So I may have mentioned that the company that I work for operate a system where each of the young people that live with us have a key team around them of a Case Coordinator, Personal Tutor, Link Tutor, Learning Mentor. This team is meant to work together to ensure that the child’s world within the care home works for them as well as ensuring that they are making the necessary progress related to the aims of the placing authority for each child.
I was always looking to move pretty quickly from Care Worker through the roles as I felt that I had more to give on a key team then the amount a Care Worker is able to get involved. I started with this company in July 2020 and by November 2020 I was a Link Tutor, not bad if I do say so myself. Now obviously in February 2021 my world kind of got tipped on its head a little and I basically had three months off work (not by choice I hasten to add) but in the August of 2021, I interviewed and was successful to the position of Personal Tutor.
Personal Tutor is widely recognised as one of the hardest positions within the company as the overall responsibility for two children (at the time) rests on your shoulders. You are meant to know the backgrounds of your children back to front and inside out as well as be able to competently plan for their futures, all while still completing a full set of shifts within the house as well. No mean feat and it should by no means be underestimated.
So I became a Personal Tutor to two children, one that was widely recognised within the team as one of the easiest children and one that was widely recognised as one of the most challenging. Being a Personal Tutor is one of the hardest jobs that I have had to do. Ever. It was so much work and so much thinking all the time. I was doing this role at a point that I had basically no admin time to do it due to the previously discussed rota change and it was nails. I struggled with the feeling that I wasn’t doing it very well and as a consequence my key children weren’t having the support that they needed. The paperwork level of a Personal Tutor was unreal. In the time that I was a Personal Tutor, all three of the other Personal Tutors within my home ended up leaving for alternative employment which effectively left me as the only Personal Tutor, the newest Personal Tutor and I had also lost three people who knew the role inside out and back to front.
I had a lot of support from everyone else around me, lots of people offering me help and I relied on my colleagues a lot to get me through. We made it, that’s all I can say… more later…