"My years in care led me to study Social Work"

When she turned 18, Ceira Walsh requested her care file.

“I’d been known to the service since I was 14, and I wanted - as many care leavers do - to see for myself everything that had been written about and decided for me in the last few years,” she explains.

“When the file finally arrived, it wasn’t what I was expecting. It came in a series of brown envelopes, each with the word ‘Walsh’ scrawled on the front.”

As Ceira began to read, she was shocked to realise that her file actually dated back to 2006, with records beginning when she was five-years-old.

“I had no idea I’d been known to children’s services for so long,” says Ceira, who turned 19 last August.

“Plus the file was a mess; I had notes from 2006 double-sided with information from 2017.

“It was a lot to wrap my head around.”

For Ceira, receiving her file represented a rite of passage.

An end to a difficult chapter in her life that saw her shunted from foster home, to residential housing, to a homeless shelter - all while studying for her GCSEs, holding down a part-time job, and working her way through college.

As we chat now via Zoom - she from her flat in Jersey - Ceira has just accepted an offer to study for her social work degree at Bournemouth University in September.

She plans to become a social worker.

“I've had a lot of social workers over the years," she says with a wry smile.

“From ages 14-18 I had 30 social workers - goodness knows how many I had in the years before that I didn’t know about or remember.

“Where I live in Jersey, there are very few ‘home-grown’ social workers, so the turnover of staff is high, with people coming here for a few months and then returning home.”

I ask if she had a favourite social worker, and one name springs immediately to mind: “Julie,” she nods, “when I was 17, she was so good.

“She was care-experienced herself, and you could tell, because she did so many things that to anybody else would seem like a little thing, but to a young person in care made such a difference.

“When I moved into my first flat on my own, I really wanted to paint it, and make it feel like mine. I told Julie and she said ‘let’s do it Sunday, we’ll make a day of it.’

“Of course she didn’t work Sundays, but she said she had no plans, and would be happy to come and help.

“That Sunday, we painted from 10am to 7pm. That meant so much.”

As a young person with so much experience of the care system, Ceira has a good idea of the kind of social worker she'd like to be.

“I understand working hours are important, but I know I won’t be the social worker who refuses to answer a text, because it came in at 5.15pm - I had a few of those over the years.

“I don’t think it’s common knowledge for social workers that ‘being safe’ and ‘feeling safe’ are different things to a young person, but they should be treated with the same importance.

“I think it’s worth bearing in mind that the file you’re writing will likely be read by the young person in question one day, and the potential impact of that.

“The last thing I hope I’ll always bring to the role of social worker is compassion,” she says decidedly.

“Yes, you’re a professional, but you’re not expected to be perfect, and really - to that young person you’re supporting - it’s nice to know that you’re human.”