Community Social Support!

Posted at 12:27 pm on 20th October, 2021

Sitting within the heart of our local community Flixton Girls School (FGS) staff have their ear to the ground when it comes to sharing good practice and supporting our community. Through our founding principles of empowering others through sharing excellence and network links beyond 11-18 education pathways, we have offered our support to university students for practical work placements.

We have partnered with the Manchester Metropolitan University (MMU), to provide a pilot work placement scheme for three of their second year BA (Hons) Social Work students. This offers students a 70 day work placement for practical, face to face experience relating to social work within a school setting, and how this interfaces with other multiple agency networks.

Zoe, Ocean and Jennifer will be working with staff to assist and understand our health, welfare and safeguarding practices over the course of the next few months. They will experience how we share good practice across the school and our wider welfare community, as well as being involved with preparing resources for use online and as part of Physical, Social, Health and Emotional (PSHE) training. Additionally they will have the opportunity to work with our Student Welfare team in supporting students with their emotional health, school absence and communications with other external agencies.

Social workers often have to deal with complex and challenging situations to help to improve families lives and bring about social change. We hope that by being part of this pilot placement scheme we can provide relevant and practical experience for future generations of social workers who will continue to support local communities to promote human rights and social justice.

Mrs Trussell, Headteacher said, ‘I will be overseeing the three students during their placement and I am very happy to be working alongside Mrs Larkin as on-site Practice Educator as well as providing remote expertise to be able to support their universities studies. The logistics required for universities to be able to provide work placements has been particularly difficult this year, due to the challenges of the pandemic, so we are extremely pleased to be able to support at this time. We look forward to working together to share good practice to provide our social workers of the future the best workplace experience we can. We hope this pilot is successful and we can extend our programme from second year through to third year students, strengthening our links with degree and higher apprenticeship educational facilities for the benefit of everyone now and for the future.’