Today we visited the Ladywood Family Center. The center aims to provide families with early years services. The center provides great learning and opportunities for children and their families to thrive in order to lead more confident, caring, and capable lives. The location we visited, Sandwell, is a very ethnically diverse area with 51% of school children being from a minority group. Sandwell also has a very high poverty rate with the average level of child poverty of children aged under 16 at 27.6%, more than England’s national average, living in poverty.

During our visit I had a great time touring the facility. My favorite part definitely had to be us peeking through the windows into the nursery, and even though we couldn’t go in because there was a little boy with SEND who is easily overwhelmed and anxious, I still had a great time seeing their happy little faces and waving at them through the door. One extremely adorable  kid was even hiding behind the corner of the wall and peeking his head out at us through the windows before quickly moving it, and he was having the best time and so was I. I also liked walking around and seeing the different areas for the kids like the playground, the work-in-progress garden, the library, and I especially liked the sensory room, which I’d never seen at a daycare center before and enjoyed how inclusive it was for kids who may have SEND. Besides the tour of the center, I also really like the objective. I thought it was unique how it not only focused on the care of children when parents were working but it also focused on the education of parents as well so that their children, and them as well, have emotional support, housing support, benefits support, parenting support, and financial capability. 

Today we also had a lecture concerning social work. It was mentioned that a lot of times people mistake social work for one specific thing like taking children away but this isn’t true. Social work encompasses a wide range of topics and categories including older adults, children and families, physical disabilities, learning disabilities, mental health, young offenders, and substance and alcohol misuse. And although this seems like an important area of expertise that greatly impacts individuals, social work isn’t  regularly implemented into schools. However the Pilot Project was recently created in order to implement social workers into schools which may have positive effects like reducing the number of children thought to be suffering or likely to suffer from serious harm. Overall I think social work is an important area of care concerning individuals that is often overlooked but if used in collaboration with education and healthcare areas can be extremely helpful to the well-being of patients.