Degrees to match experience

Degrees to match experience

Tai Brown and Richard Takapautolo are getting the qualifications to go with their years of frontline experience.

The Police youth social workers from the Glen Innes Police/Genesis Youth Trust have spent the last few years not only helping young offenders in Glen Innes turn their lives around, they have also been locked into a programme of study their younger selves might not have considered possible.

For Mr Takapautolo the grind is over – he graduated from Unitec this year with a Bachelor of Social Practice. Mr Brown is in the final stages of the same degree and will finish next year. When they are both done they will form, along with their manager Jack Scanlan, the first fully social work degree-qualified Police youth development team in New Zealand.

Both Mr Brown and Mr Takapautolo are passionate, experienced and capable youth workers, able to combine their own lived experience of being at-risk youth with many years of working with young people. But in a sector that Mr Scanlan says is rapidly heading towards a new age of mandatory registration, being qualified is becoming increasingly important.

Mr Scanlan says there are many front line social practitioners without formal social work qualifications and he wanted his team to lead the way.

“We want to be trailblazers,” Mr Scanlan says. “If this is your passion you have to do the study, that’s the reality of the professionalisation of the sector.

“We’re old school, but if we can all do it anyone can.”

Mr Takapautolo works as a child case manager with children 8 to 13 years and says augmenting his 20 years of social work experience with a degree is a dream come true.

“I’ve always wanted to do a degree. I didn’t succeed at high school, I was an at-risk youth, so I wanted to get a proper degree, especially for this field. I have a passion for people but specifically young people - it’s my belief. The degree has reinforced what I already knew and given me some new skills, especially in the area of professionalisation.”

Mr Brown, who works in the youth justice sector, also had a rough start to life. He was drawn to youth work in 2004 after working as a carpenter.

“I think the point of working with young people is being able to give something back. I wish there was someone like me around when I was offending back in the day,” he says. “I can identify with the hardship of growing up with next to nothing and with domestic violence every day and no food in the house. So nothing beats lived experience, it’s a key part of what we do, but the degree has harnessed and sharpened those skills.”

Unitec Social Practice Head of Department John Stansfield says the team have taken an important step in graduating with a qualification they can register with.

“As the government devolves more to the community sector they’re making it a requirement in organisations receiving Government funding that only registered social workers can be employed. As the impact of legislation like the Vulnerable Children Act is enforced this trend towards registered social workers in youth work jobs will only increase.”

ENDS

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