I started off first semester feeling a mixture of being excited and nervous. I was excited at the thought of beginning my journey to my dream job, but nervous in case I found it difficult making friends since I was staying at home. I had been at University for a year already, so knew roughly what to expect in terms of the work being completely on your own back and was aware of how much reading would be required. I used freshers week as my opportunity to get some friends for starting lectures. I knew there were others who would be staying at home so I got a group of people together and we met for a night out at the beginning of the week. This group gradually grew throughout the semester and I am so glad I decided to send that message in to the whole year group chat.

Once friends were sorted, I felt a bit more relaxed. I knew I had people to speak to and sit beside, so I immediately was more confident going in to our first lecture. I started off the Working Together module negatively. I had heard some comments from other year groups and so, rather than waiting to form my own decision, I let their opinions be mine. I felt like all I had to do was get through this module, get a pass, that was all that mattered. I could see that it was relatively important but only when we went for our visit day did I see the real importance.

I had my visit at the Crescent. This has Social Work, CLD, and health care workers all in one building with a Primary School directly across the road. The set up was fantastic and theoretically should have allowed collaborative working to happen very easily. However, as we had a discussion and asked our questions to a small team of Social Workers and one CLD member, we quickly realised this was not the case. They were very much as separate as they would have been if they remained in different buildings. They didn’t like our use of the word “collaborative” which I think really put a lot of us off track as we were there to discuss collaborative working.

This was an important experience for me in first semester because it made me realise how important and useful this module really can be. We started out our journey through University working together and getting to know people from the other courses, so we know how we can work with them to our advantage and the children’s advantage when we are working in our chosen profession. Having seen the difference it makes having a collaborative approach and not a closed mindset towards the other two professions made me reflect upon the real importance of the Working Together module.