INTERNATIONAL WORKFORCE

Valuing our workforce through action

FACT? creates a shared, confidential space for international social work practitioners to make sense of their professional journey in the UK, while enabling supervisors and managers to explore the cultural and organisational context surrounding that journey

A MATTER OF FACT?

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Migrating to a new country and navigating a new professional and cultural context can be challenging. For Black, South Asian, and racially minoritised international social work practitioners from countries such as India, Kenya, Lesotho, South Africa, and Zimbabwe working in the UK, this transition may also involve experiences of difference, belonging, racism, professional uncertainty, and inequitable practice.

Valuing international social work practitioners involves more than welcoming them into the workforce. It means creating opportunities for practitioners to think things through, develop, contribute, and thrive, while inviting supervisors and managers to use reflexivity to explore how their practice contributes to equitable and supportive workplaces.

Fancy a Cuppa Tea? (FACT?)  has been intentionally designed to create two distinct but connected conversational spaces: one for international practitioners and one for those who supervise and manage them. The intention is that learning from these conversations translates into day-to-day practice and, importantly, into supervision, supporting more thoughtful, equitable, and responsive professional relationships. The conversations also create opportunities to explore and navigate experiences of inequitable practice within the workplace and wider community contexts.

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VOW recognises that when organisations do not acknowledge or respond to these experiences, opportunities for reflexive thinking are limited, potentially increasing disadvantage and affecting professional confidence, identity and wellbeing.

WHAT IS FACT?

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FACT? provides a confidential psychosocial and systemic space for international practitioners to come together as a group once a month over six months.

FACT? creates opportunities for practitioners to slow down, think things through, and explore the challenges and dilemmas of navigating social work in a new organisational and cultural context. Through shared conversations, practitioners can explore how personal experiences and workplace realities influence professional identity, confidence, decision-making, relationships, and practice.

FACT? provides space to recalibrate professional identity in the context of ‘otherness’ (see Glossary), while cultivating strategies, recognising strengths and drawing on stories of success. Coming together with others who may share similar experiences can reduce isolation, create recognition and connection, and enable practitioners to learn from what is shared and from what is different.

FACT? creates spaces for supervisors and managers to explore their own assumptions, positioning, and influence within cultural and organisational contexts, while considering how international practitioners may experience unconscious bias, otherness, and racism in the workplace and wider community. The conversations invite supervisors and managers to think about how they can strengthen equitable practice and contribute to more supportive workplace cultures.

FACT? FINDING - INTERNATIONAL

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VOW uses its three established practice tools within FACT?; however, their application is shaped by the context of international practitioners and the professional, organisational and cultural contexts in which they work.

The Metro Map – All in a Day's Work

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The Metro Map is a visual representation of the experiences of Black, South Asian, and racially minoritised social work practitioners along their social work journey in the UK. Within FACT?, the Metro Map provides a way for international practitioners to explore their transition, experiences of otherness, and navigation of an unfamiliar professional system. It can help make what practitioners encounter visible, validate what they may have encountered, and provide entry points into difficult conversations about professional and organisational life.

The PRACTISINGRACE Framework

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PRACTISINGRACE was created in response to deficit stereotypes regarding the competence of Black, South Asian, and racially minoritised social work practitioners. Within FACT?, the framework provides an opportunity to explore how assumptions, cultural expectations, racialised narratives, and organisational positioning can shape how an international practitioner is understood, and how they understand themselves.

Rather than positioning the practitioner as having a deficit to overcome, PRACTISINGRACE invites reflexive thinking about how practitioners may be positioned through stories about competence, difference, professionalism, and belonging, and how these stories can influence relationships, decision-making, and practice. It creates opportunities to question these narratives and develop new ways of making sense of and responding to their experiences.

The 3S's©

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The 3S's© – Scaffolding, Strategies, and Stories of Success – underpin VOW's identity and how conversations are navigated. Within FACT?, practitioners are invited to consider the psychological and professional scaffolding they can draw upon and hold onto while recalibrating their professional identity within a new professional and cultural context.

Strategies are the professional resources practitioners develop and cultivate through experience. Drawing on what has worked for them before, emphasis will be placed on developing meaningful strategies in this new context, helping practitioners to navigate unfamiliar systems, relationships, expectations, and inequitable experiences.

Stories of Success reconnect practitioners with stories of their preexisting professional confidence, competence, contribution, and achievement, so that their UK experience becomes part of their story, rather than the whole story of their professional capability.

Together, stories lived, stories told, and stories yet to be created provide a way of thinking about where practitioners have come from, the narratives that may currently shape their professional identity, and the possibilities they can create for the future.

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FACT? – A SIX-MONTH JOURNEY

FACT? brings international practitioners together once a month for six months, either online or in person. Each 90-minute conversation provides a confidential space to think things through and explore professional identity and what it means to practise social work in a new organisational and cultural context.

Practitioners who wish to explore issues individually can also access VOW's free mentoring.

FACT? FINDING - SUPERVISORS & MANAGERS

FACT? recognises that the experiences of international practitioners do not exist in isolation. Supervisors, managers, and organisational culture are part of the system within which those experiences take place.

Supervisors and managers working with international practitioners are therefore invited to participate in two 90-minute reflexive workshops delivered during the six-month conversation.

VOW's practice tool Exploring Unconscious Bias & Racial Microaggression in the Workplace, originally created for Research in Practice, informs the workshops. The aim is not simply to increase awareness, but to support reflexive thinking, equitable practice, and organisational action.

The Metro Map and PRACTISINGRACE Framework also provide opportunities for supervisors and managers to explore:

  • their own stories lived and relationship to 'othering';
  • assumptions and unconscious biases that may influence interactions;
  • how practitioners may be positioned along their social work journey;
  • cultural and organisational factors that may shape workforce experience; and
  • how supervision, support, and organisational responses can promote equitable practice and more supportive workplace cultures.
FACT? – WORKSHOPS FOR SUPERVISORS & MANAGERS

Supervisors and managers will participate in two 90-minute workshops, scheduled at the beginning and towards the end of the six-month FACT? conversations.

The first workshop establishes a reflexive space to consider the practitioner journey and the organisational context surrounding it. The second provides an opportunity to revisit learning, consider changes in understanding, and explore the implications for support, supervision, equitable practice, and workplace culture.

FEES

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Structured six-month psychosocial and systemic conversations:

6 x 90-minute group conversations for international social workers = 9 hours: £3,250.00

2 x 90-minute group conversations for supervisors/managers = 3 hours: £750.00