My name’s Rachel Wilson and I’m a newly qualified social worker in the children and young people’s section in Lewisham Council. So basically, I have about nine to 15 case loads, which is nine to 15 families, who I work with on daily basis. My job is basically to look at the safety and protection of children in those families, and working with families to try and protect the children and look at their holistic needs and things like; their health and education and whether they’re safe in the family environment basically.

I worked in my gap year in Africa and that really affected me and made me know that I wanted to work with children that were slightly more disadvantaged than myself. There was an orphanage with about 150 children who had been orphaned through AIDS, and we basically provided them with a home.

(Rachel holds up a photograph of the African orphanage where she worked and the children she met.)

I think I went there thinking that I was going to an environment where the children were sad, upset and forlorn, but in fact I went to an environment were the children were just as happy as they are as in the streets in Lewisham, that puts a lot of things into perspective really. Equally I was faced with things I hadn’t seen before, children obviously with terminal diseases and dealing with the issues that come with that and the loss that comes with that as well, things I’ve never dealt with in my life.

I think in social work there’s a lot of scope for doing different jobs. Just because I’m in child protection now, doesn’t mean I’ll necessarily be in it in five years. In social work because you have a generic, so kind of an overall qualification, I can do anything in social work at all. I could go into adoption, or elderly care, or mental health, or young offending and it’s very easy to swap into different jobs, which is quite exciting and quite interesting for the future really.