Bridget Robb: my social work career journey

The acting chief executive of the BASW explains how her experience as a teenage carer influenced her career choice

If pushed to think a memento that I would rescue before escaping a burning building, I’d probably choose a newspaper cutting of my grandmother during the war years, where the caption identifies her as a social worker.

My grandmother died before I was old enough to know her well, but I grew up in an extended family where there was a strong commitment to the importance of family and of community relationships. And just as I was very proud of that cutting, it was always drummed into me that social work was a career to be proud of.

When I was a teenager, a friend at school and a member of my family suffered from severe, but different, forms of mental illness. This was my introduction to psychiatric hospitals and services – or rather the lack of them.

The isolation of becoming a young carer, with no professional advice or support, shaped me as a person and my choice of career. The pressure meant I failed my A-levels and had to find a different type of post-16 education so that I could still go on to university.

The experience also left me determined to secure the best qualifications possible to do my job, so that I would know for sure that I was working with people in the best way possible for them. Having experienced feeling alone, I became absolutely committed to working with families and peer groups, and not just with individuals.

Like many social workers, the professional education I received helped me to make sense of my life experiences to that point. It helped me to understand what the mental health services were trying to do to help my family, and helped turn my anger into positive action.

My social work education gave me strategies for working with people, and a legal and policy framework for knowing the opportunities and boundaries of my roles and duties. This has proved invaluable throughout my career.

My social work career began in earnest at a social services department, working with anyone who came through the doors wanting assistance. It was a rapid introduction to the needs of people across the social spectrum, and the departmental and community resources available – or not available – to meet them.

It planted me firmly in the new community where I was working, as well as in the very heart of the department. I was lucky. I wish newly qualified social workers today could have the same chance to spend time in different social work teams across their whole organisation, not just in one specific job role.

As a profession, I feel that we are now urging new recruits to specialise too quickly, to the detriment of their ability to use family and community resources in their work.

Within my chosen profession, I think I was always destined to end up as a training manager in a local authority. After that, I moved into lecturing and running a university social work department, qualifying formally as a lecturer and also completing an MBA in public sector management.

My then employer agreed to help with the fees but would not release me to attend lectures, so I undertook the teaching qualification through a portfolio, and the MBA by distance learning.

Having flexibility when the children were younger meant that I was able to take on lots of part-time and fixed contract jobs that expanded my knowledge and skills. I learnt to take chances when opportunities arose.

I consider myself very lucky every day to have chosen social work as a career.

I love what I do and I am very proud to be able to stand up and call myself a social worker, continuing the tradition that began with my grandmother three quarters of a century ago, as that newspaper cutting shows.