As Nicola Dowling finds out, in Leicester there are social workers who are passionate about making the life of children in care as happy and stable as possible.

The despairing mum of an eight-year-old car thief rings her social worker at her wits' end. The police are unable to do anything to stop him because he is under the age of criminal responsibility.

Beyond the reach of the law, his behaviour is going from bad to worse. He has recently been spotted threatening another youngster with a knife and when his mum tries to ground him he climbs out of the bedroom window and runs off. His mum, who has other children to care for, doesn't know what to do. Leicester city social worker Mary (not her real name) is determined to help. She says the child's mum is not a bad parent, but is struggling to cope with her son's behaviour.

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One of Mary's tricky jobs is to stop the child becoming another name on the care list.

Her aim is to do everything possible to keep the child with his mum, keep the family together and put a lid on the boy's disruptive and potentially dangerous behaviour.

She does not want us to use her real name, to protect the identity of the family.

But she also has a very personal story to tell about what led her to become a social worker.

She is a 41-year-old black woman who was herself taken into care when she was just three years old.

Some of the time she was with foster parents in Leicestershire. One screamed racial abuse at her when she was a youngster because she had the audacity to walk into the living room while he was watching TV.

The rest of the time was spent at a children's home in the county, separated from her other four siblings, where she was forced to wear a regulation uniform which marked her out for ridicule at school.

When she was 11, Mary and her brother were sent to a home in Lincoln.

She said: "We never saw another black person at home or in school. We suffered racial abuse from the other children and my brother was physically attacked.

"I didn't know what a social worker was, I knew someone came to take me from home to home but I didn't know who they were and I cannot remember ever speaking to a social worker.

"I decided to become a social worker because I wanted to try and ensure that children didn't go through what I went through."

But she says her experience is a world away from the situation which exists today with the emphasis now shifted towards keeping families together rather than splitting them up.

She said: "Families, quite understandably are very anxious about social service involvement because their perception of us is that we are just there to take their children away.

"This perception is very wrong and based on negative media where the only time we are ever mentioned is when a child dies. We are never seen for the good things we do.

"We now do everything we can to keep children out of care and within the family and community they know and we see and speak to them regularly. Things are 100 per cent better than they were."

Story and picture courtesy of the Leicester Mercury