Well the first paid job I undertook, after 3 years of wilderness, was working as a learning mentor for a FE college in Leeds. There were a number of young people who were coming to the college on placement from schools as they were behaviourally challenged and the schools were after babysitters for them.
I could only do part time work, 25 hours a week, and this hasn’t changed to this day, however I only did this job for one school term and then an opportunity I couldn’t resist came along…
Before I was signed off work I had started working for one of 3 or 4 multi-agency teams, based in school clusters. The teams worked in one local high school and their cluster of ‘feeder’ primaries. The one I was working for before the kerfuffle of pain and tumour was in the south of Leeds and now an opportunity presented itself and I was able to join the team in the west. I started working alongside the sorts of young people that had been sent to the college placements with some incredibly talented, resourceful and caring colleagues. At that time on the team we had a; Social Worker, Mental Health Professional (CAMHS), Youth Worker, School Exclusion Cover Team for both Primary and Secondary schools), Learning Mentor and others I have forgotten. The work we were able to do ranged from case to case and we were able to support vulnerable young people and their families as they went through the struggle of schooling when facing incredible social and domestic challenges.
We worked with the kids that teachers understandably wanted out of their class as they lacked some the basic social and academic skills required to engage with learning. A common student case we worked with would have been;
Jimmy – Year 10 (14/15 years old).
Reading age:
7 years
Domestic life:
- No father (in jail for domestic violence which Jimmy witnessed)
- Mother is a drug addict
- 4 siblings (from different fathers)
- older sister (16 years old) pregnant
- older brother permanently excluded from school
- 2 younger siblings.
School Life;
Excluded for fighting with other students, verbally abusing teachers, over sexualised and inappropriate behaviour, says he doesn’t care what happens to him.
Aspirations:
Either non-existent or Drug Dealer
Agencies involved:
- Social Care
- Youth Offending Team involved
This really isn’t an exaggeration, yes this might have been one of the more complex cases but we would regularly be working with children living in these situations.
Completely challenging but a real privilege to be able to support in some small way.
Within the first week of this job I was put on a training course telling me how to deliver a Parenting Course!
“…me, teaching Parenting? I don’t even have kids, how could I do that…?”
Nevertheless I did the training and started to deliver within the first month of being there. Flip this was a challenge! The closest thing to parenting I had ever done was looking after a dog and babysitting my niece and nephew for one weekend! However the beauty of this course was that I didn’t teach parenting, we structured discussion and activities to either draw parenting principles out or look at psychological evidence for particular approaches and the look at how they could be applied in the context of the families we were working with. Unbelievably it worked! The parents would mostly come back week after week telling stories of success and, unless there had been external influences, barriers that could be overcome through brainstorming strategies to help achieve the next small step to success.
This was incredible, an amazing privilege and I was able to apply the same basic principles to the way I worked with young people. For example Jimmy (described above) would come to a group of about 8 other challenging students in his year group and me and an incredible Youth Worker called Jane and do some work for us when they would refuse in any other setting. By using simple things like specific praise when he did anything right, ignoring some of his unwanted behaviours that other teachers couldn’t ignore (e.g. one kid would come any lesson and ‘eff’ and ‘jeff’ about not doing any work and, as soon as he looked like he was going to engage with some work, we would praise his positive behaviour massively.
“Jimmy, I really appreciate that you have picked your pen up, you’re the first person ready to start and that shows me that you respect me and that makes me happy!” (believe it or not this was also coupled with a ‘Sponge Bob Square Pants’ sticker!)
After a while I noticed that my outlook on life had changed, I forgot that my pain controlled who I was and made sure that the pain and the drugs were controlled by my decisions and, as tough as it was, I was back, maybe I was 60% back, but that was 59% better than it was. Working , with all the challenges I had to overcome, had made me remember who I was and my identity was now defined by the positive things in my life and that was the start of looking for a better future!
