Things I want to remember as I leave frontline practice

By Richard Devine, Social Worker and Author of Messy Social Work: Learning from Frontline Practice with Children and Families and co-host of the Messy Social Work Podcast

I stopped writing a work-specific diary about nine years ago when I left frontline child protection. I’m moving into my first leadership role now and have noticed how quickly people forget what this work actually feels like.

I don’t want to be one of them.

So I revisited the diary and wrote some reflections as a note to myself.

I want to remember what it actually felt like.

Not the edited version you tell in meetings or the neat formulation you write in a report, but the lived, messy, contradictory feeling of doing the work.

The feeling of sitting in a courtroom, knowing that whatever happens, something important is being lost. The feeling of walking out of a house, having told a parent their child isn’t coming home, and then getting in the car and thinking, “what a shit job”.

The feeling of being absolutely convinced you’re doing the right thing, and at the same time not being certain at all.

I want to remember that you can hold both of those things at once.

I want to remember how often I felt out of my depth. How frequently the thought crossed my mind, “who the fuck am I to be doing this?” At the time, a twenty-something trying to explain to parents they can’t take their baby home. Sitting in someone’s living room making life‑changing decisions based on a partial understanding of lives that are far more complex than anything written in a report.

If I ever start to feel too certain, too assured, too comfortable in my authority, I want to remember that feeling.

I want to remember what it was like to carry decisions around after work. How they didn’t stay in the office. How they followed you into the car, into the evening, into your sleep. The way your mind kept going, even when you weren’t aware of it, thinking about cases before you’d even realised you were awake.

This isn’t abstract “emotional labour”; it’s a body that’s tired, a mind that won’t switch off, a kind of background noise that becomes normal until you step away from it.

I want to remember how hard it was to do the job properly with the time available.

The constant compromise.

Knowing what good practice looks like, yet not having the time to do it.

Knowing children needed time, attention, and consistency, and that I couldn’t give it to them the way they deserved.

The quiet, ongoing sense of failing a bit, even when you were working as hard as you could.

Six-day weeks and still feeling behind. Being late, missing things, letting people down – not because you don’t care, but because you care and the system can’t hold it.

I want to remember that pressure – not to excuse poor practice, but to understand it.

I want to remember how relationships actually work in this job. That sometimes the best conversations happened when I dropped the agenda. That sitting in a car, or having a hot chocolate, or kicking a football around could achieve more than a carefully planned piece of “direct work”.

That young people would tell you things when you weren’t trying too hard.

That parents would let you in, literally and emotionally, even after you’d made decisions they hated. And I want to remember how extraordinary that is. That people continued to work with me, talk to me, even trust me, when I represented something that could fundamentally change their lives.

I want to remember complexity.

That the same child can be a victim and a perpetrator. That the same parent can be loving and harmful.

That you can sit in a park watching a parent laugh and play with their children and know that, on balance, you still might recommend those children are adopted.

That liking someone, really liking them, doesn’t mean they can safely parent their child. And how uncomfortable it is to hold on to.

I want to remember the pull of intuition and the discipline of evidence, and how they rarely sit comfortably together.

I want to remember how often this job felt contradictory. Building a relationship with a parent while knowing you might be the one to recommend removing their child. It can feel, at times, like a form of betrayal – even when it’s necessary.

Conveying empathy while holding risk. Being open and curious while also being decisive. Wanting to help while knowing that your involvement may also cause harm.

If I ever simplify this work, I’ve forgotten it.

I want to remember fear. Not in an exaggerated sense, but the quiet, physical awareness that things can turn quickly.

The raised heart rate, the scanning of exits, the calculations happening in your head while you try to remain calm and present. The fact that this becomes normal. And the fact that, for some colleagues, this is a much more constant reality than it was for me.

I want to remember the toll.

The tiredness that sits in your body. The guilt about your own children. The sense that you give so much of yourself to other families, that sometimes there is less left for your own.

The moments where, if I’m honest, I wasn’t the parent I wanted to be because I was exhausted, distracted, or full of something I hadn’t processed from work.

And how humbling it is to realise that in those moments, the gap between the parents I work with and me is not as wide as I might like to believe.

I want to remember that most parents I worked with loved their children. Not in a romantic or abstract way, but in a very real, often visible way.

Even when their care was unsafe, neglectful, or chaotic, their intentions for their children were almost always the same as any other parent’s: to be happy, to be safe, to have a good life.

The tragedy is not the absence of care, but the inability to provide it.

I don’t want to become someone who forgets that and slips into easy judgement.

I want to remember that outcomes are uncertain. That even when we “get it right”, we don’t really know what that means long term. That “winning” a case doesn’t feel like winning. That every decision carries loss – sometimes visible, sometimes not. That being right is not the same as things turning out well.

I want to remember Munro’s point; that being willing to be wrong isn’t a weakness, it’s essential.

And finally, I want to remember the people.

The kids who won’t remember me but who I won’t forget. The parents who let me into their lives at the most difficult times.

The colleagues who made the job bearable, who laughed, who supported, who understood without needing things explained. The shared sense that, despite everything, we were trying to do something important in very imperfect conditions.

If I move into leadership and start talking about “what practice should look like” without holding onto these things – the tiredness, the compromise, the doubt, the humanity, the mess – then I’ve lost something important.

And if I lose that, I’ll start asking things of frontline workers that aren’t grounded in reality.

So this is what I want to hold onto:

that this work is complex, imperfect, emotionally demanding, and often uncertain –
and that the people doing it are, for the most part, doing their absolute best within it.

I don’t want to forget that.

By Richard Devine (27.05.26)

If you want to hear more of these conversations, you may want to check out recent episodes of the Messy Social Work Podcast, including conversations with frontline social worker, Maddie McCormack, Senior Clinical Lecturer at Tavistock, Dr Anna Harvey and Professor Harry Ferguson

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