.

Is there a type of social work or a field of social work that you would love to work in if given the chance? I think I'm probably doing it at the moment. Yeah. Yeah, I really enjoyed drug and alcohol or substance. missies. I really enjoyed that. And then when this came up, I thought, this is just me. I've played on the edges of schools for years. The funny thing is I hated school. Yeah. Because you didn't have a social worker then maybe. And I've often reflected, now, if there was a social worker in my school,

could my teenage and adolescence years have been different? And I still don't know if I would go and talk to the social worker, because they're for people with problems. So I don't know if I would have spoken to them or not. Where would I like to go next? Oh, actually, you know, one role. I guess the field of practice that I'd like to see, and this will be another 10 years, this might be 20 years,

is having a university or a school social work school within a social work school. Oh, yeah. That's interesting. Yeah, yeah. And whether you and E keep going that direction, there's, I keep knocking on their door saying, hey. I've got another meeting coming up soon with the people right at the top.

We're trying to get all the people at the top to say, wow, you're doing a good job here. We're not recognizing that. So I'd love to be able to have, not the Scott Gartrell School of Social Work, but just to have school social work stand on its own as a unique field in social work would be pretty amazing. Yeah, brilliant. Is there any type of social work that you've never had an interest in, So something you just can never see yourself doing or being happy with. Yeah, child protection. Even though it's probably, there's probably benefits that could come out of the child protection services in schools.

I have absolutely no inclination to work for child protection services. None at all. Which is interesting because it's so closely tied in with what you're doing. Exactly. Yeah. And students say to me, why don't you want to go into child protection? I just think, I don't know. I haven't seen, and this is just my little world view,

I haven't seen many great quality outcomes come from child protection. And I've worked around the edges for a little while, and I'm just not seeing it. I'm sure it's happening, but I just haven't seen it. So, yeah. So it would be a tough space to work in. Now, taking kids, removing kids from families, threatening families with loss of settling payments and those types of things.

I just think there's enough issues going on in this family without that sort of threat and that power. I don't know, many workers try to minimize that power, but I just think, no, it's not for me. I don't want to put that on somebody else. Having said that, I imagine there would be aspects of your role that would come under child protection. Like there would be a duty of care for you to respond to something,

but it's not all you do. Yeah, and in the school system with our students, it very much is going straight to your task supervisor, raising the concern, what's the evidence, and then working through that manager reporting guide. what does the tree say? And that way the student learns how to use that guide appropriately and effectively about reporting.

If it needs reporting, then the school can pick it up and go with it. We live in a very nice suburb. We've got a couple of houses around that are problematic, and we've had to call the police and make reports a few times. So I definitely do it. You know, we are there to protect children. Yeah, so definitely do do do it, but I wouldn't want to do it every day as a job.

Yep, understandable. Are there any other projects or programs that you're working on at the moment that you haven't already spoken about? I've always got things on the boil, all linked with social work and school, whether it be, so I've got two more handbooks that I've got ready to go and just, I've got to go through the copyright process of UNE. One is on facilitating small groups effectively in a school, and these will go up on our Swiss website once they're all done and dusted, so that other people can have access to those as well. and the other one is supervision. How does supervise effectively social work students in a school?

And that's going to be linked, or it is linked with my Master of Philosophy Research. So there's quite a few of my things that overlap and meld together, which is good in some ways, but it means that I can't release things until that part's done. I can't do that until this part's done. So quite a few things sit there for a while, just waiting to go. We've got two more articles that I'm working on. both very in their early stages. One is with a school social worker from each state in Australia.

Working and putting together a thing about COVID, and we haven't come up with a clear abstract yet, but what was the impact of COVID-19 on your school? What did your social work students do to get through it? A collective Australian view from each state. Always thinking big and outside the box. Yeah, that's what we do. Yeah.

And then communicate the findings and try to see if that work. elsewhere. Exactly. Yeah. Brilliant. And that will raise the profile of Australian school social work. There's a little bit written by Doris Tester. She's probably the most prolific writer of school social work in Australia. Hers is metropolitan Catholic schools Melbourne, but still the same concept is there. But she's been saying for years that there's a very small number of articles written about school social work in Australia. So we're starting to add to that. Yeah, which is good. raise the profile. If people wanted to know more about social work in this field, where would you direct them?

Is there any really good media or readings or websites? There's our Swiss website on the UNE page. And that's just a starting point of the model that we use with a few resources that are there. Yeah, and all the others are very hard to find or their theses, like PhD thesis that are hard to locate. but they're and I guess there's a bias there go to our website but Doris Tester gives you a good balance cross section of what she's done over the last gosh 10 or 11 years I think it's been yeah sure but I imagine even going to your website which would have a lot of that research people could then go down a rabbit hole looking at other resources and references from there so that's a good launch pad yeah yeah well

I'll put those couple of links in the show notes as well and people can go off and do their own reading and come back to us if they've got any other questions. Is there anything else that you'd like to let our listeners know anything about social work in schools in general that you'd like to mention? No, look, it's a really unique area to go into, and some people love it. Like some of our social work students absolutely love it. And others by the end or even halfway through their placement say, this is not for me, which is fine. So I think, you know, if you can find out about social work in schools. Look at the scope. The ASW has a few documents out about school social work. There's two they've got now or three. Get an idea of the scope and give it a go. Yeah, it's challenging.

Working with adolescents and children can be challenging. I thrive on it. I love it. Yeah. So hopefully more people engage. Yeah. No, I definitely think more people will after this. So thank you so much for your time again. And it's been wonderful hearing about this very unique area of social work that and they didn't know much about before. Awesome. Thanks, Yasmin. Thank you. Thanks for joining me this week.

If you would like to continue this discussion or ask anything of either myself or Scott, please visit my anchor page at anchor.fm slash social work spotlight. You can find me on Facebook, Instagram and Twitter, or you can email SW Spotlight Podcast at gmail.com. I'd love to hear from you. Please also let me know if there is a particular topic you'd like discussed, or if you or another person you know would like to be featured on the show.

Next episode's guest is David, who brings to social worker passion for doing things differently and supporting others to bring their ideas to life. He is also running for the role of national president of the ASW this year. David is co-founder of Host International, operating in five countries in the Asia Pacific. He has held senior executive roles in the refugee and settlement sector since 2011, prior to which he was a tertiary educator and vocational trainer and spent many years in child protection and youth homelessness,

specialising in helping young people and families to break generational cycles of disadvantage. See you next time.