Family Engagement Worker Review

• Working with prisoners one-to-one (on the wings) to discuss the contact they have with their children. If contact is limited or restricted, reaching out to ex-partners, social services, or Family Courts, on the prisoner’s behalf, to attempt to reintroduce contact between father and child/children, should it be beneficial to the child.
• Providing support to families visiting loved ones, working as one of the family team based primarily in the prison's visitor centre, but also across the visit's hall, play area and tea bar to provide a safe and welcoming environment, and provide advice, support and information to friends and families visiting the prison.
• Engaging in a range of upkeeping and administrative tasks such as: helping move stock on delivery days, ensuring notices in the visiting centre are up to date and accurate, distributing and collecting surveys from prisoners/families, as well as cash handling; organising specialised visits for prisoners and their families.
• Working one-to-one with prisoners to go through self-reflection booklets.

Yes, I would handle my casework independently, which could include working with multiple departments within the prison as the Pact representative for that case.
I attended TAF meetings with external psychology teams who were working with the family.
I would handle stock deliveries and orders alone every Thursday.
I would come in on Saturdays as the only Pact team member working that day to help run social visits; this would include unlocking the play areas and the tea bar, collecting the safe, counting the money made, and logging it in our systems.
I attended court on my own behalf to be a character witness for one of the prisoners I had worked with.
Additionally, with my fellow placement student, I covered managerial responsibilities for 6 weeks during a vacancy, 2 months after starting the placement.

I received a lot of training for this role, including recognising signs of abuse in children and adults, how to recognise and report signs of self-harm or suicidal ideation, how to recognise and report signs of ongoing domestic abuse and control and how to report it.
I also received health and safety, key, and security training for three different establishments, which allowed me to take a set of keys and move through all three establishments without an escort. I also received radio training and how to signal if I was in personal danger.
I received training on building rapport whilst maintaining professional boundaries, so that prisoners and visitors could feel supported and not judged through my work, whilst also understanding the limits of the professional relationship.
I also developed skills of confidentiality, as the knowledge I had learnt for specific cases was not allowed to leave the establishment.
I also developed empathy throughout this placement, as more often than not, prisoners or visitors would share harrowing details of their past, so it was essential to show empathy in this role.
I also built on my organisational skills, as this role also required me to organise specialised family visits, which involved communicating with higher-ups to make sure plans for these visits were all approved in advance and that the prisoners I had on the list were security cleared to attend, communicating with the prisoners and then the booking team to make sure the correct visitors were booked on for these visits, and then relay this information to the kitchen so the correct amount of food could be prepared for the total amount of visitors and prisoners.

I started this placement in September 2024.
The line manager I had started this placement with had annual leave booked for three and a half weeks of November (2024), and she then left the job at the beginning of December for another job opportunity.
Before she left for her annual leave, we received thorough training from her on how to complete the role and who we could reach out to for support, but it was a jump in the deep end to be without a manager for almost two months. Another manager was found relatively quickly, but she then had to undergo prison vetting, which can take up to 3 months - she started in January 2025, as the regional manager began the search in October 2024.
During the November-January period, the regional manager would occasionally be on-site. Still, she was also the regional manager for several other prisons, so she couldn't be on-site for too long. This left the other placement student and me as the Pact representatives most of the time and meant we had to take on some day-to-day managerial responsibilities and help with the monthly reports as well.
When the new manager started, she was new to the role and to the prison setting, so we also had to help her get used to the requirements of the role. One responsibility I kept on was helping with the monthly report figures, which I maintained until I left the role.
Overall, the support was as good as it could be, but due to the line manager leaving and the demands placed upon the regional manager and any internal support we had, it was fairly limited. Understandably, it was due to mitigating factors, but this did make heavy demands on the other placement student and me early on.

The Pact team I worked with was very good; other staff had been hired after I started, so we built a strong team dynamic within Pact. However, in the wider prison setting, it did create a quite difficult atmosphere to work in at times.
The other placement student and I found ourselves under suspicion from a lot of the other prison staff since we were young women in a men's prison who were working with Pact for no salary and also without compensation for our travel expenses. This raised a lot of questions about our 'intentions' of working in the prison; this did make it somewhat uncomfortable to work in that environment at times.
Furthermore, due to the nature of the role, we also had to work very closely with the prisoners and the family members; prisoners and family also would disclose very personal information to us that they didn't want shared with operational staff (e.g., prison officers) whom the prisoner's saw every day and would be 'in control' of their lock-up and day-to-day schedule.
Given the prisoners' insistence on privacy, we assured them that if the information they shared did not pose a threat to the prison's security, it would not go beyond the pact team. This did create a level of trust that prisoners didn't necessarily have with operational staff, so we received a lot of scrutiny from these staff members, who deemed our relationship with the prisoners to be crossing professional boundaries.
All the information shared was within our role and aligned with our service's expectations, and the pact staff, including myself, did not disclose our personal information. However, this level of trust the prisoners had in us also raised suspicion among other staff, despite our proving ourselves every time our work integrity was called into question.
This didn't happen every time, but it did happen frequently enough that it was sometimes discouraging to continue in the role, which was upsetting because I did enjoy the role, the responsibilities that came with it, and the impact the work could have.

I thoroughly enjoyed this placement; I enjoyed the work, the responsibilities, and the impact the work could have. It did mean a lot to hear from prisoners that they felt Pact was there to help and they could depend on us, which, for some, sadly differed from how they felt towards operational staff.
It was really encouraging to know that various departments felt they could come to me directly for support for specific cases, and that the regional manager felt confident in giving me additional responsibilities. It made me feel very capable in the role and confident about looking for a potential permanent role in the prison setting after I graduate. It gave me so much more knowledge on child law, public protection, prison organisation, and this is something I'm very excited to explore in future.
Apart from the various issues I had with trust amongst the other prison staff and how this made the atmosphere slightly uncomfortable at times, generally, I enjoyed the work.

Yes